Aviano's Myron McRae, left, tries to put the ball in the basket in front of Jordan Gaddy of Hohenfels in the Division II final at the DODDS-Europe basketball championships in Mannheim, Germany, on Saturday. Hohenfels' Jamie Thompkins watches for a rebound. Defending champion Aviano repeated with a 49-38 win. (Michael Abrams / S&S)
MANNHEIM, Germany — For the second straight year, the Aviano Saints had all the answers on championship Saturday in the DODDS-Europe basketball tournament. This year, they produced a second straight Division II championship with a 49-38 conquest of second-seeded Hohenfels.
“We knew what we had to do,” said all-tournament guard Sean Outing about his team’s decisive 40-27 run over the game’s final 24 minutes. “We had to play defense and find the holes in their defense.”
MVP Jamal Tuck, who scored a game-high 23 points in his high school finale, did most of the hunting for the holes in the Tiger defense. He closed each of the first two periods with three-pointers, the second of which came from just inside the angle made by the right sideline and the center court line at the halftime buzzer. The shot helped coax the Tigers out of a zone defense that had been clogging Aviano’s paths to the rim.
“We were looking for the open man,” said Outing, who finished with 16 points, nine of them after all-tourney teammate Shaheed Seaton was forced to sit most of the second half with foul trouble. “Once we started hitting from the corners, they had to come out of their zone.”
Forcing Hohenfels to go man-to-man opened the way for Tuck and Outing to slash to the basket, with devastating consequences.
Outing scored on three layups during a three-minute span in the third quarter and Tuck took it to the rack for a fourth layup 30 seconds later. The flurry put Aviano up 36-29 and in the driver’s seat, especially when combined with another adjustment.
“In the first half, I thought we were committing too many turnovers,” Aviano coach Ken McNeely said. “It was nothing they were doing. It was mistakes we made. In the second half, we let the game come to us.”
Hohenfels, which got a team-high 14 points from Miguel Chestnut, suffered when junior transfer Jamie Tompkins, an all-tourney choice, had to throttle back his game after being whistled for three first-half fouls. Tompkins, who stayed in the game anyway, scored just five points, all of them before he picked up his third foul. He drew No. 4 with 1:31 left in the third period and fouled out with 53 seconds left in the game.’
Hohenfels, its game honed by a regular-season spent banging heads with Region III powers Heidelberg and Patch of D-I and D-II third- and fourth-place finishers Bamberg and Ansbach, had no luck taking the ball inside against the quick hands and feet of the Aviano defense or turning to the three-ball.
The Tigers turned the ball over 12 times in the second quarter alone and were just 4-for-16 from behind the arc. They scored just seven points in the third quarter, backing up McNeely’s pithy post-game assessment.
“We really stepped it up in the second half,” McNeely said.