Think Cougars’ victory over schoolboys was going to be a slam dunk?
No. Try multiple slam dunks.
Ricardo Jemmott flushed his way to 25 points and 12 rebounds, including three emphatic throw-downs on Nicholas Rouse as basketball’s Premier League leaders slammed Co-operators General Tridents in a lopsided 102-47 blowout on Saturday at the Barbados Community College.
It was the fourth win on the trot for the undefeated Cougars, who had never previously started a season with three successive wins while serving as the league’s proverbial doormats.
But schoolboys were the ones getting walked over in 40-minute, one-way traffic that saw the men from Hothersal emphatically dunk and lay-up their way to a season-high 102 points.
And of those finishes none was as resounding as Jemmott’s thunderous throw-downs, as every rim-rattling dunk was greeted with an accompaniment “oohs”, “ahs” and looks of total astonishment.
Even Rouse was seemingly left in awe after jumping full stretch and still getting on the wrong end of one of Jemmott’s forceful one-handed flushes early in the second quarter.
Jemmott wasn’t done just yet though, returning only moments later to jump from just inside the painted area and crown Rouse again with an even more thunderous spike for the “hoop and harm”.
So forceful was the slam that the contact sent Rouse sliding along the floor until the luckless schoolboy forward eventually crashed into the back wall behind the basket.
It proved the defining cap to a 42-20 first-half burst from the league leaders who routinely turned the Tridents over and converted each throwaway into transition buckets.
When Jemmott wasn’t dunking, Adrian Stewart and Godfrey Leacock were comfortably finishing on 3-on-2 fast breaks against a schoolboys team that was slow in changing ends.
Jemmott added a pair of facials on Rouse and Taurean King for good measure before Stewart went to work with his trademark one-foot fade-aways that put Cougars up 73-39 in the third quarter.
Stewart finished with a game-high 29 points and 11 rebounds, Leacock scored 22 while Jemmott added four blocks. Jae Harris was the lone player for the winless Tridents (0-4) in double digits with ten points.
In the night cap, shooting guard Keefe Birkett hit eight treys in a season-high 35-point performance off the bench as Lumber Company Lakers remained unbeaten following a 92-62 rout of Clapham Bulls.
The rematch of the 2006 and 2011 finals looked anything but a matchup of champion teams after Lakers blew open a close contest (36-30) via a surreal display of shooting in a 32-15 third-quarter surge.
Bulls guard Nicholas Jones threatened to end the run with an “and-one” drive before Kenny Matthews got a steal and lay-up to get Clapham within 11 (54-43). But Birkett responded with a sensational four-point play and another huge triple before Ian Alexander capped the surge with a timely fastbreak dunk and a pair of free throws.
Andre Lockhart hit a pair of jumpers on the other side of the break for good measure until Birkett, Jamar King and Adrian Allman combined for four treys in succession to stretch the lead past 30.
Alexander ended with 20 points and Lockhart added 15 for Lakers (3-0) while Sydney “Bouncer” Rowe led Clapham (2-2) with a double-double of 18 points and 12 rebounds.
