By now, you’ve probably seen video of a basketball player from Guam running between the legs of an Australian offensive player in order to close out on a shooter. I’m not going to lie, it is kind of funny, but mostly because I just want to see Nate Robinson do this in pretty much every game from now until the end of his career. What’s not as funny is the final score of the game it occurred in. The game took place in the FIBA Oceania U19 tournament — a game which Australia won, 103-40.
Amazingly, that 73-point margin doesn’t even come close to the most lopsided margin of the tournament. If you take a look at the final scores, you’ll see Australia and New Zealand are basically the Dream Teams of this tournament. You know, if the Dream Team was playing Sister Mary of the Blind.
Round 1: Guam mustered 40 points against Australia and crushed Solomon Islands 88-13. Good god, how bad is Solomon Islands? Fortunately, PNG had a bye (we’ll get to them in a minute).
Round 2: Hey, there’s Solomon Islands again, getting crushed by 82 points. Meanwhile, PNG put up a respectable 29 points against New Zealand and managed to keep them under 100 points (remember these numbers — it’s important).
Round 3: Jesus, what a disaster of a round. How does a FIBA game end 20-0? Seriously, did PNG (that stands for Papua New Guinea, by the way) just not show up? Did they see the word “American” and flee in fear as if a bunch of NBA players were involved? I’m guessing this was a forfeit, and the final score was actually 2-0. At least, I hope that was the case. Then there’s Australia crushing Samoa by 104, and New Caledonia (the third-best team in this thing) beating up on poor Solomon Islands.
Round 4: Now I’m confused. PNG no-showed the last round, but here they are losing by less than 20 to Tahiti, which, according to the standings, doesn’t totally suck. What is going on here? Meanwhile, poor Fiji.
Round 5: At this point, why are we even going through motions with the byes? Can’t everyone just get a bye and let Australia and New Zealand duke it out for the most meaningless FIBA title in the world? Although, if that were the case, we’d have missed out on a guy running through another man’s legs. We’ll always have that. And, to the Fijis, Tahitis, and various Samoas, you’ll always have beautiful beaches (that I will never be able to afford to visit).
