RAVENS ROMP TO NATIONAL TITLE
Carleton Ravens star point guard Philip Scrubb drives between University of Ottawa Gee-Gees Johnny Berhanemskel, left, and Caleb Agada in Sunday night’s CIS basketball final in Toronto. Scrubb scored a game-high 28 points, was tournament MVP award and col
Dave Smart, head coach of the Carleton University men’s basketball team, is sitting with his chin resting in a hand as one of his players drains a flawlessly executed corner three. He’s quiet, his brows furrowed, corrugated lines etched into his forehead. He doesn’t seem impressed. It’s near the end of the second quarter of the Canadian Interuniversity Sport final and Smart’s team — the Ravens — are leading by double digits.
Their opponent, and occasional kryptonite, the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees, are lost on the hardwood of Ryerson University’s gym in Toronto. It seems like every Gee-Gees possession is killed in a whirling mass of white Ravens jerseys; they consume and suffocate uOttawa’s offence, like a boa constrictor wrapped tight around a mouse.
Yet, Dave Smart doesn’t seem impressed.
The buzzer blares at the end of the half, and Smart’s team is leading 38-23.
Twenty more minutes are left on the clock, but the game is already over.
Carleton opens the second half on a tear, going on a 23-7 run, hitting three-pointer after threepointer. It’s a surgical fire bombing. Backboard and in, rim and in, swish. It isn’t a game any longer. It’s an annihilation.
And yet there is Smart, sitting with his chin resting on his hand, his suit rumpled, looking unimpressed.
Emotion only ever crosses his face when things go wrong. A foul against his team, or a botched possession by the Ravens, and Smart stands, arms waving, yelling, screaming hoarse, his body a pantomime of fury.
It’s the fourth quarter and Carleton is up by about 40 points. There’s a break in the action. Smart is yelling at his star point guard Philip Scrubb.
Scrubb is on his way to a gamehigh 28 points, a tournament MVP award and his fifth consecutive national championship. With three CIS player of the year awards to his name, Scrubb is also on his way to leaving Carleton as one of the school’s most dominant athletes.
Yet in that moment, he is simply a pupil facing the anger of a displeased teacher. The noise of the nearly 3,917 fans at Mattamy Athletic Centre, the lights of the TV cameras and a dejected uOttawa team mere metres away do not exist. Dave Smart is yelling. That is everything.
“For me, that was more to make them understand that this was another opportunity to learn how to compete,” Smart said after the game.
“It’s my job to try to prepare my team as best I can. I think it would be a disservice to the game and a disservice to the kids if you stopped coaching.”
This is Carleton basketball. This is why when the final buzzer sounded the score was 93-46 for Carleton. This why the school has won 11 of the past 13 CIS titles.
“(Smart) just expects the best of us,” Scrubb said after the game. “We want to focus on every possession like it’s a one-point game … That’s why we win. We focus on trying to be perfect with every possession.”
And this is why Smart doesn’t seem impressed. He doesn’t just have his team chasing an idea of being perfect, he has a team that wants to capture perfect and hold on to it forever.
You can hear that belief in the voice of Scrubb’s brother, Thomas, after the game.
“We’ve had some struggles (this year). We’ve lost a couple of games to teams, and I think we felt that the general perception around the country was that Ottawa was the best team,” he said.
The “struggles” he alludes to are the two losses the team suffered this year. One to Windsor and one to uOttawa, who defeated them 68-66.
At Carleton, this is what it means to struggle.
At the other end of the court, a truer sense of the word “struggle” could be seen in the play of the GeeGees. Their star, and CIS player of the year, Johnny Berhanemeskel was ice cold. He shot 1-for-10 and only managed six points.
And in the third quarter when Carleton came out flying with an 11-2 run in which Carleton’s Connor Wood was a lethal weapon from beyond the arc, Berhanemeskel needed to respond and energize his team. Yet as Carleton continued to pour on points, the fifth-year shooting guard couldn’t respond — the Ravens’ defence wouldn’t let him.
“We couldn’t get anything going offensively whatsoever,” uOttawa coach James Derouin said after the game. “They challenged every shot we took. Even when we got offensive rebounds, we still couldn’t turn them into points.”
The Gee-Gees’ offensive woes were so bad that their highest scoring player, Moe Ismail, only registered 10 points. The Scrubb brothers, combined, scored more points than the entire uOttawa team.
The two brothers will leave Toronto and head back to Ottawa as only the fourth and fifth players in history to win five CIS men’s basketball titles.
After the game, in soft tones, Thomas reflected on what it meant to end on such a high note. It took him a while to find the words.
“I think what I’m most proud of is how much I’ve improved and how much I’ve changed as a person and improved as a person.”
Dave Smart wasn’t around when Thomas said that.
But you knew that, somewhere, he was smiling.
And he was impressed.