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Vancouver basketball buzzer-beater sees both sets of fans storm the court
St. George's and Kitsilano fans stormed the court in confusion, to cap off a wild week for the eventual winners
A buzzer-beater brouhaha, fans storming on the court, threats of legal action and several other forms of hard-court hijinks.
Call it March Madness, B.C. high school basketball style.
It's not often you see a team involved in two controversial events in the same tournament, but that's what happened with the St. George's Saints in the B.C. Lower Mainland AAA senior boys tournament. The Saints only got into the tournament after two of their appeals were denied and a third one was barely upheld, and even then, they were only placed directly into the main tournament bracket after threatening legal action against the governing body. Once there, though, the Saints received partial home-court advantage, and they went on a run. St. George's eventually claimed the regional title on a last-second buzzer beater against the Kitsilano Blue Demons at home Saturday night, but one that took some time to resolve. When the buzzer blew, fans of both schools thought their team had won and stormed the court in celebration, as you can see from this video clip:
The finish was a bizarre one, and as Megan Stewart of the Vancouver Courier relates, it involved a series of odd events. St. George's was down by one with seconds to go, but they inbounded the ball and ran a nice play to create a near-layup for one of their guards. He missed drastically, though, finding nothing but air, but the ball fell into the hands of six-foot-seven forward Milan Mitrovic, who sank a shot right at the buzzer. The timing of that shot caused both teams' players to jump around in celebration and both sides' fans to storm the court, thinking they'd won, with Kitsilano partisans thinking the shot was after the buzzer and St. George's ones believing it had counted. The refs were even confused, too; the one official on-camera seems to be waving it off, and the video description says two of three refs said no basket, but after a conference, they elected to count the basket and give the Saints a 58-57 win. That will give St. George's one of the top three seeds at the provincials, set to start March 13.
What's even more unusual than how St. George's entered that tournament is how they got into it, though. The Lower Mainland regional tournament, which draws teams from Burnaby, Richmond and Vancouver proper, is supposed to feature one team from the independent school league private schools like St. George's and Vancouver College compete in (berths are proportionally allocated based on students in a district). However, Vancouver College beat the highly-ranked Saints in a best-two-of-three playoff series. St. George's appealed based on a rule put in in 2005 that allows schools from single-berth leagues to get in if they can prove they're one of the top three teams zone-wide, but that appeal was denied by both the Lower Mainland committee (which counts St. George's coach Guy daSilva as a member) and the B.C. executive committee before being approved by the B.C. board of governors. That expanded the tournament to 13 teams and also relocated it to St. George's and Vancouver College. The decision initially would have had St. George's in the four-team wild-card playoff, but a letter sent on St. George's behalf by the Farris law firm threatened legal action against the Lower Mainland committee if the Saints weren't given direct entry. The committee backed down and let them in, but didn't sound particularly happy about it:
"It is most unfortunate that those who use the threat of legal action are rewarded for this type of behaviour. Acting in the best interest of our member schools and their players and volunteer coaches, we were not prepared to bankrupt our association by having to hire lawyers."
It's not like high-school basketball's normally serene or anything, but the Saints' march through this tournament has added an extra degree of anarchy to it. There's still one tournament left to go, too, and it's the big provincial one. If things continue along these lines, we may well get even more chaos than usual.
