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Game 4: Almyra @ Valm
Hey look, it’s the best defense in the league against a team I haven’t shown yet!
Yen’fay, Valhart, and Cervantes are ready to turn their season around. Cervantes doesn’t have his signature mustache because 2k, but that’s okay!
Because Walhart and Valm got off to a stupid fast start.
Amir Timur kept Almyra tied, 4-4, but then Valm started to explode:
They forced bad shots early, and got good shots in return.
Yen’Fey’s 3 pointer was the exclamation point to an 11-3 run, ballooning their early lead to 17-7.
Almyra started moving through different players. The unique thing about Almyra is that they don’t have go-to players. If I had to pick pairs, Fort Merceus has Dennis and Bowie, Albinea has Rimmy Tim and Gob, Nuvelle has Regina George and Cordelia Chase, Gloucester has the big 3 already mentioned in Game 3, Plegia has Owain and Morgan, Brigid has John Kreelman and Angus McMutton and Sreng has Nanami Kiryuu and Charles Barkley bullying the inside. Almyra has… 15 players that all put in nearly equal time, all play super hard defense, and score 4 to 12 points a game. Nobody gets more than 6 rebounds, everyone just gets 6 rebounds. It’s a unique, almost mid-major college look at basketball, and Almyra really leans into it.
In this game, Alp Arslan and Ardashir Sasan would be the go-to players.
They pulled the game back within 6 by the end of the 1st, 13-19 Valm lead.
The second quarter started with a monstrous run by Almyra, however:
Arslan and Sasan would combine for 12 points in a 15-2 run that blew the game wide open early in the 2nd.
But Nader Shah would get the exclamation point to the run, putting Almyra up 28-21 before a Valm timeout.
The rest of the half played out with Almyra losing a little of that lead, 36-31.
Cervantes would come out of the 1st half playing well:
But Almyra was done playing around:
And they began to show why they are the best defense in the league right now:
Over the next 10 possessions, Valm would not score a single point. They wouldn’t even get fouled.
And Almyra capitalized frequently:
The 3rd quarter ended with Almyra stifling and suffocating Valm, leading 58-42.
And then came the finishing blow:
Cyrus Teipsid would put together a solid 4th quarter, scoring 12 of the team’s 17 points in the quarter. But the real impressive thing was Almyra’s defense. In each quarter, they allowed fewer and fewer points. 19 in the first, 12 in the second, and 11 in the 3rd.
There are 1/3rd of the points that Valm would score in the 4th quarter.
That’s right, Valm scored only 6 points in the whole 4th quarter. They scored 1 point every 2 minutes, while their opponents scored nearly 3 in the same amount of time.
To their credit, they got a pretty sweet physics breaking moon-block near the end of the game:
Oh, nevermind.
Almyra had 13 out of their 15 players score points in this game, and they won 77-48.