Queen's loses U Sports final — just don’t lose the plot with Laval and Québec rising
Queen's loses U Sports final — just don’t lose the plot with Laval and Québec rising
Perspective, s'il vous plaît. Queen’s got almost all of what it wanted with an U Sports silver medal, and Laval seized on a flawed format to help Québec basketball get the "RoC" off its back.
Félicitations, Laval et Québec — maintenant, profitez-en. The form calls to elevate the Rouge et Or’s band of lightning riders. Their energy flowed through Steeve Joseph, tournament MVP Ismaël Diouf and coach Nathan Grant. They rolled the “RoC” off the back of an oft-faded, oft-shaded basketball conference. It was an impressive workout, so no biggie about dropping 45-pound bumper plates on Queen’s soul without a désolé.
My soul could feel a little crushed too. It was suboptimal, personally, to see the Tall Yellow Guys’ final ride with the star siblings Cole Syllas and Luka Syllas turn into a trip on The Devastator.1 Sunday, the Laval Rouge et Or, in front of their sellout crowd of 3,000 — plus the TVA Sports audience who might only know it as “the football school” — took control late in the third quarter. Riding the crowd, with Queen’s outside game somewhere well outside the arena, Laval shook off the Syllas’s last surge, a late 13-3 run, and earned a 77-71 win.
Small-picture summary: Laval got enough big shots and big stops, often from Diouf, who had 26 points, 12 rebounds, and four blocks — and accepted MVP honors as modestly as any Oscar winner. Joseph changed tempos like a jazz drummer to tangle Queen’s athletic defending and slow their rotations, hooping 24 with seven assists.
Queen’s, who led by as much as seven, got jelly-legged. Their perimeter game never came into focus, to the count of 4-of-23 three-point shooting; they’re usually a team that hits in the low-30s range.
Luka Syllas had to fight through tight D and foul trouble to notch his 23 points and five assists (46.0 TSP). Cole Syllas ended up with a 17-13 double-double (50.0 TSP). It seemed to be all aboard the struggle bus for everyone else save rangy forward Aaron Tennant, who had a proficient 16 points and nine rebounds, including a steal for a breakaway dunk that gave Queen’s its last chimera of a lead with 97 seconds left. Of course, that was also the only bucket Tennant had in the final two quarters.
In the end, Queen’s versatile Fofo Adetogun was in tears on the bench, so you know they cared. Basketball boils down to Win the day / gagner la journée.
Big picture: Laval, starting from Friday, beat No. 1-seeded Victoria, the champ of western Canada, then No. 4 Dalhousie from Atlantic Canada, and No. 2 Queen’s from Onterrible. However farcical it might seem (“Is”, shurely?! — Ed.) to have a sub-.500 national champion, they rose to fill the role. The victory ends the province’s 26-year national title drought, which had dated to the Bishop’s Gaiters in 1998.2 Laval also became the first French-language university to win the W.P. McGee Trophy.
It would have been huge for Queen’s; at least they have earned respect as a top team, with three Final 8 trips in a row. There is no looking that Laval, known for funding football so handsomely, set its sights on basketball and trusted deliverables to Grant, a young coach, who is Black.
Talk about a bet hitting — and here one thinks good thoughts for the Gaels’ graduating guard Cameron Bett, whose Tricolour run ended sourly. The Englishman has saved Queen’s with big shots time and again, but he ended up with four points on 1-of-6 in his last game. Very seldom does one get to win their last game.
Please allow me one sip of bitters: Laval is the best 12-17 team ever, apparently. But, host team format, yo. OK, I will be good.
Okay, a second sip. Laval did get to the free-throw line 11 more times than Queen’s. Even when the ball didn’t lie after a 50-50 foul call, it worked out. In the third quarter, you almost heard beeping sounds when Laval’s Brandon Wembe backpedaled into Isaac Krueger in the lane, sticking the valuable reserve forward with his fourth foul. Wembe got a wedgie on his second shot. The ball stuck between the rim and backboard, which never happens on a free throw. That’s treated as a jump ball. Laval had the arrow, and used the extra possession to get a big bucket.
C’est la vie! That is the kind of day it was for the Gaels.
May this spur growth
Thought follows action. Over three days, Laval illustrated why basketball is on the come-up in Québec. One hopes those twigs that were planted keep stretching to the university game.
One imagines basketball benefactors, athletics admin folk, seeing the crowds this weekend, seeing how Laval got after it, seeing the young and racous crowds at Montréal Alliance games in the CEBL, and saying, OK, let’s get in on that. While university basketball has been on off English-language linear TV since the Before Times in 2019, TVA Sports broadcast the tournament, and you can imagine that will help in the attention and sharing economy, making it down to future players.
Short of that, Bishop’s, and the Montréal trio of Concordia, McGill, and UQAM, gained a recruiting chip. And, it’s not those teams’ fault that they play in a five-team conference.
That is the hope. It could be catalytic. Truthfully, if it’s not catalytic, then it will be a quick pivot to holding that Gael Force was stopped by the Laval Farce. The host team berth is a reality of national tournaments in Canada, but the Rouge et Or were a real outlier, with a .346 winning percentage before the tournament. They had a bad, Final 8-unworthy outcome. Those are the facts.
Reiteration, though. They won the day, times three. Nationals are in Vancouver next season, so go out and verify the victory with a good showing there. Not a championship necessarily, or even necessarily the same conference rep. Just bring it.
There has to be a magnanimity. One breakdown, at the end of three consecutive seasons with a Final 8 tournament trip, does not ruin the ride, and how Queen’s coach Stephan Barrie has built a respected team where there had never been one. They’re there, man. There might be a step back without the Syllases, but willingness to take a step back allows a team to grow.
It has been fun to follow. It will be next season. Past dispatches have established there was a time when Queen’s winning an OUA Wilson Cup title and nationals silver medal would have seemed like fanfiction.
There will be another day, and the Gaels will yet capture that lightning. No final victories, eh? Je le crois, et je me souviens.
Fourth at nationals for women’s basketball Gaels
It feels bad not to have given equal time to both Queen’s hoop teams. The fifth-year standouts Julia Chadwick, Bridget Mulholland, Emma Weltz, and Laura Donovan, have led a team that was just so freakin’ steadfast. They left the place better than they found it, unlike student rentals back before the whole financialization of housing ran amuck.3
That group, along with all student-athletes, and all young adults, surely have some collective trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic. It also cost them development time, since U Sports was shut down for a full season and started late in 2021-22. That group has led the Claire Meadows-coached Gaels to a 73-21 record the last three seasons with a silver, bronze, and the imaginary antique bronze medal at the nationals.
That is very, very, very good. Ninety-second percentile.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
See Season 3, Episode 1, of Mr. Show. “Two whole minutes underwater!”
1999 to 2020, plus ’22 and ’23, equals 24 seasons, but common usage is 26 years. Math!
That’s my political humor!