Victoria crowns Calgary for first title this century | Unibball Dispatch, Year 2
A sustainable innovation masters student led the way as Victoria showed Calgary it was too reliant on Petrone-um. Meantime, Ottawa earned a third-peat, or a bronzasty.
For the first time since 1997, the Victoria Vikes are Canadian university men’s basketball champions. It was rather anticlimactic.
Victoria throws it back, takes the title
There is no town on the map called Swarmish, B.C., but the Victoria Vikes made player-of-the-year Nate Petrone spend a month there on Sunday.
In Swarmish, everything is well-spaced, people know their assignments, and Vikes guards Renoldo Robinson and Geoffrey James keep the town’s fleet of vehicles moving. And there’s a hardware store with an aptly managed and affable manager, Sven Maillet, whose name literally translates from “mallet.” You need a settle-down response basket, a tough rebound, or advice on a home project, the Final 8 MVP will be there.
The Vikes, after three years of hitting their thumbs at the U Sports Final 8, were nails, defeating the depleted Calgary Dinos 82-53 to win a #CanadianMade national title in Vancouver.
Winning the Canadian university hoops title starts with defence. Job one for Victoria was to stop the Dinos’ dynamo, Petrone, who was averaging 26.2 points in the league and national playoffs. With Victoria swarming him and sending extra defenders — Maillet; James; Robinson, and co-captain Aaron Tesfagiorgis — Petrone had nowhere to turn.
Maillet, the national defensive player of the year, set the tone by blocking Petrone on a turnaround jumper early. The Dinos star who drops 25- and 30-point efforts on the regular was held without a basket for the entire first half. He didn’t get a bucket until 1:25 into the third quarter, and finished with 10 points on 21.7 percent eFG%.
By the way, Maillet is working on an MBA in sustainable innovation at Victoria. So, yes, a sustainability expert showed Calgary it was too reliant on Petrone-um.
The Dinos and Petrone were missing two major assets. Calgary lost point guard Noah Wharton and 6-foot-11 centre Declan Robinson during their quarterfinal and semifinal wins against Queen’s and UPEI.
The great unknown will remain how well these teams would have matched up with their full lineups, since the Vikes lost star scorer Diego Maffia in mid-January and just continued to win. The defeat against Calgary in an auto-berth game (Canada West semifinal) on Feb. 28 is the only downnote on a 30-1 season under national coach-of-the-year Murphy Burnatowski.
Back over in Swarmish, hopefully the town has a good physiotherapist. Maillet will probably need some. The 6-foot-7 national defensive player of the year is one of those two-way, all-around players whose talents are better displayed in the Canadian university game. With the FIBA-rules 24-second clock and allowance for physical play, our brand of ball, not sorry if this is repetitive, plays out as a confluence between finesse on the fly and ruggedness. A competitor can pull up everyone else’s level of play.
To a man, Victoria embodied that. Robinson (24 points, nine rebounds), James (17), and 6-foot-6 forward Shadynn Smid (11 with 17 rebounds) got out in transition, to the count on a 19-9 edge in fast-break points.
As Calgary wilted, Robinson dialled up the highlight meter, crossing over defenders and illustrating why he blossomed into an all-Canadian after the loss of Maffia. It was a command performance from the lefthander from Montréal.
The Vikes were seeded either 1 or 2 in the previous three Final 8s, and lost to the eventual champion in the first round twice (2022 Carleton and 2024 Laval) on either side of a fourth-place finish in 2023. Then coach Craig Beaucamp and star Elias Ralph moved south to join Dave Smart with the D1 Pacific Tigers.
And it didn’t affect them. That attests to anyone and everyone, but it also opened more room for Maillet to bring a wild-man affect to a talented team.
As for the Dinos, who will host the 2026 Final 8, whose absence hurt more? Wharton could have taken some of the handle from Petrone. Robinson’s Alberta beef under the boards enables the Dinos to clear the boards quickly out and get out in transition.
Without their offensive arsenal, which had produced an average output of 101.7 points in their last three starts, concerns about Calgary’s details and defending were exposed. Victoria was the second team this weekend with fewer than 10 turnovers against Calgary.
So, that about wraps it up from barely-a-living room in Hamilton. Hope people enjoyed this outsider remote coverage.
Bronze age for Gee-Gees
It is a bronzasty? A third-peat?
Either way, Ottawa must own winning three bronze medals in a row. The Gee-Gees played true to themselves to collect Final 8 hardware. All told, Ottawa has six Final 8 medals — two silver, four bronze — across the last 12 seasons.1
A transition basket early in a 12-2 mid-fourth quarter run over wearying UPEI, Brock Newton running the floor as a big man to lay in a pass from graduating guard Drajan Stajic, summed up the effort. Ottawa rates credit for reaching down past the disappointment and the grind of a long season. After all, motivation in a bronze-medal game has to come from within; the cliché “it’s better than nothing” is kind of negative.
Their 86-70 win over those pesky UPEI Panthers was closer than the final tally suggests. It was a one-point game until Akrit Choudhury, the fourth-year guard, made a three-pointer with 7:21 left that seemed to move the adrenalin toward the deeper Gee-Gees.
The postmortem is entrusted to Gee-Gees skipper James Derouin and his fellow coaches. The ‘thanks Stewardess Obvious’ stat is that Ottawa’s three-point shooters hit at a 35 percent rate, but they made only 23 percent (19-of-82) across three Final 8 games. That’s still a small sample, but that is the sample available. The teams that have got to the summit and claimed the W.P. McGee Trophy usually manage not to have too much drop-off in their shooting performance as they deal with the added pace and intensity at nationals.
Stajic, in his final game in le gris et grenat, dished a game-high eight assists.2 Forward Justin Ndjock-Tadjore, with 25 points on 9-of-13, bounced back from a rough semifinal against Victoria to cop player of the game recognition in the bronze-medal game for the second season in a row. Newton also had 22 points on 9-of-15, while the guard Jacques-Mélaine Guemeta had an 11/10 points-rebound double-double.
The effort from UPEI affirmed this tournament isn’t just about who is No. 1, but it is about representing how basketball has a heartbeat everywhere. They had heart and hustle, hectoring ballhandlers with a four-guard lineup. The graduating guard, Kamari Scott, went for 21 in his final game for auld lang syne.
As noted, the Panthers earned their first win in the tournament since 1985, when the then-CIAU used a 16-team regionals format. In capturing the AUS title for the first time since 2003, they also offered a reminder of why its single-site conference championship offers good competition and surprises every season.
Beyond Scott, UPEI has one other aging-out star: centre-forward Daniel González Larranga. The team from the postage-stamp province has had both basketball teams earn a top-four finish in Canada so far this decade, since the Panthers women’s team won the 2020 bronze.
Note
All records and statistics are sourced from usportshoops.ca by Martin Timmerman.
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March 16, 2025
Hamilton, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
2012-13 through ’24-25. There was no 2020-21 season due to COVID-19 health protections.
That’s garnet and grey. The CBC commentator called Ottawa’s main colour “maroon.” Take a lap.