Ubisoft Basketball gets real.

Giving a team talk during a time out

As some of you might know, I play a bit of basketball every now and again, alright to say that it’s more of an obsession is closer to the truth, but with that said I still haven’t played that much Basketball whilst I’ve been here.

Although, I did start the Ubisoft team, which evolved from pick up games and then turned into something pretty competitive, ok so very competitive, in fact probably a little too competitive for something that was started as a bit of fun, but then when you get Ubisoft Montreal against EA Montreal the other rival game company in Montreal playing against each other you can imagine the testosterone going through the building.

One of the EA players taking it to the basket against Sam, with me looking on.

So they challenged us to a series, best of 5, with a couple of pre season games. Well they thought they had a good team, we thought we had a good team, and we had a couple of referee’s just to make it a little more balanced. This was both a blessing and a curse as the series wore on. Ok so we won the pre season games convincingly, and then took the first game of the official series to put us up 1 – 0. But then EA won game 2 to even it up at 1 – 1. Then the unthinkable… EA took game 3 and led the series 2 – 1, these games had all been tight, with game 3 seeing us loose in overtime. Game 4 we had a full team back and were at full strength and it showed as we blew them out by 16 to even everything again at 2 – 2.

Taking it to the basket, around Suresh's pick.

Then comes the final game, by this time we are wanting to wrap it up and just start playing for fun again, EA had a tendency to foul as fouls weren’t being counted, this meant that they could nail us whenever we had the ball and it would stop us dead in our tracks, not being able to score. With team fouls not being counted, it meant that instead of us shooting foul shots after the 5th foul all that would happen would be that we would get the ball on the side line for another try; this would become the difference between the 2 teams.

Anyway, enough with the excuses, at the end of the day we both wanted to win and it ultimately came down to the scripted ending that of course I think we all knew would happen… OVERTIME, not just overtime, but the final shot with the score tied in overtime, with the score tied 72 – 72, EA has the ball with 3 seconds left and wouldn’t you know it, they get the ball inbounds and heave up a shot with no time left on the clock… Swish, EA win by 2… Gutted.

With the wind taken out of us I think that it’s easier to accept, the fact that it came down to the final shot of the series, we can hold our heads up as when a game is that close and you loose you can take comfort in that you took it down to the wire, sure I went over it in my head wondering if we could of done anything different, and being the captain of the team, of course I’m going to think that I could of done something else, but when it’s that close any 1 play could of changed the course of the game. So congratulations to EA, and I’m still proud of the team, we’ve come really far from nothing to what we are today. But would have been great to of beaten them DAMN IT!!!!