Defending champions show teeth to beat Stade Malien

Stade Malien head coach Kaba Kante described his team's 78-68 defeat to reigning champions US Monastir on Sunday in Dakar as “an accomplishment.”

But a look into the numbers and evolution of the game suggest that the outcome of it could have gone either to Basketball Africa League (BAL) debutant Stade Malien or to US Monastir.

At times, Stade Malien forced the defending champions to look careless with the ball, forcing them to turn it over a surprising 21 times.

The young Maliens appeared to be on course of a surprising result, but Monastir’s zone defense and composure paid off.

Although Stade Malien showed tremendous resilience for most of the regulation, but making only 5 of their 31 three-point attempts and shooting 9-for-17 (52.9%) from the charity stripe proved costly to the Bamako-based club.

Jerome Randle (18), Ibrahima Thomas (11), and Oussama Marnaoui (12) combined for (41 points) more than half of US Monastir’s 78 points, but they didn’t move the ball as well as they've shown over the past few seasons, but, a win is a win.

“We are still not playing the way we want to play,” admitted US Monastir head coach Modrag Perisic.

US Monastir’s last loss in the BAL happened on March 14, 2022 during the Sahara Conference at Dakar Arena, when they fell short 77-74 to Rwanda Energy Group. Since then, the Tunisian champions are on a four-game winning streak with four games left in the Conference.

“We just wanted to take the first game out of the way. Thankfully we came out with the victory. [Starting the BAL with a win], That’s what we were looking for. Now, we just need to keep progressing,” Thomas acknowledged.

Souleymane Berthe was 12-for-23 from the floor to finish with a game-high of 34 points, Aliou Diarra converted half of his 14 shots to go home with 14 points while adding 14 rebounds, but no other Stade Malien player scored in double digits.

And to make matters worse for Stade Malien its bench proved unproductive, contributing only 11 points compared to Monastir bench’s 31 points.

“It was a tough loss because we a very experienced Monastir team” admitted Stade Malien forward John Wilkins.

“We shouldn’t feel bad about this loss. All we have to do, moving forward, is to take the positives from this loss, and get ready for the next few games,” Wilkins added.

Stade Malien will go up Kwara Falcons on Tuesday, March 14 in hope of relaunching their BAL aspirations. A day later, the Falcons go up against US Monastir