Ganapamo rescues Cape Town Tigers with clutch 3

What seemed an unlikely comeback turned into a historic win for Cape Town Tigers in the Nile Conference on Wednesday night in Cairo.

The South African champions were on the ropes when a cold-blooded Evans Ganapamo hit a three-pointer with 2.2 seconds left to lift Cape Town Tigers to a 73-70 victory against FAP.

It was Cape Town’s first Basketball Africa League (BAL) win in three games, and it couldn’t have come at the right time.

A defeat to FAP would have seriously compromised Cape Town’s chances of fighting for one of the four tickets on offer for the BAL playoffs in May in Kigali.

But Ganapamo and Co. weren’t prepared to go down easily.

FAP led for most of the time, and with Tigers’ starters Billy Preston and Myck Kabongo off the game due to fouls limit midway through the last quarter, Relton Booysen’s team seemed destined to their third straight defeat, but against all the odds, it was a bench player who became one of the heroes of the night.

Ben Myburgh, didn’t score a single point in the first three quarters, but when the Tigers needed him most he hit three critical three-pointers in the fourth quarter that completely changed the narrative of the game.

Myburgh hit a three-pointer with 38 seconds that tied the game at 70-all, forcing FAP to call a timeout.

As the Cameroonian champions tried to close the game out with a designed play, they turned the ball over, Jamel Artis moved the ball forward, found Ganapamo, who calmly sealed the victory.

Myburgh was 3-for-4 from beyond the arc to finish with nine points.

Ganapamo finished with a game-high of 24 points, Kabongo added 9 points, 12 assists and 6 rebounds, and Artis delivered a 17-point performance to help Cape Town Tigers improve to 1-2.

“It’s my job to bring energy onto to the court, and that’s what I did,” Myburgh said to bal.nba.com.

When asked if he ever considered seeing his team going down 0-3, he didn’t hesitate: “No. I have complete faith and trust in these guys. We just needed to stay as a team. We had a couple of tough games, but our energy was good throughout the whole time. We stack together. Our mindset coming to the game was ‘we got to get the win. No excuses, it was as simple as that.”

Cedric Kenfack led the way for FAP with 16 points, four others – Brice Bidias, Etienne Toko, and Alexis Wangmene – scored in double figures, combining 30 FAP points, but the Yaounde-based team had to settle to a 1-1 mark with three games left.

“We played well. We lost to a great Cape Town Tigers team. We need to get the right motivation for the rest of the tournament,” admitted Wangmene.