BAL Playoffs: Key highlights from the quarterfinals

It was a weekend of basketball as eight African giants rubbed shoulders inside BK Arena fighting for supremacy in the quarter-finals of the 2023 Basketball Africa League (BAL) season which served fans with lots of great action and entertainment. From the tightly-contested ABC Fighters vs Petro de Luanda game, to yet another shock elimination from REG at the hands of Al Ahly, here are some of the things we learned from the action-packed quarter final games: REG collapsed...again! Rwanda Energy Group (REG) suffered an early elimination from the BAL 2023 after they fell to a 94-77 quarter final defeat at the hands of Egyptian giants Al Ahly on Saturday. This is the second time that the team has failed to make it to the semi-finals, despite playing on home soil, having lost to Cameroon’s FAP last season. Al Ahly’s 17-point lead at the final whistle showed that Rwandan teams still have a long way to go, especially in player recruitment, to establish themselves from underdogs to Africa’s best. The dressing room looked really up to achieving something better than last season’s prior to the playoffs, but the home crowd witnessed the opposite. It will require next season’s representatives to explore REG’s failures if they are to make the most of the tournament and finally win the championship be it at home or away from home. Otherwise, Rwandan teams will one regret not winning silverware at home, especially the time BAL organisers will decide to take the playoffs to another country. Rwandans' love for the basketball game To no one’s surprise, the REG vs Al Ahly match was sold out, a sign of not only how the BAL’s popularity is quickly rising, but also how the local fans are loving the game. But the atmosphere that fans of both Petro de Luanda and Abidjan Basket created inside the BK Arena is a testament of how the tournament continued to hit the hype even after the home side got knocked out. Social media also experienced a good traffic about the game, as fans followed the action. Liz Mills, a woman of steel On Sunday, Liz Mills, the only female coach at the BAL playoffs, put up a serious fight although her ABC Fighters side was edged by Petro de Luanda 84-88. Considered by some as the title favourites, Petro de Luanda is a hard team that has great players like South Sudanese center Ater Majok, Ivorian point guard Suleiman Diabate and Angolan veteran Carlos Morais. However, Mills’ team ably gave them a big test and any other opponents could have surrendered to resist. Pedro Neto was never sure that his men would take the game away from the Australian coach until the last second of the game.

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BAL Playoffs: Key highlights from the quarterfinals