Week 8 Recaps

Glasenglitter 53, Sherwood Lumber 32
Glasenglitter kicked off the home stretch of the season with a resounding 53-32 victory over Sherwood Lumber, who are still adjusting to life without key player Sam Marlowe on the floor.

Five-man Glasenglitter came out in a zone to save their energy and boy did it work. Sherwood only managed 32 points on 22% shooting from the field. The Lumbermen generally only managed one shot per possession too, thanks to Ben Danitz's whopping 17 rebounds for Glasenglitter. "That's a lot of boards," said teammate Josh "Boards, Baby" Rappaport. "Kinda makes me wish I hadn't gone around showing off about my measly ten boards. Only kinda though. I got ten boards, baby!"

The win was huge for Glasenglitter, who are fighting to get out of the first round play-in game and face Elite Pets next in a crucial matchup that could determine who ends up in the bottom four. Sherwood Lumber are still sitting pretty in fourth place, but will need to figure out their offensive woes if they're going to meet the lofty championship-or-bust expectations of the Sherwood sponsors.

DRG Talent 72, Brandgenuity 67
Despite leading the league in players not showing up to games, DRG Talent took care of Brandgenuity, winning 72-67.

Minutes before the game, DRG discovered they only had four healthy and present players able to suit up. “Can you play?” asked commissioner Eli Grossman, pointing to the first person he saw enter Chelsea Piers. Luckily, that person was Elite Pets guard David Immerman, who had arrived to keep stats for the game. Unluckily, Immerman had his own game at 7pm. Luckily, Immerman’s a mensch and said he’d play. Unluckily for Grossman, Immerman scored four points, grabbed five rebounds and had three assists. Luckily for Immerman, he won his game at 7pm too.

“It was a rollercoaster of emotions,” Grossman and Immerman said in a statement.

Back to the game, DRG had three players score at least 20 points, including David Shepard, who finished with 22 points, four rebounds, one assist and one block.

Brandgenuity, meanwhile, only had five players themselves. Rookie center Mark Abramovitz led the BG squad with a career-high 24 points to go along with 15 rebounds, three assists and five blocks, and teammate Jeremy Kelly poured in 16 points as well, but it wasn’t enough to get the win.

The loss knocks Brandgenuity down to 6-2, tied for second, while DRG improves to 3-5, tied for sixth.

Elite Pets 48, Accordion 28
Accordion is still looking for its first win of the season after falling to Elite Pets 48-28.

It was a close game for a while, with Elite Pets ahead at halftime by like five points. But Jared Scheff took over in the second half, cruising to 19 points, complemented by David Immerman, who also scored 19 points if you include his four points from the game he subbed in earlier (see Immerman, David, DRG Talent game recap).

The Pets went on a big run, and all of the sudden were up by 20.

“That escalated quickly,” said onlooker Ron Burgundy after the game.

Accordion, missing rookies Uri Pearl, Evan Soloff and Jonathan Schneider, was led by captain Tomer Langer, who finished with nine points and three rebounds.

Accordion falls to 0-8 and plays TurfTalentNFT this week, while the Elite Pets improve to 4-4 and will play Glasenglitter.

LDJ 47, TurfTalent NFT 40
In a hard-fought battle between two teams, LDJ was able to pull ahead of TurfTalent late to secure the crucial victory as we move into the final stretch of the RBA 22-23 regular season. It was a relatively low scoring affair with both teams struggling to create efficient offense, and they both turned up the grit on defense. Led by the Brothers Scheff, TurfTalent attempted to be the aggressors on defense and get into LDJ’s space, and while they were able to hold LDJ well below their season averages on offense, they could not create enough offense to compensate. LDJ was led by Harlan Reiss who scored a team-high 14 points, as he remains the RBA point leader on the season.

TurfTalent struggled on offense with a team-wide 23% shooting from the field overally. Specifically, the team struggled inside the arc, shooting just 2 of 24 from 2-point range compared to 10 of 28 from 3. The team was happy to welcome back Simon Mendes, who scored 11 points including 3 from deep. Jason Scheff was both tasked with defending Harlan much of the game and creating on offense and finished with full box score including 8 points, 7 assists, 3 steals and 2 rebounds in the loss.

With the win LDJ moves into a tie for 2nd place as they look to push for a top-2 seed, while the NFTeam finds themselves in a 4 way tie for 6/7/8/9 places, hoping to win out to avoid the bottom 4.

3G Capital Investments LLC 74, Verstolo 49
3G Capital Investments continued their recent scoring spree, running by Verstolo with a 74-point outing last Sunday night. 3GCI is now averaging a league-high 61.1 points per contest, the highest in recent history. 3G jumped out to a lead pretty quickly in the first half spurred by a combination of three-pointers and fast-break baskets. Josh Wohl scored 18 of his 24 points in the first half as 3G got out to a 20-point lead by halftime, 40-20 (approximately).

The second half was a blur of fastbreaks and exciting plays for the Investors, with seemingly every Verstolo miss turning into an open bucket on the other side. GA got many of the fastbreaks started with his game-high 22 rebounds, pushing the ball ahead to Jeremy Gross (15 points, 3 assists) and Leo Weiner (8 points on 4-4 shooting). Jacob Fortinsky added an exclamation mark on the victory for 3G with a coast-to-coast one-man break punctuated with a behind-the-back move into a reverse layup. On the evening, 3G shot 50% from the field, a stunning achievement by RBA standards.

For Verstolo, they were led by rookie sensation Emmett Stein, who had 30 points including 4 3-pointers, as he moves into 3rd in the league in scoring in the tightly contested scoring title chase, behind Harlan Reiss and fellow rookie Jeremy Goodman. Ben Schluger added 12 points to go along with 6 rebounds for Verstolo as they now find themselves in a 4-way tie for 6th place.