Nigeria’s Men Basketball team, D’Tigers have taken the basketball world by storm in the last 72 hours after defeating the USA and Argentina before losing to Australia in a pre-Olympic exhibition game in Las Vegas.
Despite the loss to Australia in the early hours of Wednesday morning, it has been an impressive preparation for D’Tigers ahead of the Olympic games which begins in about 2 weeks.
Against the USA, D’Tigers won 90-87 in a keenly contested game which saw the world no.1 field their strongest line up against world no.22.
Miami Heat man, Gabe Nnamdi Vincent and Caleb Agada was the star of the show hitting 6 of his attempted 8 three point shots and making a total of 21 points in the game.
Caleb Agada and Ike Ireogbu also contributed their own quota of 3 pointers which was Nigeria’s main weapon as D’Tigers amassed a total of 63 points from their 3 pointer shots.
Prior to that game, the USA had only lost two of their previous 56 exhibition games.
Nigeria’s D’Tigers then followed up the performance with another impressive win over the no.4 ranked team in the world, Argentina as the team got more global basketball heads talking for the second time in a matter of days.
Although going by the stats it wasn’t a very clinical performance from D’Tigers in terms of shooting especially from behind the arc but the team did just enough in and around the paint to get a 94-71 win over the Argentines.
Early Wednesday morning it was time for the final pre-Olympic warm-up game against world no.3, Australia who have also been drawn alongside D’Tigers at the Olympics.
And just like against the Argentines, Nigeria failed to make most of the shots from behind the arc and also in the paint count as the Aussies won by a 39 point margin (69-108).
There was also lots of turnovers from the Nigerian team as the Aussies defended brilliantly while also moving the ball quickly and converting their shots.
D’Tigers will now look forward to the Olympics where they play Australia, Italy and Germany in the group stage as Coach Mike Brown is set to release his final roster
