No. 1 Celtics, No. 2 Bulldogs set for all-Vancouver final

Two teams who each lost in their respective championship games last season will meet with one squad set to celebrate, and the other facing another off-season of knowing they came as agonizingly close to winning a title as they could without accomplishing the feat.

The St. Patrick Celtics face the Sir Winston Churchill Bulldogs in an all-Vancouver final which pits the top two seeds when the Junior Boys Basketball Provincial Invitational Tournament concludes after four days at Langley Events Centre. The Celtics defeated the Walnut Grove Gators 75-61 while the Bulldogs topped the Kelowna Owls 80-60 on Monday night. The championship final is set for South Court at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday (Feb. 25) between the top-ranked Celtics and No. 2 Bulldogs.

Regardless of which team emerges victorious, it will be a best-ever finish for both schools with Churchill’s best being a third-place finish in 2013 while St. Patrick came fourth in 2019.

While just three players from that squad are back this year for coach John Boateng’s Celtics, his largely Grade 9 roster (10 of the 13 are first-year juniors) came agonizingly close to winning the B.C. Grade 8 Provincial Championships, falling two points short in the gold-medal game. And the three returning juniors were part of a Celtics squad which reached the semi-final round before losing their last two games. Boateng said the trio of Kyle Santa Juana, Jornel Ursua and Rey Bahena have been invaluable in guiding the young core.

“Those guys all season long have them focused on what the goals is, to get back to the final four,” the coach said. “Having that veteran leadership has been helpful.” In Monday’s semi-final, the Celtics were up against the No. 4 Walnut Grove Gators and for the first 16 minutes, it was back-and-forth with St. Patrick scoring the first four points and the Gators rattling off the next 10. The Celtics led 12-11 after one quarter and 32-29 at the half. Irish Coquia would take over the game in the third quarter with a dozen of his game-high 29 points in that eight-minute span.

“They just started getting confident. All tournament, we haven’t really played well … we have a bunch of young kids, so lack of experience, the crowd and everything, but I think they just started to settle down in the second half,” Boateng explained. “It was the first time I had seen them poised and playing like we had been playing all season long and they rode it out all the way to the end of the game.”

The Celtics were up 17 with a quarter to go and while Walnut Grove was able to get the deficit down to single digits, nine points was as close as they could get. While the Bulldogs have won three of their four games by 20 or more points (and the fourth was a nine-point win over Vancouver College in the quarter-final), St. Patrick has been tested in all but their opening contest. The Celtics needed overtime to avoid an upset by No. 16 Handsworth in the round of 16, eking out a 68-67 win and then defeated Lambrick Park by a dozen points, but the lead was down to five in the fourth quarter.

“We expected the challenge, we knew it was going to be a tough road. But it has done is each game it has built up our competitive fire. Being in those tough games, we have been through the ringer now, we are battle-tested,” Boateng said. “Each game, because of that, I am starting to see them reach their full potential. That competition, that push … all of that has elevated our play.”

In addition to Coquia’s 29 points, Joey Panghulan had a dozen while Ursua and Bahena scored 11 apiece. Walnut Grove received 15 from Callum Neily and 13 from Kevin Kao. As for St. Patrick’s opponent in the championship final, the Bulldogs also have the bitter memory of defeat in a championship final to draw upon from last season. The predominantly Grade 10 squad (they have just one Grade 9 on the roster) unfortunately knows all too well the heartbreak of falling in a gold-medal game after losing in the BC Grade 9 Boys Basketball Provincial Championships.

“Last year as Grade 9s they came second so they know exactly what it is like to be here and to lose that last game,” said head coach Rob Bayne. “They are going to be focused and ready to go.”

The Bulldogs – who entered the Junior Boys Basketball Provincial Invitational Tournament at Langley Events Centre as the second seed among the 32 teams – overcame some first-quarter jitters which saw them fall behind 11-4 to defeat the No. 3 Kelowna Owls 80-60 in Monday’s first semi-final contest. Churchill cut the deficit to 17-10 after one period but the 10 points marked the team’s smallest offensive output in the first 13 quarters of basketball as they had averaged nearly double that in the three prior games.

“We came out really nervous, you could see that,” Bayne said. “I think we got outworked and that’s our thing. If we are not working harder than the other team, we are going to lose any game. Eventually we came around, outworked them and probably played a little smarter down the stretch and that was the difference.”

But as has been the case over the course of the first four games, the Bulldogs found their game, taking a 33-31 lead at the half and then outscoring the Owls by a dozen in the third period for a double-digit lead that Kelowna could not claw back from. Filip Subotic (who earned Player of the Game) had just four points in the first quarter but erupted for 10 in the second on his way to a 29-point effort. Ethan Baron added 19 and Milan John chipped in 13. Oaklen Kowal led Kelowna with 16 points, Maxim Storozhuk had 14 and Jai Saini had 13.