Rocking the Basket

Posted on by Croyviews

Night out to the Basketball-The London Lions

He’s “Rocking the Basket”, a London Lion jumped up, grabbed the basket and scored by dropping the ball into the basket. The crowd and I yelled excitedly as another few points were added to the board, egged on by the commentator.

What a night-out!

On a dreary and wet February evening, my husband and I went to watch live Basketball for date night. There are few perks to watching basketball compared to football. Firstly, it’s indoors and therefore much warmer. And in theory, it’s shorter, with games only being 40 minutes long (four quarters of ten minutes). As I discovered later, in reality, it lasted nearly two hours.

So date night was at the Copperbox in Stratford, home of London only professional Basketball team, the London Lions.

The Copperbox can host up to 6,000 fans for a European basketball game (which it done) only the week before. While tonight they expecting to host some 1600 fans. These include a couple of school groups, families, friends, and keen basketball fans.

While we were waiting for the game to start DJ Cinderella played some cracking tunes to get the audience into a party atmosphere. Some I recognised like Michael Jackson Thriller, while others were new to me like Funky Friday, Silent Hill & KMT featuring Giggs. The music got louder, the closer it went to game time. We also treated to the DJ skills during the breaks.

There were a couple of fun and family friendly traditions. Firstly. all the Lions fans had to stay on their feet, until the Lions scored their first basket. Well, that certainly didn’t take long, took them less than 20 seconds. There was Dance Cam, picking out the good dancers to the tunes during some of the breaks. Some audience participation games included a basketball skills challenge, where competitors needed to bounce while running between cones, shoot a basket and then run to the other basket and shoot a basket from the penalty area. Another one was reminiscent of a kid’s party game, with contestants starting at one of the courts and running down the court and picking up a bit of the kit to end up dressed in the Lions Kit, and then shot a basket. One of the adult superfans won against a youngster in that particular competition.

While the actual game was intense, fast paced and very even. With the ball regularly switching sides and points being scored by both teams on a regular basis. The skill on show was incredible, jumps for the basket, the clever bounces of the ball around the opposition, the turns to get space and avoid the defender. Some clever blocks by defenders, and the odd nab of the ball and suddenly the game was going the other way up the court. Just thrilling. A player even slid into the photographer, just not able to stop himself after a tackle.. Every so often two lads ran out and gave a floor a quick swipe clean.

There was a lot of rotation of the players. (I’m not surprised, as they pretty much just sprint, bouncing or throwing a ball from one side of the court to another.) On average, professional basketball players can run over 2 miles every game.

After a while, I understood the basics of the game (I know very little about basketball). You have twenty seconds to score, and then you need to switch the ball to the opposition. If you foul, you can be penalized (I still have no idea how those rules work). There is a sin bin, and there are timeouts.

One of the things that got me, was the height of the players! I thought a Sheffield player, called Glasgow was short. And he was compared to this team mates, but he was 5ft 11! These are tall people. I also admit I had a soft spot for him as surname is same as my favourite city in Scotland, and he was Sheffield main scorer.

During the time-out, the suit-wearing Sheffield Coach got out his pen, the mini whiteboard of the basketball court, and provided some tactical suggestions to his team. The team gathered around intense, looking for a way back into the game. And they almost had it. They grabbed points back and stopped the Lions from scoring. But no! another foul! And the London Lions have an additional chance to score. It goes in. More distance they need to make-up.

It was a fun night out, watching very competitive and high-standard basketball. A very fun, family-friendly atmosphere was created. On the plus side, you can get hotdogs and stay warm and dry while watching sports. I will be back to cheer along the Lions on another night.

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