VANCOUVER — With exactly two minutes remaining in Saturday’s fifth-place final at the CIS Final 8 men’s basketball championships, UBC Thunderbirds head coach Kevin Hanson rose from his seat on the sidelines, and amidst a heartfelt round of applause reserved for the man of the hour, summoned his fifth-year forward David Wagner to the bench.
Over a career in which he chased his potential each season, the 6-foot-9 South Kamloops grad finally reached it here this week at the national championships and his fans at the Doug Mitchell Arena wanted him to know it.
“I think these were the best three games of his career,” said UBC head coach Kevin Hanson after the No. 8-seeded ’Birds shot a sizzling 68 per cent from the field to beat the No. 3 Ottawa Gee-Gees 93-76. “After last night’s game (69-68 over No. 5 McGill), we said that we were going to dedicate today’s game to Dave so it turned out to be a pretty special day for Dave and this program.”
Clearly, following its crushing 109-101 overtime loss to No. 1 seed Ryerson in Thursday’s opening round, UBC could not have finished any stronger than they did.
And while Wagner was a bright spot by averaging 18 points per game and shooting 72 per cent from the field field for the tourney, so too was the rest of the 11-man roster, all of which are set to return next season.
Hanson, in fact, returns 88 per cent of his scoring from a team that went 16-4 in the Canada West conference this season.
Every member of UBC’s starting five hit double figures on offence, led by Conor Morgan with 25, Phil Jalalpoor with 19, Will Ondrik with 16 (14 in the third quarter) and Jordan Jensen-Whyte with 11.
Ottawa, which played its second straight game without CIS Player of the Year Mike L’Africain (knee), was led by the dual 18-point outings of Matt Plunkett and Caleb Agada.
Hanson, encouraged by the response of the local basketball community, said he’s like to see the event return to UBC as soon as possible. The Final 8 returns to Halifax in 2017 and ’18, meaning the quickest it could return to the Point Grey campus is 2019.
