Yakutat seemingly had everything going for them — the crowd, big-time shotmakers and a never-say-die attitude.<\/p>\n
But they didn’t have Alex Heumann, the Juneau Crush player who scored 57 points to lift his team to a 114-102 triple overtime win Tuesday afternoon in the Gold Medal C Bracket.<\/p>\n
Heumann waited a long time to play in the Gold Medal Basketball Tournament, and he wasn’t ready to be done with the tournament after just two games.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been waiting to play in Gold Medal my entire life and it’s more than lived up to everything I thought it could be,” Heumann said. “Playing against Yakutat, guys who I have much respect for, crowd filled with some of the people who have mentored me more than anybody else, I’m just very thankful to ball.”<\/p>\n
Yakutat’s Martin Sensmeier also had a monster game, coming up with 56 points. Jimmy Jensen added 29 points in the losing effort.<\/p>\n
Juneau led 53-52 at the end of the third quarter and looked poised to close the game out. It was a recurring pattern — Juneau going up three or four points on high-energy plays only to watch Yakutat promptly shoot their way back in the game.<\/p>\n
Such as in the fourth quarter, when, after going down five points, Sensmeier was fouled on a 3-point shot to tie the game at 67.<\/p>\n
And then later in the quarter, when Jensen shot over Sean Joslyn with 40 seconds left to tie the game at 77, the score at the end of regulation.<\/p>\n
But the real jaw-dropping, how-on-earth-did-they-do-that Yakutat plays came in the first and second overtime periods.<\/p>\n
In the first overtime, after going down by three with 20 seconds to go, Sensmeier saved what looked to be a sure turnover at midcourt. The high scorer jumped in front of Dean for a loose ball before finding Jay Johnson on the left wing for a 3-pointer that tied the game at 89.<\/p>\n
“Those guys have been playing their whole life just like we have,” Heumann said. “To see them hit big shots, it just kept on raising the level of the game.”<\/p>\n
The madness (or exhilaration, depending which side you were on) continued in the second overtime, when Heumann put Juneau up 99-96 with under a minute to go. Then, after missing a 3, Sensmeier stole the ball away from Dean. He then dribbled around a Johnson screen to knock down his second attempt from long range and tie the game at 99.<\/p>\n
The magic finally ran out for Yakutat in the third overtime, when Heumann’s offense and defense finally got the best of them. Yakutat was outscored 15-3 in the third overtime.<\/p>\n
“My teammates kept making big play after big play when we finally got a little bit of a lead,” Heumann said. “I still wasn’t believing it was real because they hit so many big shots. Until that final buzzer sounded, there was no sure things out there.”<\/p>\n
Juneau plays Filcom in another elimination game today at 2 p.m. Filcom lost to Klukwan in Monday action.<\/p>\n
• Contact sports reporter Nolin Ainsworth at 523-2272 or nainsworth@juneauempire.com<\/b><\/p>\n
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Yakutat seemingly had everything going for them — the crowd, big-time shotmakers and a never-say-die attitude. But they didn’t have Alex Heumann, the Juneau Crush player who scored 57 points to lift his team to a 114-102 triple overtime win Tuesday afternoon in the Gold Medal C Bracket. Heumann waited a long time to play […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":4495,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-4494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4494"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=4494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}