PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) – Back ‘home’ in the Petersen Events Center, a group of mostly Pitt alums will play in The Basketball Tournament starting Saturday at the Pete with a championship prize of $1 million.
The ‘Zoo Crew’ is headlined by DeJuan Blair and includes recent players Greg Elliott, Nelly Cummings, Nike Sibande along with Jamel Artis, Jared Wilson-Frame, Jermaine Dixon, Lamar Patterson, Mike Young and Ryan Luther all scheduled to play.
There will be four elimination games on Saturday including the second-seeded Zoo Crew taking on ‘Million $ Worth of Game’ which is made up mostly of players from the Philadelphia area. The top seed of the eight is ‘Stars of Storrs’ which is made up of mostly UConn alumni including Ryan Boatright and Jerome Dyson. There are also teams of West Virginia (‘Best Virginia’) and Penn State players (‘Happy Valley Hoopers’).
“That’s the beauty of our team, we have multiple guys that can explode and get high points and high rebounds on any night,” Sibande said. “It just takes someone to get hot.”
“We got to be hot at the right time,” Cummings said. “There are going to be a lot of pros we are playing, a lot of guys only got together for a week or two so it’s not going to be too schematic. It’s going to come down to who wants it the most and who is hot that day.”
Last year the Zoo Crew lost to Herd That in Wheeling, a team of Marshall University players that has often had success in this tournament. After the four games of the first round on Saturday, there are a pair of regional semi-final games on Monday and then the regional championship on Wednesday.
It’s the first time Pittsburgh has hosted a regional for The Basketball Tournament with the championship in Philadelphia August 2nd through the 4th.