Muslim Basketball

Would Ibrahim Omar please come to the stage to collect your General Manager of the Year Award? Year after year, his teams are one of the best defensively, but they were losing games solely because of their offense. Now, with Mujtaba, they’ve shown that they can rely on their offense win games in critical moments (see week 2, Muj game winning 3 against Granada). A great season, but those 3 loses came against 3 of the top 5 teams, teams they will have to beat if they look to win a championship.

Ran out of gas against a team that kills you once you start to show any weakness. If they had Jawad, that may have been the lift they needed to stay energized for the entire 40 minutes. He would have also relieved the ball handling duties from Muj, who was doubled and trapped on every touch. 

With the whole squad, they are easily a top 5 team - but there are also 5 other top 5 teams. I don’t know what that means lol. This team is legitimate - Mujtaba out there surveying the field like an NFL QB, picking and choosing the right spots to make a play. Teams still don’t understand they need to find Omar Elsamna and box him out, because he’s going to eventually start getting all those put backs to go down. Saw Himey hit a 3 - hell has frozen over!

After sleepwalking through the first half, Jawad turned up the offensive intensity and carried that Mujtaba-less Jakarta team to victory. Ramzy hit a big time 3 to pull away, while the whole team played almost perfect defense for the entire forty minutes and just dominated the glass. Omar Elsamna has to be the most underrated rebounder in this league - dude leaps and grabs everything, he just needs to start finding ways to get the putback to go through the net. With Muj, this game would have been 70-30.

Best defensive performance they’ve had thus far - this was the level of defense I expected from them to start the season. Not many teams should score more than 35 against this team. Muj will carry the load offensively. They’ll rack up wins real quick in the second half of the season if they maintain this level of defensive intensity. 

Did everything they could to keep Beirut from stealing this game late. For the third straight week, they get a W in a dramatic, but cool and collected fashion. Muj struggled a bit, but he had jawad by his side to carry the offensive load. Big boy Omar Khalaf ate on the boards. Omar "Bunnies" Elsamna looking like he came out of Space Jam to grab some of his 17 rebounds. These boys can defend and rebound, but again, consistent offense is their Achilles heel. We've seen spurts of tremendous fire power, but then we've seen a 30+ minute stretch (last week against Sana'a) where without Muj, they cannot buy a basket. 

What a difference Muj makes. Couldn’t buy a basket in the second half, after looking like they were going to send Sana’a off with a blowout loss. On top of that, they could not defend Mo Amin without fouling. 

Definitely did not deserve where they were ranked last week and they played like they knew that. They found it early and often, lost it, then found a way to take it at the end. Jawad almost did it last week and Mujtaba did it this week, cold-blooded.

Early season loss for a team with sky-high expectations. The Omar brothers struggled to get anything going, Mujtaba scored a very hard earned 22, and Jawad added 15 after hitting some very late clutch 3s to keep Jakarta within striking distance. They came up a couple free throws short, but a team this defensively talented and with a scorer as skilled as Muj, they should be able to handle 90% of the teams in this league.