Day 1

HALIFAX — There will be no conference champions in the final four of the national men's basketball championship this weekend.

Lending more credence to the argument that conference winners aren't the only ones worthy of Halifax, all four conference champs went in the tank on the first day of the national tournament here Friday.

The Acadia Axemen were absolutely horrendous in a loss to a Carleton Ravens team looked every bit the part of a four-time national champion. The Ravens — who Windsor Star reporter Bob Duff felt shouldn't have been eligible to come to nationals because they lost the OUA final — were sharp and cold-blooded in dicing up an Axemen team that had become one of the great stories in Canada this season. Acadia was over-powered early, lost its discipline before you could blink and watched as Carleton landed a punch right square in the mouth of the AUS champions.

Elsewhere, the St. Mary's Huskies pulled off the first upset of the day and the Concordia Stingers looked nothing like a No. 1. First-team all-Canadian Patrick Perrotte was basically invisible and the Huskies grinded the game almost to a halt with a style that emphasized holding possessions and keeping the ball out of the favoured team's hands.

The Huskies will get the Brandon Bobcats who used a solid second half and a sudden Windsor Lancer collapse to earn a berth into the semifinals. Greg Surmacz, the 6-foot-7 NCAA transfer, had 12 points and seven boards in the first half but the Lancers went away from him in the second and instead settled for jumpers from distance. The Lancers even owned a nine-point lead at one point in the first half but really hurt themselves with shot selection in the second half and going away from the big Surmacz who was eating on every touch but suddenly was cut off.

The UBC Thunderbirds are once again going into the second day of competition as a losing squad in a 92-85 defeat at the hands of the wild card Ottawa Gee-Gees. The T-Birds wasted an absolutely outstanding performance from fifth-year conference MVP Casey Archibald who had 32 points on 13-for-15 shooting. Unfortunately, UBC has no one to blame but itself. Once again the Thunderbirds are not playing for a championship because they couldn't stop anyone from scoring and they didn't get enough help elsewhere. Chris Dyck, a class act and a dead-eye shooter, did not respond well to his first-ever nationals appearance missing 10 of his 12 shots from the field. But they gave up 92 points and that's not going to win you a lot of games ever. At Nationals, at anywhere. Ever.

Ottawa, meanwhile, was pretty impressive in its athleticism and looked like a battle-tested, self-assured and downright braggadocious. The Ottawa-Carleton match-up that we'll see in the semifinal is redundant, for sure, but the battle should be worthwhile. Do the Ravens and Gee-Gees want to play each other again? Hard to say. Probably not. After you've played someone 87 times in the past two seasons it gets a bit overdone.

There's one man's very brief and random thoughts on Day 1. Check back Saturday.