Ronnie Kasewu had something almost deceptive about him. On a basketball court, he carried the nickname of an assassin, but off it he was hardly the sort of person who seemed interested in announcing himself. He was calm, understated and, to those who knew him, almost completely uninterested in the theatre that can sometimes surround a basketball star. Ronnie did not need the noise. He did not need to be the loudest man in the room, the flashiest player on the floor or the one demanding that everybody notice him. He had the basketball. That was enough. And perhaps that is why the news that Ronnie Kasewu passed away on Friday evening feels particularly difficult for a generation of Ugandan basketball that watched him play. There are players you remember because they made a lot of noise, players you remember because they were spectacular, and then there are players whose presence somehow became woven into the fabric of the game itself. Ronnie was one of those. For Kyambogo Warriors, he was more than a player. For Ugandan basketball, he was one of the craftsmen who helped build an era.

Long before Ugandan basketball became dominated by the modern language of dynasties, continental ambitions and professionalisation, there was a different league being built at the YMCA, Lugogo and university courts, with players whose reputations travelled mostly by word of mouth and whose careers were measured as much by loyalty as they were by trophies. Ronnie Kasewu belonged to that generation. He started with Kyambogo Warriors as a teenager and, remarkably, never found a reason to leave. By 2017, when he had spent nearly two decades with the club, Kasewu could look back on a relationship that had begun when he was only 15 and still in Senior Two at Kyambogo College. “I’ve never had any reason to leave,” he said then. Warriors, as far as Ronnie was concerned, was home.

Ronnie Kasewu with Warriors teammates Ivan Enabu and Ssali in 2014

There is something almost old-fashioned about that kind of loyalty now. Professional sport has always involved movement, but in Ugandan basketball the bond between player and club could sometimes become something much more personal. Ronnie was not simply somebody who wore the Warriors jersey; he became part of what the jersey meant. He lived through the club’s difficult seasons, its near misses, its heartbreaks and, eventually, its triumphs. He was there when Warriors went from being a team with ambition to becoming national champions. He was there when they lost. He was there when they came back. Kasewu was one of the survivors of the Warriors team that had reached the 2007 final and surrendered a 2-0 series lead to Falcons, a painful defeat that stayed with the club for years. By 2009, when Warriors returned to the final under Coach Gad Eteu, Kasewu was no longer simply one of the players. He was one of the people who carried the memory of everything that had happened before.

And then there was the left hand.

Ugandan basketball came to know Ronnie Kasewu as the Left-Hand Assassin, a nickname that sounded far more menacing than the quiet man who carried it. The remarkable part was that Ronnie was actually right-handed. His left-handedness was not some childhood basketball trick designed to confuse defenders. It was born from circumstance. In 1998, while playing handball, he injured his right hand. During his recovery he continued playing basketball with his left, and then another injury to the right wrist forced him to essentially start again. The left hand became stronger and, eventually, became the hand with which Ronnie dribbled, passed and shot. He continued to write with his right hand, but on the basketball court, the left became his signature.

It is one of those stories that sounds almost too perfect to be true, because sport loves to turn adversity into mythology. But there was no mythology necessary with Ronnie. He simply adapted. What began as a limitation became an advantage. Defenders knew the left hand was coming, but knowing it and stopping it were two very different things. Kasewu was a player who could do a bit of everything, a facilitator and floor manager with the ability to shoot from anywhere on the floor. The left hand was the most obvious part of his game, but it was never the whole game. Ronnie understood basketball. He could organise it, read it, slow it down or speed it up. He was the kind of player whose value was not always captured by the box score alone because some of his best work happened before the shot ever went up. You could not have identified a more quintessential player who was as defensive as was offensive.

By 2009, that understanding had become impossible to ignore. Kyambogo Warriors won the national championship and Ronnie Kasewu was named the season’s Most Valuable Player. It was an important championship for Warriors, but also an important moment in the story of the Ugandan league itself. Kasewu had become one of its defining players. His name was no longer merely attached to Kyambogo(Kasewu was born, raised in Kyambogo, even went to Kyambogo College); it was attached to excellence. Yet even then, the personality remained the same. There was no sense that the MVP award had suddenly transformed him into somebody who needed to be bigger than the game. Ronnie was still Ronnie. The basketball remained the thing.

Warriors would have to wait three more years for their next championship, and the road to the 2012 title carried its own collection of scars. They had lost the previous two finals to DMark Power and had already experienced the particular cruelty of postseason basketball. But when they finally reached the 2012 final against Falcons, Kasewu was one of the men carrying all that history. Warriors won the series 4-2, and in the deciding Game Six at Lugogo, Kasewu delivered the kind of performance that turns a good career into folklore: 25 points, six rebounds and five assists, including 15 points in the fourth quarter, to lead Warriors to an 88-81 victory and their second national championship.

There are performances that happen in games and performances that become part of a club’s mythology. That was the latter. Warriors had been through too much to lose another final. They had seen leads disappear before. They knew what Game Seven could mean. This time, there would be no Game Seven. Kasewu, carrying four fouls, kept shooting. He made three three-pointers in the fourth quarter. With the championship within reach, the man who had spent years quietly going about his business suddenly became the most important player in the building. The Left-Hand Assassin had another target, and this time it was history itself. To highlight how important this performance was, we are talking about a team that had Norman Blick, Henry Malinga and Ivan Enabu but Kasewu as the Man of the occasion.

His contribution to Ugandan basketball extended beyond Warriors. Ronnie made his Uganda national team debut in 2005 and became part of the Silverbacks story, representing the country during an important period in the growth of the men’s national programme. But perhaps his greatest national contribution was not a particular game or tournament. It was simply that he was there. He belonged to the generation of players who gave Ugandan basketball its accumulated memory, the players who played before the current generation inherited the platforms that now exist. They built reputations in YMCA, Wandegeya, Lugogo and the other courts where Ugandan basketball found its identity long before the game acquired some of the polish it has today.

And those who watched Ronnie will remember things that never appeared in the statistics.

They will remember how calm he was. They will remember that he was not particularly flashy, that he did not seem consumed by the need to perform a personality alongside his basketball. And they will remember a peculiar little ritual that became almost inseparable from the Ronnie Kasewu image. Before games and after games, he would often find a quiet place away from the commotion and have a cigarette. It was not the basketball, and it certainly was not what made him great, but over time the ritual became part of the visual memory of him, almost like a recurring prop in the story of an actor who had played the same character for so many years that the audience could recognise him from the smallest detail. While the crowd was gathering and the teams were preparing, Ronnie could often be found away from the noise, in his own little space, before returning to the business that mattered to him.

The cigarette was not the story. Ronnie was. And perhaps that distinction matters because we are often tempted, when somebody dies, to reduce them to the most spectacular things they accomplished. We list the championships, the awards, the national-team appearances and the numbers, and then we say goodbye. But people are rarely remembered that way by those who actually knew them. They are remembered in fragments. A particular laugh. A particular phrase. The way they walked into practice. The way they handled pressure. The way they looked after younger players. The way they stood at the side of the court. The way they held a basketball. For Ronnie, perhaps it will be the left hand. Perhaps it will be the Warriors jersey. Perhaps it will be that quiet figure stepping away from the noise before or after a game. Perhaps it will simply be the knowledge that, for almost two decades, if you were looking for Ronnie Kasewu in Ugandan basketball, you knew exactly where he would be.

With the Warriors.

That may ultimately be the most fitting tribute to him. In an era when careers can be defined by how many teams a player has represented, Ronnie’s career tells a different story. He became great without constantly changing his surroundings. He became an MVP without becoming a celebrity. He won championships without losing the understated personality that had always defined him. And he became known across the country for a left hand that he never originally intended to make his basketball identity. There is poetry in that. Sometimes greatness is not about having everything go according to plan. Sometimes it is about taking what the game gives you, adapting, and becoming so good at the adaptation that generations forget there was ever another way.

Kasewu Ronnie #12 and the Kyambogo Warriors

There is, however, another loss buried inside the loss of Ronnie Kasewu, and perhaps it is one we ought to confront while we still have the memory to do so. Kyambogo Warriors, the club that gave Ronnie his basketball home and to which he gave almost the entirety of his basketball life, is no more. The two-time champion, the 2009 MVP, the Silverback and the Left-Hand Assassin belonged to an organisation that has itself disappeared from the landscape of Ugandan basketball. That is an uncomfortable detail in the story of his legacy because it means that when we remember Ronnie, we are also remembering something that no longer has a place in the present tense. He was not simply a great player who happened to play for Warriors; he was a Warrior in the fullest sense of the word. He started there as a teenager, stayed through the highs and lows, won there, lost there, and became part of the culture of the club. Yet today, the player remains in our memories while the institution he represented has become part of the past. Perhaps that is what makes the story of Ronnie Kasewu and Kyambogo Warriors belong to the larger story of Uganda’s Forgotten Cult. We have a habit of remembering the trophies but forgetting the houses in which they were won, remembering the stars but forgetting the clubs that made them, remembering the photographs but allowing the worlds inside those photographs to disappear. If Warriors can vanish and we simply move on, what else are we allowing to disappear with them?

Ronnie Kasewu leaves behind two national championships, an MVP award, a Silverbacks legacy and a place in the history of Ugandan basketball. But perhaps his most important legacy is less tangible. It is in the players who watched him. It is in the teammates who shared the court with him. It is in the opponents who spent years trying to stop that left hand. It is in the young basketball players who may never have seen him play but will one day hear the name Ronnie Kasewu and ask why people who watched him speak about him with such affection.

That is the responsibility of basketball history. Championships eventually become lines in an archive. MVP awards become names on lists. Players eventually leave the court. But the stories are supposed to remain.

Ronnie Kasewu was a Warrior. He was the Left-Hand Assassin. He was an MVP, a champion and a Silverback. But before all those things, he was simply a basketball player who seemed to understand that he did not need to make himself bigger than the game. He let the game speak for him.

And it spoke loudly.

Rest in peace, Ronnie Kasewu.

There was something strangely fitting about the way Power Basketball Club left the National Basketball League in 2024. The five-time champions did not go down in some dramatic final-day collapse against one of the giants of Ugandan basketball. They went down at the hands of Livingstone, a club fighting for its own survival, in a 61–54 game at YMCA. Livingstone won and stayed in the NBL; Power lost and, after 29 years in the top flight, were relegated to Division One. For Power, it was the kind of defeat that seemed to demand an immediate response. Surely a club with five championships, decades of history and a name that had been part of Ugandan basketball for so long would spend a season in Division One, gather itself, and come back. Livingstone had merely survived the day while Power had suffered the misfortune of having a bad season at the wrong time. That was how the story could have been told.

Two years later, however, the story looks very different. Power have finished at the bottom of the Division One table and will now drop another level into Division Two. The fall that seemed almost inconceivable in 2024 has therefore acquired a second act, and perhaps the most uncomfortable thing about it is that it makes the first relegation look less like an aberration and more like a symptom. Power did not spend a season outside the NBL before returning to normal. They spent a season outside the NBL and then fell again. For a club that once defined what winning looked like in Ugandan basketball, the question is no longer simply how Power lost its place in the top flight. The more interesting question is what happened to the institution between the last championship and this latest relegation.

I wrote about some of this in November 2024 in an article titled Forgotten Cult. The immediate occasion was Power’s relegation, but the argument was never really about one season or one roster. It was about the erosion of the things that make a basketball club more than a collection of players assembled for a particular competition. Power had accumulated something over the years that could not be measured in championships alone: names that meant something to supporters, players who became part of the identity of the club, traditions that connected one generation to another and a reputation that made the Power jersey carry a certain expectation before a game had even started. The concern then was that while Power still possessed the history, it was becoming increasingly difficult to see how that history was being transmitted to the next generation.

The events of the past two seasons have made that question considerably harder to dismiss.

Power’s attempt to climb back from Division One was, in many ways, built around one of the last living connections to the club’s great era. Isaac Afidra, better known as Magalo, had been playing basketball for more than two decades and had become almost synonymous with Power. By the time the club entered its lower-division campaign, he was well into his forties, yet he remained the go-to player and one of the central figures around whom Power’s attempt at recovery was built. There is something admirable about that, and there is also something deeply revealing about it. A club that once produced generations of players capable of carrying its identity into the future was now asking one of its oldest surviving representatives to help carry that future himself.

Afidra deserves considerably more credit than the eventual league position might suggest. His longevity is remarkable, but longevity alone does not explain why he remained relevant. He could still play. He could still influence games. He could still produce the sort of moments that had made him valuable to Power for years. In 2022, for instance, he had a 16-point, 14-rebound, six-assist performance against Ndejje and made the decisive layup in a 69–67 victory. Even in the lower divisions, he continued to have the experience and skill to make important contributions, including a late game-winning basket against Nkumba Marines in 2025. This was not a case of Power carrying a retired player around for sentimental reasons. Magalo was still capable of helping them win basketball games.

The problem was that Power needed him to help them win too many basketball games.

There is a significant difference between having a veteran as part of a young team and having a veteran become the most dependable expression of what the team is supposed to be. At 43, Afidra was competing in a game increasingly shaped by young legs and athleticism. The lower divisions are not a retirement league, and Division One has plenty of players capable of playing at a pace that makes experience alone an insufficient advantage. A veteran can compensate for declining athleticism with positioning, anticipation, shooting, strength and an understanding of the game, but there comes a point where the physical demands of basketball cannot be negotiated with experience. The irony is that the qualities that made Afidra so valuable to Power—his experience, his familiarity with the club and his understanding of winning—were precisely the qualities that should have made him a mentor to the next generation rather than the primary vehicle through which Power attempted to return to the NBL.

That is why I find Magalo’s role in this story so fascinating. If you wanted to demonstrate the difference between remembering a culture and reproducing a culture, you could hardly construct a better example. Afidra had lived Power’s history. He was not somebody who had watched old championship footage and been told what the club used to mean. He had been part of it. He represented a continuity that had become increasingly difficult to find elsewhere. But an institution cannot depend indefinitely on one person to be the bridge between its past and its future. At some point the bridge has to lead somewhere.

Perhaps that is what Power’s two relegations are telling us.

The club did not lack a connection to its past. It may have lacked the mechanism for turning that past into its future.

That distinction is important because it would be too easy, and frankly unfair, to make Afidra the villain of this story. If anything, his continued presence is one of the more admirable aspects of it. A 43-year-old still turning out for a club he has represented for most of his adult life is not evidence of the problem; it is evidence of the loyalty that still exists around Power. If Magalo was still doing the most he could at that age, perhaps the question should not be why he could not carry the club back to the NBL. The question should be why a club of Power’s historical stature needed him to carry so much of it in the first place.

That brings us back to the original Forgotten Cult argument. Power’s five championships were not created by nostalgia. The trophies were the visible outcome of a functioning basketball culture: players came through, established themselves, became leaders and eventually became part of the history that younger players inherited. The point of remembering Wilbrod Oketcho, Ken Balyejjusa, Marvin Banks, Julius Wapera, David Kiberu, Peter Mubanda and the other figures associated with Power’s great years was never that young players should spend their time worshipping old players. It was that a club should know where it came from well enough to understand what it needs to reproduce.

That is where Power’s situation becomes particularly difficult. There is no shortage of history to draw from. The club’s championship years are well documented, its former players are still around, and Afidra himself is a living archive. Yet history is only useful to an institution when it is passed on. A retired number, an old photograph or a championship banner can preserve a memory, but none of those things can teach a young player how to become the next leader. That requires people, structures and a deliberate effort to make the club’s identity part of the development of its players.

And then, almost as if somebody had decided that the Power story needed one final twist, there is Livingstone.

The irony is difficult to ignore. In June 2024, Livingstone beat Power 61–54 in the game that sealed Power’s relegation. Livingstone survived; Power went down. It was a neat piece of sporting symbolism: the old heavyweight was pushed aside by a club fighting to establish its own place in the top flight. Two years later, the final Division One table has put the two names together again, only this time neither club is celebrating. Power finished 12th and Livingstone 11th, and both are heading to Division Two.

In 2024, Livingstone effectively helped send Power down.

In 2026, Livingstone has joined them.

There is an almost comic cruelty to that symmetry, although neither club is likely to find it particularly funny. It also makes the broader point that relegation battles are rarely as simple as one club being “too big to fail” and another being the deserving survivor. Livingstone’s victory in 2024 was entirely legitimate and their subsequent relegation does not diminish it. They survived that season because they were better when it mattered. But surviving one crisis does not necessarily mean an institution has solved the problems that produced the crisis. Two years later, the same league has swallowed both clubs.

For Power, however, the latest relegation feels different because the club is no longer dealing with the shock of falling from the NBL. That shock has already passed. The club has had time to respond. It has had time to adjust to Division One, to develop a route back, to identify younger players and to decide what the next version of Power should look like. Instead, the result is another relegation, and that makes it much harder to argue that the problem was simply a bad NBL season.

There is also a generational question hiding in all of this. Ugandan basketball has changed considerably since Power’s championship era. The league is deeper, the style is faster and the athletic demands are different. Clubs that want to remain competitive cannot simply preserve their old identity and expect the modern game to accommodate it. The challenge is to take whatever was valuable about the old institution and build it into something capable of competing in the present.

Power cannot go back to 2010 -2011 back to back NBL Championship spat.

Nobody can.

The players are older, the game has moved on and the basketball ecosystem around the club is different. Trying to recreate the past would probably be another form of refusing to confront the present. What Power can do, however, is ask why those championship teams worked, what they gave the club beyond trophies, how they developed players, how they connected with supporters and how they created an identity strong enough that people still talk about them more than a decade later.

That is where Afidra becomes important again. Magalo should not be the symbol of Power’s inability to move forward. He should be evidence of what a properly functioning institution can preserve. Imagine what it would mean for a young Power player to learn directly from a man who has spent 26 seasons around the game and lived through the club’s most important years. Imagine if the knowledge accumulated over that career were deliberately transferred to the next generation, rather than being required primarily on the court. The goal should not be to find another Afidra. It should be to create an environment in which Afidra is no longer needed to be the answer because he has helped produce the answers.

That, ultimately, is what makes Power’s fall worth discussing beyond the club itself.

Every generation of Ugandan basketball has its institutions. Some survive because they adapt, some disappear because they don’t, and some linger long enough for us to become nostalgic about what they once were. The danger is that we mistake the continuation of a club’s name for the continuation of the institution itself. A name can survive almost indefinitely. A culture requires constant renewal.

Power now has a long road ahead of it. Division Two is not the end of the club, and there is no reason to believe that a five-time champion cannot eventually find its way back to the NBL. But the comeback cannot simply be measured by promotion. If Power wins its way back to the top division with the same structural problems, the achievement will only postpone this conversation.

The more interesting comeback would be one in which a young player becomes the new Magalo, not because he is 43 and somehow still doing the work of three generations, but because the institution has spent years preparing him to take responsibility. It would be a Power team in which the history is not something mentioned when reminiscing about the old days but something young players understand as part of their responsibility to the people who will wear the jersey after them.

Two years ago, when Power went down to Division One, I wondered whether we were witnessing the erosion of something much bigger than a basketball team. I hoped, perhaps naively, that relegation would be the shock that forced the club to confront it. Instead, Power have now gone one level lower, while Livingstone—the club that delivered the final blow in 2024—has somehow ended up beside them.

There is an irony there that basketball writers could hardly have scripted better.

But there is also a warning.

Power’s five championships are not going to disappear because the club is playing in Division Two. The names of the players who built those teams will remain part of Ugandan basketball history. Magalo’s career will remain extraordinary whether Power are in the NBL or Division Two. None of that can be relegated.

What can disappear, however, is the connection between those things and whatever comes next.

And perhaps that is the real cost of Power’s fall.

Not that one of Uganda’s great basketball clubs is going to play in Division Two.

But that a generation of players could eventually grow up knowing Power as a name, without ever understanding Power as a culture.

That is the part that should worry us.

Because when I wrote Forgotten Cult in 2024, the question was whether Power had forgotten what made it special. After another relegation, perhaps the question has become even simpler: Who is going to remember it for them?

By Cucu Brian

The views expressed herein are only the views of the author. Brian is an ardent Ugandan basketball follower, a basketball junkie and the founder of Basketball256 LLC.

RezLife Saints produced the biggest comeback of the opening weekend of the 2026 NBL Playoffs, overturning a 13-point second-half deficit to edge Sommet BC 68-67 and seize a 1-0 lead in their best-of-three quarterfinal series.

The 2026 National Basketball League playoffs opened with drama at the YMCA Court as RezLife Saints completed a remarkable comeback to defeat Sommet BC 68-67 in Game One of their quarterfinal series on Saturday afternoon.

For much of the first half, Sommet looked firmly in control. They dictated the tempo, controlled the paint and punished RezLife’s mistakes to carry a deserved 39-32 lead into halftime after winning both opening quarters.

The momentum only seemed to swing further in Sommet’s favour early in the third period when they stretched the lead to 13 points, threatening to run away with the contest. Instead, that proved to be the turning point.

RezLife responded with a devastating 24-point third quarter while limiting Sommet to just 10 points. The Saints tightened defensively, converted turnovers into transition opportunities and suddenly found life from beyond the arc. By the end of the quarter, the game had completely flipped, with RezLife carrying a 56-49 advantage into the final ten minutes.

Sommet refused to disappear. They clawed back throughout the fourth quarter and had opportunities to reclaim the lead in the closing moments, but RezLife held their nerve to escape with a one-point victory and home-court advantage in game 2 of this series. Game 2 will be played at RezLife Lubowa where the home team hasn’t lost a game this season.

Chris Basheke Omanye was outstanding for the Saints. The point guard delivered one of the most efficient performances of the opening playoff weekend, scoring 19 points on an incredible 8-of-9 shooting from the field, including a perfect 2-for-2 from three-point range. He added four assists and four rebounds while orchestrating the offense whenever RezLife needed composure.

Edrine Ekau matched Basheke’s 19 points in spectacular fashion. Every one of his field goals came from beyond the three-point line as he buried six triples, providing the perimeter shooting that fueled RezLife’s third-quarter resurgence.

While Hon Kwany struggled through a difficult shooting night, finishing with just five points on 1-for-10 shooting, the Saints found enough production elsewhere. Michael Otieno chipped in seven assists, Kevin Moru added seven points off the bench, and RezLife capitalized on Sommet’s mistakes by converting 24 points off turnovers and adding 21 fast-break points.

Sommet will rue the missed opportunity after leading for most of the afternoon. Pauti Kikomba paced the side with 14 points and seven rebounds, Peter Cheng contributed 13 points and six rebounds, while Brighton Galiwango finished with 10 points. Despite outrebounding RezLife 39-39 overall being level and dominating the paint with a 34-20 advantage, Sommet’s offense stalled at the worst possible time during the third quarter.

The difference ultimately came down to efficiency from long range. RezLife knocked down 11 three-pointers compared to Sommet’s seven, with Basheke and Ekau combining for eight of those makes. That shooting barrage erased Sommet’s early cushion and proved just enough to survive the late rally.

With the victory, RezLife Saints move within one win of a semifinal berth, while Sommet must now regroup quickly ahead of Game Two, where defeat would bring their 2026 campaign to an abrupt end.

     -Basketball256 Editorial

The  Men’s opening game of the 2026 National Basketball League playoffs promised contrasting identities, and Friday night at the YMCA Court delivered exactly that.

One team relied heavily on its star.

The other relied on everyone.

Victoria University Crocs overcame another brilliant postseason performance from Jimmy Otim to defeat UCU Canons 61-53 and move within one victory of the semifinal round.

The scoreline hardly tells the story.

This was an ugly, physical playoff contest where every basket had to be earned. Neither side found any offensive rhythm, with UCU shooting just 28 percent from the field and Victoria not much better at 27 percent. For long stretches, the game resembled a defensive chess match more than an offensive showcase.

UCU looked the steadier side early, taking a 16-13 first-quarter lead before carrying a narrow 28-26 advantage into halftime. Jimmy Otim was already doing what he has done so often for the Canons—creating offense out of almost nothing. Whether attacking the basket or drawing contact, he continually gave UCU life while the rest of the offense struggled to find any consistency.

But playoff games are rarely won in the first half.

Victoria emerged from the break with greater defensive intensity, limiting UCU to just eight points in the third quarter. The Canons suddenly looked stagnant offensively, managing only four made field goals in the period as the Crocs quietly took control with a 15-8 quarter.

That third quarter proved to be the game’s first decisive turning point.

Holding a 41-36 lead entering the fourth, Victoria never allowed UCU back in front. Every time Otim threatened to spark a comeback, someone in the Victoria blue had an answer.

More often than not, that someone was Cyrus Wobusobozi.

Coming off the bench, the pointguard completely changed Victoria’s offensive complexion. He knocked down five three-pointers on his way to a team-high 18 points while adding six assists, providing the shot-making the Crocs desperately needed in a game where points were at a premium. More importantly, his baskets came at timely moments, preventing UCU from building any momentum.

Yet Victoria’s victory was bigger than Wobusobozi’s shooting.

It was a team performance.

Erick Komagum quietly imposed himself inside with 12 points and 11 rebounds, repeatedly extending possessions and protecting the paint. Chuol Nyout matched him with a 10-point, 11-rebound double-double, while Mark Ngobi battled through an inefficient shooting night to contribute 11 important points and four assists. Cedric Alema scored only four points but filled the stat sheet with seven assists, nine rebounds and disruptive defense.

That balance was the difference.

While Otim finished with a game-high 24 points—nearly half of UCU’s total offense—the Canons could not find a reliable second scorer. Zachariah Ekirapa managed seven points, Lihumi Jimmy added five points and nine rebounds, but no other UCU player reached double figures.

In contrast, Victoria had four players scoring at least ten points and received 32 points from their bench compared to UCU’s 15.

That collective effort was reflected everywhere in the numbers. The Crocs shared the ball better, finishing with 18 assists to UCU’s nine. They committed only 12 turnovers while forcing 21 from the Canons and converted those extra possessions into a decisive advantage despite shooting poorly themselves. They also generated 16 second-chance points through relentless work on the offensive glass.

For UCU, the concern isn’t that Jimmy Otim wasn’t good enough.

He was excellent.

His 24 points came against a second half defense designed to stall him, but asking one player to shoulder nearly half the scoring load is rarely sustainable in a playoff series. Unless someone else consistently joins the scoring party, the Canons risk becoming far too predictable. Jimmy was helped off the court with an apparent sprain halfway the fourth quarter. UCU will be hoping that their talisman will be in shape and ready come game two.

Victoria, meanwhile, will leave Game One encouraged not because they shot well—they certainly did not—but because they showed they can win ugly. The Crocs defended with purpose, trusted one another, and found contributions from across the roster when it mattered most.

In the playoffs, those are often the qualities that travel furthest.

And after drawing first blood, the Crocs now need just one more victory to book their place in the National Basketball League semifinals.

Game 2 | Sunday 12th July 2026 | 6PM | YMCA Wandegeya.

  ~Basketball256 Editorial.