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 (Photo by Bill Allen/NJ SportAction) caption:
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The Cafe Comes Together as a Unit; On Verge of 2nd Straight Hoops Title
By Bill Alden
In the early stages of the Princeton Recreation Department men's summer league 2004 season, defending champion The Cafe seemed out of sync.
With the team having trouble putting a set lineup on the court night in, night out and the players cocky from their success last summer, The Cafe didn't have the look of a championship team.
The Cafe got a major wake-up call in mid-July when it fell 67-62 to Merrill Lynch in double overtime. Since that setback, the team has reeled off seven straight wins and made it back to the league championship series.
Win number seven in that streak came last Monday at the Community Park courts when The Cafe, the tourney's No. 2 seed, whipped eight-seeded Upper Makefield 53-41 to take a 1-0 lead in the best-of-three championship series.
In the view of Cafe guard and former Princeton High star Shahid Abdul-Karim, the team's early inconsistency came down to selfishness.
"We were playing too much one-on-one," said Abdul-Karim in reflecting on the club's early season play. "We saw after we lost to a team like Merrill Lynch that plays as a team, that we couldn't get away with playing individual ball. After that game, we've just been playing together. We're coming together and playing as one."
In the game against Upper Makefield, The Cafe took a little while to get clicking. Trailing by 37-32 early in the second half, the Cafe went on a 23-4 run to snuff out the challenge from upstart Upper Makefield.
Abdul-Karim helped spark the rally, hitting some key jumpers and ending the night with 14 points as The Cafe improved to 11-2. Marshawn Ferguson led The Cafe with 16 points while Rasheem Harris chipped in 13 and Asmar Fortney added 10. Upper Makefield, now 6-8, was paced by Jeff Stewart with 10 points while Fred Pope and Hunter Bretschneider scored 8 apiece.
Abdul-Karim, who played college ball at Mercer County Community College and then Springfield College, maintained that The Cafe's 2003 playoff run gave it an edge over Upper Makefield, the lowest seed to make it to a championship series in the annals of the Rec Department summer league.
"We've got a little playoff experience on them," added Abdul-Karim, whose club has the chance to win the title this Wednesday when it plays Game Two of the series with a third game to be played, if necessary, on Friday.
"We're coming to repeat and nobody is going to take that away from us. We've got to come here and take care of business."
In its second half run, The Cafe emphatically took care of business. "We said to ourselves that one-on-one they can't beat us," said Abdul-Karim, reflecting on the team's late surge.
"We knew that if we played defense the way we can, there is no one on that team that can get by anybody on our team. In the second half, we didn't worry about anything. We just played our game and everything fell into place."
If The Cafe can keep clicking like it did Monday night, another championship trophy could be falling into its grasp.
