Saturday, June 7

APR Vs Petro de Luanda 4pm

APR Basketball Club head coach James Maye Jr., has said that his team is healthy and in good spirits ahead of the Basketball Africa League (BAL) 2025 playoffs in Pretoria, South Africa.

The American tactician was speaking in an interview with Times Sport on Saturday morning, a few hours before their seeding game Vs Angolan giants Petro de Luanda at 4PM.

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The seeding games are meant to decide how the eight teams that qualified for the playoffs will be paired in the quarterfinals. Introduced in 2024, the games don’t eliminate any team, but instead rank the teams based on performance; so that stronger teams are matched up against lower-ranked ones.

"All of the players are healthy. We got a chance to be able to rest after the Nile Conference. We did a lot of extra therapy, a lot of getting on the court and just nurturing our guys to get them back to health,” Maye Jr. said.

Talking about the addition of South Sudanese star forward Nuni Omot, he said the trade is "very important” for the team, as he described him as a guy that can score and also control the team’s pace to avoid "sporadic” tendencies that he showed up during some games in the Nile Conference.

"Sometimes you need to have somebody to help balance that. We think Nuni does that,” he noted.

The Nile Conference, he said, gave them a number of lessons in terms of injury management, how to fight adversity, and being flexible.

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"We learned some things about ourselves and about our players on both ends of the court, and then we have been able to take time to be able to correct it,” he pointed out.

Analysing APR’s game Vs Petro de Luanda, he noted that the Angolan team is very physical, organised, aggressive defensively, have a good coach and good players.

"We have been preparing for that physicality with our bodies, making sure we rested and healed up, but also how to attack the game. They are very aggressive on the basketball, so we have to be able to be strong with the pass, and be able to attack the rim the way we need to,” he said.