Winnipeg Acceleration Performance arrives at the Bucharest Challenger as a finalist of the national tour 3×3 Canada Quest and after having secured a World Tour showing in Saskatoon (12th place, in a contest won by Ljubljana). However, the team is slightly different from Saskatoon, with Darcy Coss (34) and Graham Bodnar (36) joining Wyatt Anders and O’Neal Gordon instead of Jelane Pryce and Matthew Koenig (an entertaining player to watch, enrolled in a special training program to improve detention and dunking skills).
Interestingly enough, Bodnar and Coss were Wyatt Anders’s opponents in Winnipeg’s home tournament final, in the Longshot squad. Winnipeg won the final.
Key player: Wyatt Anders
A top 10 3×3 player in Canada, Wyatt Anders is a 2,02 m forward who, already at 26, started a teaching career as a basketball coach. Inspired by the way an assisting coach made a huge difference in his development, separately helping the boy who never got on the team start-up to better his game, Wyatt set his goal to do the same for other children and young players. In 2015, while playing for the Canadian University where he studied, Wyatt got the prize for most rebounds in the season.
Wyatt is the youngest member of a highly experienced team, that brings to the field 34, 36 and 37-years-old players. Anders started his 3×3 basketball career back in 2014, becoming a key player to one of three traditional teams representing Canada at the FIBA World Tour level.
Winnipeg returns to Bucharest after last year’s adventure and, alongside Clearwater (USA), is one of the two North American contenders in the Challenger played this weekend in the land-mark University Square.
Previous Raiffeisen Bank Bucharest Challenger participation: 2016
Best result: 5th place – 2016
