While a full-time coach, leading the Northern New Mexico women’s basketball team, 37-year-old former NBA player J.R. Giddens isn’t calling it quits just yet on his playing career.
For the second year, he found a spot in the Basketball Tournament, a 64-team single elimination tournament with a $1 million prize for the winning team. Giddens rejoined The Enchantment, a team of former University of New Mexico players. (Many of the teams consist of alumni of various college programs.)
Hosting a regional, Enchantment was given a No. 4 seed, and squared off for a version of the “Rio Grande Rivalry,” also known as the “Battle of I-25” against a new team in The Panamaniacs, made up of New Mexico State University alumni. And Enchantment got the win, 89-82, in the first round of the Tournament on Monday in The Pit in Albuquerque.
Billy Keys, the former assistant men’s basketball coach at Northern New Mexico College and longtime friend of Giddens, was also an assistant coach for the Panamaniacs.
The listed attendance was just 3,532, but it felt like more to anyone inside the gym.
“The entire game, it felt like 10 or 12,000 (fans),” said The Enchantment’s Joe Furstinger.
Giddens finished the game with eight points — all in the second quarter — on 2-of-6 shooting, and added three rebounds and four assists. He also took a technical foul after giving an extra shove in the closing seconds of the first half.
“J.R. is unique, at his age he’s still playing at a pretty high level,” said Enchantment coach Kenny Thomas, a UNM alum with a longtime NBA career. “He’s taken pride in working out and getting ready for this.”
Giddens started the game at the wing, and had an assist at the team’s first possession.
Enchantment led 22-16 after one (nine-minute) quarter, and made a big run in the second quarter, at one point hitting five straight shots and were 5-of-6 on 3-pointers in the quarter, and a 17-0 run made it a 23-point lead.
Last year, the Enchantment led by 23 in their first-round game before watching the lead slip away in a one-point loss. This time, Panamaniacs fought back to within three points in the fourth quarter before Enchantment managed to close the door.
The Tournament utilizes the “Elam ending” to every game. At the first stoppage after five minutes of play in the fourth quarter, a “target score” is set to eight more than the current leading team’s total. The clock is turned off and the first team to hit the target score is the winner. With Enchantment leading 80-73 at that mark, the score was set to 88.
Joe Furstinger, a 2014-2018 UNM player, scored the team’s last eight points while coming off the bench. The team’s leading scorer was Scott Bamforth, a Del Norte graduate and Weber State alum, the only player on the team not to play at UNM. Bamforth could be caught giving UNM Lobo hand signs after making a basket, something he said he had always wanted to do growing up.
Thomas used a smaller lineup with bench players for much of the fourth quarter, including the closing minutes, as Giddens watched from the sideline.
The Enchantment faced top-seeded Team HEATFIRE — who snuck by the No. 8 seed 84-75 — in the second round on Tuesday after press deadline.