Given their dominance of The Basketball League opponents this year, the Sudbury Five had yet to enter one of their interlocking games feeling that they had something to prove – until Sunday.

A 98-97 loss against the Jamestown Jackals Saturday night in Sudbury was admittedly due in part to the visitors hitting the court with a certain level of intensity that they managed to maintain pretty much from start to finish.

It was also, however, due in part to a Five team that did not necessarily come all that close at all to hitting their “A” game in the opener of a two game weekend set.

Sunday would be a different story altogether.

Up 37-28 after the first quarter of play, the NBLC franchise from northern Ontario outscored the Jackals 46-35 in the second quarter and 44-31 in the third, establishing a new league standard for most points in a game with a 162-139 triumph over Jamestown before a crowd of nearly 2300 enthusiastic local partisans.

“That’s a good basketball team, a hungry team when they get a chance to play us,” acknowledged Five veteran Jeremy Harris. “They came in and punched us first (on Saturday) and never let up.”

“We threw the first punch today.”

Actually, it was closer to a non-stop flurry of jabs and hooks and uppercuts from the native of Greensboro (North Carolina) that most helped to K'O the Jackals - if we are to follow the boxing analogy to its natural conclusion.

Harris opened the contest by scorching the Jackals for 22 points in the first quarter alone, adding another 13 in the second quarter en route to a game-high 40-point effort.

“It was unbelievable,” said coach Logan Stutz, after the game. “I think if you look at the first 14 minutes, I think he had 30 points in 14 minutes. That’s a great response. I think he’s the MVP of the league and I think he came out and showed it – and I think he’s going to do it the rest of the way.”

All in a day’s work for the soft-spoken 26 year-old who thrived as a member of the Buffalo Bulls of the Mid-American Conference during his NCAA career. “It’s just playing the game of basketball,” he offered about his offensive outburst. “My teammates did a good job of getting me the ball in my spot – and that’s really it.”

Harris was hardly alone in drawing the praise of his coach in providing a counter-punch to their first loss in 11 games to TBL opponents the previous night. A.J. Mosby (30), Braylon Rayson (27) and Mark Vital (20) were all lighting it up with regularity in the rematch against Jamestown.

“The guys knew what they had to do,” said Stutz. “We just came out so flat yesterday, no energy. Today, they did it on their own. It was really all on them so it was great to see the response from the guys.”

While the Five did finish the game with no less than 19 three-pointers – Braylon Rayson went 7/9 all on his own – the team did feature a more varied look on the attack early in the contest, something that we are seeing far more often with the 2022-2023 version of this squad than perhaps a few other earlier editions of the Five.

“I think we’re shooting one of the least amount of threes in the league, which is very uncharacteristic for us,” said Stutz. “We’ve been attacking the rim really well lately and they didn’t have a rim protector. We got to the rim and then the mid-range (shots) opened up, the threes opened up.”

“That’s kind of the basketball we’ve been playing lately.”

Although Jeremy Harris did net 15 points from beyond the arc (5/7), he also went 7/10 from the free throw line as well as earning nine assists, many of which came in the second half when Jamestown appeared to be far more focused on just shutting him down.

“We’ve got a lot of talented offensive players so we’ve just got to keep the ball moving and don’t let it stick – that’s it,” said Harris.

Dante Law countered with 28 points to lead the way for the Jackals, with Calvin Cheek (23), Tafari Beckford (19) and Roderick Finley (17) also helping their points per game stats on a crew that finished with seven players in double digits.

Still, Logan Stutz was not about to lose a whole lot of sleep over the 139 points his team surrendered.

“In the fourth quarter, they hit a lot of shots,” he said. “And I don’t want to say that we checked out, but we were fine with just playing back and forth – and shots were going in both ways. It kind of got a little out of hand, but that’s alright. When you get up that many points, it kind of gets like that.”