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AJ Simmonds Breaks Out At Nationals, As NS Eyes Gold

Published by Gilbert Muako on August 4, 2011

Its always exciting when the Nationals come around. Not only do you get a chance to see the best from each province battle it out to claim gold but we get a chance to also welcome new faces onto our radar.

It’s been four wonderful days of basketball at Humber College North Campus and after evaluating the group of talent at hand, one of the biggest surprise players we’ve seen thus far is Nova Scotia’s AJ Simmonds and he has been impressive in every sense.

Simmonds has been big time for his Nova Scotia team who are now 2-0. The 6-foot-2, 165lb combo guard is fluid, makes plays off the dribble while staying under control, scores in the open floor, gets to the free throw line often with his aggressive penetration game and showed the ability to consistently knock down shots.

At his size and the touch for scoring the ball and toughness as player, Simmonds fits the mold of Nova Scotia guards that I’ve seen in recent years. To him it’s just the norm where he comes from.

“Basically it’s just everyone playing against each other. Nova Scotia is small, and not as big as other provinces, we’ve been playing together since we were young, there are not a lot of bigs, mainly guards but they play hard.”

Simmonds is coming off a huge win scoring 21 points, 6 rebounds and 2 assists to lead Nova Scotia to a 80-75 “personal” victory over last year’s national Quebec. This was the game they’ve been waiting for the whole tournament to get sweet revenge on a team that beat them at the buzzer in the 2009 championship game.

“We were all pretty hyped going into the game, we knew it was big, probably our biggest game. When my first shot went in that’s when i started feeling it” he said

“Every year I’ve played for team Nova Scotia we’ve never beaten Quebec and especially in the summer games and in the finals [last year] when they hit that last shot to beat us in the finals… so all the older players have been texting us telling us we gotta get it back for them. So its a very big win for us we knew we had to beat them.”

Nova Scotia is looking like one of the stronger teams thus far in the tournament. Though they lack the size, they showed toughness and desire to out work any body in their way, aiming to finish a spot higher than they did two summers ago.

“We just want go play hard, we know can compete at this level and we don’t want take anyone lightly. Play pressure defense that’s big for us because we’re smaller so it’s important for us to play harder than everyone else. We can’t be intimidated by others, we gotta look at every team the same and just keep playing the way we’ve been playing”

Talking to Simmonds after the win it was shocking to find out how under- recruited he was, naming Acadia as the only school currently recruiting him. He will continue to use the nationals as a proving ground. Simmonds is guaranteed to gather much attention from schools going forward.

Nova Scotia continues their road to gold tonight against Newfoundland at 8:15pm.

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