Tony Dennison had it set in his mind that the Dyckman championship game was Thursday night. So after dominating Team 914 for a half Thursday, the Takes No Prisoners guard was disappointed when the game was called after a small fight led to masses of people evacuating the park seemingly for no reason.
“I didn’t even feel like playing today,” Dennison said Friday night. “My momentum was yesterday, today was just really off.”
If he was off, it certainly didn’t look like it. The Queens native and Bryant HS grad made two huge baskets on fearless drives to the hoop and finished with 39 points to lead TNP to a 67-57 win against Team 914 in Washington Heights. It was Takes No Prisoners’ fourth victory at Dyckman and first since 2007.
As it turned out, the postponement actually suited Dennison well.
“It was good that I kind of got a break, because my legs were giving out yesterday,” said the 6-foot-3 guard who recently graduated from Division II Barry University in Florida. “I’m glad that game got put on hold and we continued it today because I got a little rest.”
There was no resting for 914 when Dennison was on the court. After the team from Westchester cut TNP’s lead to 47-45 on a 3-pointer by Iona’s Scott Machado with 4:32 left, Dennison came down and scored the next two baskets, swooping to the hoop and finishing impressively in traffic. Such jaunts to the rim have earned the former Hofstra guard the nickname “The Boxcutter.”
“I think if we didn’t get a stop and I didn’t penetrate to the basket and make a play, the momentum would have switched to the other side,” Dennison said of that juncture of the game. “It was a big, key possession for me.”
No one else was in double figures for the game, but that’s par for the course when it comes to Takes No Prisoners, a group of no-nonsense, hard-nosed basketball players. One observer hoping for more action opined during the game, “I hate watching TNP play. They’re mad fundamental.” Jeff Dog, one of the team’s coaches, smiled when told that afterward.
“The type of game people are gonna see when they come to watch us is like the Knicks versus the Heat back in the ’90s,” he said. “We don’t have a superstar really. We just have a bunch of guys who play together and just fight and bite.”
Guys like Fabian (Foots) Pinnock and Sherrod (S-Class) Brown have been around for all four of TNP’s titles, the first coming in 2003. The squad has developed a nickname aside from its nickname.
“They call us dinosaurs,” Pinnock said. “We’re old and all of that. But we just keep winning.”
This summer, though, the Queens-based team had to deal with the absence of former two-time NCAA scoring leader Charles Jones, streetball phenom Quinton (T2) Hosely and former Eastern Kentucky star Jason (J-High) McLeish. In stepped guys like Kiwan (Avatar) Smith and Dennison, who was in his first full-time summer with the team due to college responsibilities.
“He’s been waiting for his chance,” Dog said of Dennison. “Tone has been on our team since he was 16 or 17, but he never got the chance to play because we had guys like J-High and Charles Jones. But he stayed around and played that bench. He stayed in the game, he stayed focused and determined. This year, I told him, ‘This is your time to shine. This is your team now. You have to do what you need to do to get us over the top.’ As you see clearly, he did exactly what he had to go. He got the MVP and I’m proud of him.”
Not bad for a guy who didn’t even feel like playing Friday night.