The home team zoomed to a 23-10 lead to end the game’s first 10 minutes and that came about thanks to his conscious effort to facilitate for his teammates as he dished 5 of his dame in the opening period alone.<\/p>\n
Assist no. 5 even turned into a highlight-worthy play as it led to a three-point play conversion by Keisei Tominaga, which also pushed their lead to 20-8 with 1:14 to go and thus set the tone for the one-sided affair.<\/p>\n
Hawkinson would also be responsible in pushing the margin to 30 points, 65-35, approaching the final minute of the third canto as he manufactured six consecutive points, four of which came from the free throw line.<\/p>\n
Key players<\/p>\n
But it wasn’t all Hawkinson for Team Japan as the others made their mark as well in the triumph. Newly named captain Yuta Watanabe top-scored for the squad with 20 points alongside 5 rebounds and 5 assists.<\/p>\n
Yudai Baba came through with 14 points on 6-of-9 shooting from the floor, while Keisei Tominaga fired 13 points off the bench – spiked by a pair of three-pointers – and also collected 5 rebounds and 2 assists.<\/p>\n
*This article will be updated shortly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KOBE (Japan) – Joshua Hawkinson showcased his all-around brilliance to help Japan get off to a hot start…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-314286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-basketball","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}