No. 4 Piscataway hitting from the arc, playing takeaway defense as they visit No. 8 Colonia in GMC Finals rematch

On paper, it’s a rematch, featuring the two teams that reached last year’s GMC final, with the victorious team having won its second straight.

But looked at another way on paper, it’s not quite.

Colonia is missing several key contributors to that game against Piscataway, with Aidan Derkack now at Spire Academy in Ohio, R.J. Wortman leaving high school early to enroll at Rutgers, where he’ll play football on scholarship, defensive specialist Nick Smith graduated, and Julien Jones and Colin Kroner not suiting up this year.

But Piscataway head coach Bob Turco knows Colonia well. Besides battling last year, they’d do the same prior to that when Turco was at St. Thomas Aquinas; they even met in the 2024 final.

And what does Turco know about Colonia? They still have dudes.

So even if a challenging first four games of the year have left the No. 8 Patriots 2-2, while fourth-ranked Piscataway is 4-0, he knows – and so do we, frankly – that this one is going to be a battle, as it always is.

You can hear Monday night’s game – our final regular season broadcast before the New Year – on Central Jersey Sports Radio, with Mike Pavlichko and Alec Crouthamel on the call. Pregame starts around 5:45 with tip-off set for 6 pm; click here to listen.

For its part, Piscataway is getting incredible point production. They are averaging almost 86 points per game in their first four – wins over McKee/Staten Island Tech (NY), West Orange, St. Thomas Aquinas and Old Bridge – and are averaging more than seven threes per game.

Of course, Turco is a defensive minded coach, believing that the defense fuels the offense. So maybe that’s been it. Because Piscataway has 88 steals and 85 assists through its first four games, more than four times as many steals and more than double the number of assists Colonia has.

While numbers don’t always tell the whole story, they tell a good part of it on the floor. Watch them, and they scrap on defense, deflecting many passes, too. The steals and tips lead to passes up the floor where the Chiefs can get a ton of points in transition.

Click below to hear Piscataway head coach Bob Turco talk with Central Jersey Sports Radio’s Mike Pavlichko: