Punahou's Micah Ma'a goes up for a shot attempt against Farrington during a meeting last December. The Buffanblu won 61-53 in the teams' first meeting of the year in Radford's James Alegre Invitational last Saturday. Tyler Guieb | SL

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Exactly one week after their first meeting, the Punahou and Farrington boys basketball teams will face off in another preseason showdown this Saturday.

The Buffanblu (2-1) and Governors (4-0) will meet at 4 p.m. in the final day of the OIA-ILH Challenge, which got underway Thursday and features four games daily played at Moanalua High School.

The early-season rematch will be the second game played that day, following Mid-Pacific and Leilehua in a 2:30 p.m. game and preceding Iolani and Kalani at 5:30 p.m. The final game of the tournament features Kamehameha and Moanalua at 7 p.m.

Farrington, coming off a runner-up finish in the Division I state tournament last February, had to hang on to beat Punahou, 61-53, in Radford's James Alegre Invitational Saturday.

"In the first quarter we played excellent defense and the score was like 25-4 at one point, but our guys let up on defense at the end and we threw away some bad passes, so we really need to improve on our passing game as far as making good passes," Govs' coach Allan Silva said. "It was a very good game, because Punahou has some shooters and early on we were able to put some pressure on their shooters and luckily they missed. This coming Saturday will be very interesting, because when you lose to a team, they tend to come back motivated."

The Buffanblu were without several key players in the loss, including a trio of seniors in Micah Maa, Kanawai Noa and leading scorer, JB Kam.

"We finally got everybody back to practice — (Wednesday) was the first day with everybody there, because a lot of the guys got injured in the (state championship) football game — so this week we should have everybody and we'll get a chance to see what we have, but I think by the next tournament we'll really see where we stand," Punahou coach Darren Matsuda said.

Maa and Noa were among those resting football-related injuries, while Kam sat out with what was initially feared to be appendicitis, but was most likely a case of stomach flu, Matsuda said.

"They took him to the hospital and he checked out. It was more precautionary," Matsuda said. "He's back and been practicing the past couple of days."

Matsuda said the team has been working on areas where it struggled Saturday.

"A lot of the guys we played in that game were brand new and where you saw the inexperience was the defensive side," Matsuda said. "We gave up a lot of layups, so we worked a lot on help defense, primary and secondary help — especially on the press — so hopefully when we play them again this Saturday we will see improvement."

Silva said the Govs have been working on a lot of the same things in practices this week.

"I'm pretty happy with them right now, but not on defense. We still need to improve on defense and we need to collectively work on it together, as a team," said Silva, who also has his share of football players on the team. "Our football guys are not in basketball shape yet and we run a lot, so we've got to get into shape, but we're still putting in different defensive sets and we still have three more tournaments to really put it together."

Silva expects a tough fight from the Puns, who missed out on the D1 state tournament last year, despite being ranked atop the ScoringLive/OC16 Power Rankings for most of the year.

"I've told our guys that the last game is done and we can't rest on our laurels, because they will be stronger this time, they're going to give a little extra eftort and you'll see the difference Saturday," Silva said of the Buffanblu. "Punahou is an excellent team and it's great for us in the preseason to be playing this kind of caliber of team."

The game will be streamed live on ScoringLive.com.