For some reason I jumped ahead an hour and instead of leaving at 12:40, I left at 11:40. I had spent the morning playing the Europa Universalis 3 demo through again, so it was a nice time to sit and do the tournament summary wrap-up that I had planned on doing. The HP team got there very early. I saw one of the players I knew as I was walking in and I asked how they’d done in the third game of the tourney. He said, “We lost, but we’ve gotten a lot better since then. Just wait.” I smiled. What a great attitude to have. It’s been a week since you got killed 41-16 and that’s your attitude. That’s awesome. Of course I was confident that we were going to beat HP.
The coach of the team and I had a nice talk. Poor guy is clearly pretty depressed and so I was quite complementary saying how I hope they’re in the other bracket from us, which I guess isn’t actually true. As far as likely #4 seeds go I think they’d be the team I would like to see the most, though granted I haven’t see LS yet and they currently have an outside shot at the #4 (though this outside shot does go down when you consider the fact that they have two games against us and 1 against MP1). Anyway he clearly appreciated the kind words I sent his way, though you could tell he wasn’t too happy about the knowledge that we had players this time that we didn’t have last time. I did find out that the kid who I noticed sitting by himself was a kid who missed a last second shot the game before, who then refused to play in the second game. This led to a nice talk about how there’s as much learning at this age to be done mentally as there is physically. All in all it was a very pleasant talk.
The previous game ended and I see that the officiating team for the game will be the woman ref I really like and the ref from the WM game who really likes us but is a bit a jerk. We then had 15 minutes to warm-up, which really felt like too long. Luke’s brother had a game in the next gym over and so I actually invited him to shoot around with us, until we started doing lay-up lines. In our pre-game talk I introduced what will be a motif for us the rest of the season: the bull’s-eye. I explained how every team is going to have us circled on their calendars because we’re the #1 team in the league. Noah went “Cool we’re circled” which I found amusing. Tom was on a ski trip this weekend so unfortunately we only had 9 players. I told them that HP’s big problem is that they missed a lot of shots so I was going to go with a good rebounding team of David, Gordie, Scott, Dante, Lucas. I then planned at between 4 and 3:30 minutes to sub in the other 4 players leaving Lucas in there.
We got off to a slow start. They were playing a zone and while we were getting some good lucks we weren’t making any of our shots. The group I had in there did exactly what I had asked of them, really rebounding well. Even when I inserted our subs the game remained close, with the score at the end of the first quarter 4-4.
At the start of the second quarter I explained that I wanted to use a full court man-to-man and that whoever was guarding the inbounder was to try and trap the person to whom it was inbounded. This did not work, because only a couple of the players actually guarded their man full court, so I called a 30 second time-out. When we got back on the court we did a much better job of executing our trap and they were forced to call 2 time-outs in order to attempt to cope with our press. We got up by as much as 9, but entered half only up by 6 or 7.
At half we were relaxed and a little unfocused. I remained upbeat. I was uninspiring. We were playing like the better team and I was confident that we’d turned the corner at half and would put them away in the third.
HP came charged up out of their half time and made a real game of it. We were never up by less than 5, but for a while it seemed like it could be anyone’s game. However, we went on a nice little run to end the quarter and went back up 9, 21-12. I was, to be honest, disappointed with how we were playing. We didn’t have any passion this game, we were just going through the motions. I explained that we needed to put this team away. We were up by 9, a margin we’d managed to come back from (not mentioning that we’d never done it in the 4th quarter) and we needed to cement the game against a team that wasn’t as good as us. And the team responded. We went on a 6-0 run, at which point I called a time-out PURELY to congratulate them on really doing a nice job of finishing. I backed them off a little on D, but I didn’t give them any instructions about offense. We ended up scoring 19 points that quarter and won the game 39-16. I really should have slowed us down some on offense, but the game had “felt” close so it wasn’t as bad of sportsmanship to win like we did. Plus it had the positive effect of letting Noah and Gordie, in particular, have time on the court when we were running the ball As we shook hands, the HP coach said, “Hey it was close for 3 quarters” and I smiled, graciously, though I have to admit that secretly I was happy inside at how we’d closed them out.
Brian: He was the star of our 4th quarter. He was driving and making, driving and dishing, and playing an all around great game. He whined at half about having to play PG, but, as I will tell him tomorrow, we both wanted him to get more touches and by playing PG he got those touches. He did some showboating at one point for which he received a reprimand, though I didn’t take him out. It was a warning and hopefully it won’t happen again. He was so happy with how we was playing that my gentle reprimand didn’t even set him off, which was good. If it happens again, I think I’ll do the pull him for a moment to remind him and let him go right back in maneuver.
Now granted this was easier with only 9 players, but I was really pleased that the fewest minutes anyone played in the game was nearly 13 minutes (or half the game) and that the median time played was 15 minutes (by David). Basically everyone played this game just about equally, which made me glad. Except for our two MP games, this will continue to be a big goal of mine going forward.
Dante: They moved their post players around more than most of the teams we played so he was out on the perimeter a fair amount. You could tell he wasn’t really comfortable there. Dante did a real nice job of playing full court man to man, even getting a legitimate steal off of his charge at one point, which was nice to see.
David: When our shots started not to fall, David put it on himself to make things happen. HP played a tight zone so he started settling for outside shots. The first time I let it go, the second time I pulled him. My parents knew that he had been pulled for taking bad shots, as did the players on the bench. I was happy to issue the reminder to the team that I treat people fairly (though not necessarily equally). More problematically was the fact that we went on our 19-4 fourth quarter run without David, as he sat for the whole quarter. Now this should have been great news. And it is great news. The problem is that I think that we’ve all become too David centric on offense. I really I tried to combat this some by putting him in at post, but I’m not sure this was the solution to the problem. I am very wary about discussing the problem directly with either David or the team, as I think doing either could have some damaging effects. It is a bit of a dilemma for me.
Gordie: Gordie got the start and did pretty well this game. He’s doing a lot better at avoiding getting trapped. I hope that this keeps up. Gordie has, remarkably, found the low post as a place to get the ball and found several good shots from just outside there this game, and scored a couple of baskets. It should be noted that every player on our team scored at least one basket this game which was a very nice thing to have had happened.
Jack M: Didn’t quite reach the level of performance as he had in the tourney, but played another nice game offensively and defensively.
Jack P: His shooting makes me so sad. He shot 1 for 11 today. I think we might be reaching the point where I need to say something. Now he did some amazing moves. On one move he went up for a lay-up realized he was going to get stuff and changed it into a hook-shot. There were a couple of other moves that were amazing. Of course he missed all of the accompanying shots. The one shot he made was a funny play where HP had just switched back to man and he drove in and the defense disappeared so he was left all alone in the lane. He sunk an easy 5 footer. I don’t want to tell him not to shoot, but my normal way of telling someone not to shoot, “better shot selection”, doesn’t work with him, since most of his shots are shots that taken by themselves should be shot.
Lucas: He looked lost out there today on offense. A couple of passes to him turned into turnovers because he was not expecting the pass. I think it might be a good time to review some post playing with him, as he’s the type of player who needs reminders on a lot of the mental aspects of the game, as he’s not the brightest player on our team.
Noah: While Lucas was looking clueless, Noah did a nice job of not looking clueless. He did a pretty good job of defending against HP’s point guard during the 4th quarter even, which was good to see.
Scott: Scott played some time at wing, which did not make Scott happy. It seems like it was my day to upset the triplets by playing them at positions that they didn’t want to be at. In the long run if Scott has ambitions of playing High School basketball, which I’m guessing he does, then he’ll need to learn how to play guard, as that’s what he’d be on that team. Some early exposure now seems like a long term investment and so I’m going to present the issue to him that way. Of course because I assign him to play wing on offense, he has to come up with 14 rebounds, nearly all defensive. Way to stick it to me.
This was clearly a let down game. It happens to be a let down game we won by 23, but still a let down game. One thing of note that has not happened, and which I’m happy about looking forward; while eating lunch last week with the team the triplet’s step-mother stated how her husband was going to get Super Bowl tickets if the Bears won. The Bears won, of course. All week long I’ve been waiting for the phone call/e-mail telling me that they were going to miss our two games next weekend. So far that hasn’t happened. I don’t think it’ll be a problem against either of the teams, but I don’t know anything about Lincolnshire, other than the fact that they seem very good at winning games against inferior teams by large margins, and losing games against teams that are better. In other words, if left unchecked they can put up a lot of points, so it would be nice to have some of our better defenders, in the triplets, around for the game to make it an easy game. But if it’s not to be I remain optimistic that we could still beat them.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Tourney Wrap-up
After the game and into Monday’s practice the big question was when did I know that they would be a good team and did I really think that we’d win the tournament the whole time. I said that except for the first few minutes of the JCC game, when it looked like we were just too tired to play any more, I really believed that we had an excellent shot at winning the tournament. I also told how I didn’t know how good of a team we’d be until after our first game, when I knew we had a very good team.
For Monday’s practice I called only a half practice. I anted us to have a little time to debrief, I wanted to do our continuous motion, and I wanted a chance to talk to each of the players individually, about goals/thoughts/etc for the end of the season. I was a fun practice where everyone was still in a good mood after the heroics of the weekend.
Here’s a look at some notes that didn’t make it into the tourney reports as well as a few things that came out of my talks on Monday with the players.
Brian – The only big downside to the whole tourney was the conflict between Brian and David. The two went at each other several times and it became a problem. When I talked to each of them on Monday I really talked about how I just would not tolerate players not getting along with each other on the court and so they needed to stop arguing with each other. Brian asked me during our chat if “I can and should shoot more”. It was a great question. Brian didn’t put big numbers during the tourney. Mainly this was because he didn’t get the ball a whole lot. In our first game against the JCC he popped a 3 pointer, just because he could. When I pulled him, he got very mad and went into his defeatist mode. Despite the disrespect he’d shown, I decided the best way to handle the situation was to just ignore him and I let him start the second half. The two of us didn’t have a conflict again the rest of the weekend. He also played good defense during the tourney, not succumbing to his desire to leave his man alone to make the steal, and set a couple of picks, basically the only player on the team to do so, for which I gave him complements. So in response to his question I said that I would have liked to have seen him get the ball more during the tourney. He’s a good shooter so I don’t mind him shooting smart shots. He really seemed to appreciate that response, which was good.
Dante – Dante, not having played any soccer this weekend, did do better than normal during the tourney. He’s still a little too erratic for my tastes, as I can’t figure out what will cause him to have a good game or not. He’s not quite the inside presence that his size would suggest. However, he did seem to find his “spot” to shoot from so that part was good. We’ll see if he can find shots from there again.
David – The big watchword this weekend was “frustration”. Besides the conflict with Brian, just having him be calm and collected on the court is important. Of course the two times we needed him to be cool, with the last second shots, he was as collected as Jordan. EVERYONE seemed to know him because he’s just that gifted of an athlete. I was typing this before our HP game today and a parent from the HP B team, which we hadn’t played with David, who remarked how good #20 is. As long as David doesn’t try to do too much we’ll be in good shape. I let David know that I plan on having him play the post more during the second half of the season. By playing him in the post it’ll open more time up at the 1, 2, and 3 positions, which is good for the kids who can only play those spots.
Gordie – Gordie is a good kid and has a speech impediment that, combined with his small stature, makes him very cute. He loves the game of basketball, that much is clear. That said he just drove me nuts. When he wasn’t asking to go in, he was giving his “look at me I’m an angel” face when it was clear I was doing a sub. Part of the reason that this was likely driving me nuts is that I knew he wanted to play and was only giving him close to, and actually a bit under, the 10 minutes of playing time I wanted to get my players as a minimum. This guilt was even more pronounced with Noah. Now, to his credit, he is very coachable and does most of the things I ask him to do. During our talk it was clear that he wanted to play point guard. I mentioned how he gets the chance to play point in his house league games, but that turns out not to be true. So basically he’s not good enough to play point on a house league team, how in the world does he think he’s good enough to play point on a travel team? He was, I believe, the only player not to get a start during the tourney. I told him he’d get a few starts and some opportunities to play point. He doesn’t have the skill set to be a good point right now, so it’ll most likely be in games against the NFs that I give him his shot at point. In a bit of statistical humor, he was our leading rebounder in the WM game, since he got the outside rebounds, where all the inside rebounds were vacuumed up by their center.
Jack M – Jack stepped it up to a new level during the tourney. His defense was fantastic. He did a great job of moving the ball around and of penetrating. Not to mention his clutch free throws. When its needed it seems like he can take up his game a notch, whether it was because the triplets weren’t there for the first game of the season (his best game before this tourney) or in this tourney against tougher competition. I was most proud of how he made progress on being confident in the team. I think he finally believes it’s a good team and that should help him going forward in being a positive contributor.
Jack P – This kid needs to take 500 shots a day. He’s our most gifted athlete on the court next to David. He can dribble through a traffic jam if needed and he guarded Luke nearly as well as David had. But his shooting percentage kills me. He’s got a pretty looking shot, which means there has to be something mechanically wrong with his shot, and shot mechanics happens to be a part where I need to be a stronger coach with, so it’s a bad fit. He’s a great complement to David, and racked up the most minutes, deservedly, in the championship game. I just wished he could make more of his shots.
Lucas – He had a great game against WM, but other than that I don’t really recall much of what he did, which means he mostly did what he was supposed to. I think he really struggled guarding some of the better inside men, which isn’t surprising that he’s still not entirely comfortable in that role.
Noah – Noah just looks lost a lot of the time out there. His sense of where he needs to be on the court, both on offense and on defense just isn’t up to snuff compared with the rest of the team. He’s another good kid, and unlike Gordie he doesn’t drive me NUTS with whether or not he’s going to get to play, but he had the lowest number of minutes in the tourney of anyone on our team. Fortunately, I think he’s the kind of kid who doesn’t mind sitting on the bench as much. He loves sitting next to me (I sit in the middle of the kids rather than at the end) and I think he enjoys hearing me talk about the game.
Scott – He has many of the best qualities of his two brothers. When we were talking I told him how if he saw his brothers getting frustrated he might be able to, where I cannot, to get him to calm. I told him if he ever felt uncomfortable saying something, that he shouldn’t, but that he might be able to say chill, where it would be meaningless coming from me.
Tom – The mystery that is Tom continues. I don’t think Tom is having as good of a time as the other kids, which is a shame. I don’t know if the problem is with me, or himself, or what. I’m going to try and give him some time at point and see if he does better there, which I think is a definite possibility. I really like Tom and I wish I could know what I could do to make him succeed and seem like he’s having more fun.
Me – Tom’s mom cracked me up. She and I were talking after the championship game. And she said to me, “Did you know you were entering them in the A tourney?” I mean what did she think it came as complete surprise to me? Perhaps this was the adult version of “Did you know they we were this good?” It was very gratifying to receive so many complements on what a well coached team they were. Of course when you’re winning there are always complements to be had. The complement I appreciated most was a comment from Lucas’s father. He sent me a congratulatory e-mail and referenced how much he liked one particular thing. David had made an awful pass in the 4th quarter of the championship game. He’d made another not so good pass a little earlier. He was really upset with himself and I told him to smile. Normally moments like that are done away from the parents, so they don’t get to hear it, but it was nice that someone heard it and though to say something about it. I think I did a good job of keeping the team on an even keel. While I talk about in baseball how Steve is the better rah-rah guy, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of getting them going when they needed it.
Refs – The officiating overall at this tournament was very good. Except for the one guy I talked about during the WM game, there weren’t any disputes or problems. There was a woman ref who reffed both of our JCC games and our game against Karzen. She was excellent. She always had a smile on her face and would naturally give an explanation if an explanation was needed to the players. She was fabulous and by far the best ref I’d seen at this level of play.
After the tournament I decided to go out and celebrate by having dinner at my favorite steak place. My parents came along as well and we had wonderful dinner. However, I was not the only winning coach in the restaurant that day. Lovie Smith was there as well and my family had finished dinner and desert just as the Colts/Pats game was ending so I got to watch the end of that game with Lovie standing about six feet away. It was a really neat experience.
For Monday’s practice I called only a half practice. I anted us to have a little time to debrief, I wanted to do our continuous motion, and I wanted a chance to talk to each of the players individually, about goals/thoughts/etc for the end of the season. I was a fun practice where everyone was still in a good mood after the heroics of the weekend.
Here’s a look at some notes that didn’t make it into the tourney reports as well as a few things that came out of my talks on Monday with the players.
Brian – The only big downside to the whole tourney was the conflict between Brian and David. The two went at each other several times and it became a problem. When I talked to each of them on Monday I really talked about how I just would not tolerate players not getting along with each other on the court and so they needed to stop arguing with each other. Brian asked me during our chat if “I can and should shoot more”. It was a great question. Brian didn’t put big numbers during the tourney. Mainly this was because he didn’t get the ball a whole lot. In our first game against the JCC he popped a 3 pointer, just because he could. When I pulled him, he got very mad and went into his defeatist mode. Despite the disrespect he’d shown, I decided the best way to handle the situation was to just ignore him and I let him start the second half. The two of us didn’t have a conflict again the rest of the weekend. He also played good defense during the tourney, not succumbing to his desire to leave his man alone to make the steal, and set a couple of picks, basically the only player on the team to do so, for which I gave him complements. So in response to his question I said that I would have liked to have seen him get the ball more during the tourney. He’s a good shooter so I don’t mind him shooting smart shots. He really seemed to appreciate that response, which was good.
Dante – Dante, not having played any soccer this weekend, did do better than normal during the tourney. He’s still a little too erratic for my tastes, as I can’t figure out what will cause him to have a good game or not. He’s not quite the inside presence that his size would suggest. However, he did seem to find his “spot” to shoot from so that part was good. We’ll see if he can find shots from there again.
David – The big watchword this weekend was “frustration”. Besides the conflict with Brian, just having him be calm and collected on the court is important. Of course the two times we needed him to be cool, with the last second shots, he was as collected as Jordan. EVERYONE seemed to know him because he’s just that gifted of an athlete. I was typing this before our HP game today and a parent from the HP B team, which we hadn’t played with David, who remarked how good #20 is. As long as David doesn’t try to do too much we’ll be in good shape. I let David know that I plan on having him play the post more during the second half of the season. By playing him in the post it’ll open more time up at the 1, 2, and 3 positions, which is good for the kids who can only play those spots.
Gordie – Gordie is a good kid and has a speech impediment that, combined with his small stature, makes him very cute. He loves the game of basketball, that much is clear. That said he just drove me nuts. When he wasn’t asking to go in, he was giving his “look at me I’m an angel” face when it was clear I was doing a sub. Part of the reason that this was likely driving me nuts is that I knew he wanted to play and was only giving him close to, and actually a bit under, the 10 minutes of playing time I wanted to get my players as a minimum. This guilt was even more pronounced with Noah. Now, to his credit, he is very coachable and does most of the things I ask him to do. During our talk it was clear that he wanted to play point guard. I mentioned how he gets the chance to play point in his house league games, but that turns out not to be true. So basically he’s not good enough to play point on a house league team, how in the world does he think he’s good enough to play point on a travel team? He was, I believe, the only player not to get a start during the tourney. I told him he’d get a few starts and some opportunities to play point. He doesn’t have the skill set to be a good point right now, so it’ll most likely be in games against the NFs that I give him his shot at point. In a bit of statistical humor, he was our leading rebounder in the WM game, since he got the outside rebounds, where all the inside rebounds were vacuumed up by their center.
Jack M – Jack stepped it up to a new level during the tourney. His defense was fantastic. He did a great job of moving the ball around and of penetrating. Not to mention his clutch free throws. When its needed it seems like he can take up his game a notch, whether it was because the triplets weren’t there for the first game of the season (his best game before this tourney) or in this tourney against tougher competition. I was most proud of how he made progress on being confident in the team. I think he finally believes it’s a good team and that should help him going forward in being a positive contributor.
Jack P – This kid needs to take 500 shots a day. He’s our most gifted athlete on the court next to David. He can dribble through a traffic jam if needed and he guarded Luke nearly as well as David had. But his shooting percentage kills me. He’s got a pretty looking shot, which means there has to be something mechanically wrong with his shot, and shot mechanics happens to be a part where I need to be a stronger coach with, so it’s a bad fit. He’s a great complement to David, and racked up the most minutes, deservedly, in the championship game. I just wished he could make more of his shots.
Lucas – He had a great game against WM, but other than that I don’t really recall much of what he did, which means he mostly did what he was supposed to. I think he really struggled guarding some of the better inside men, which isn’t surprising that he’s still not entirely comfortable in that role.
Noah – Noah just looks lost a lot of the time out there. His sense of where he needs to be on the court, both on offense and on defense just isn’t up to snuff compared with the rest of the team. He’s another good kid, and unlike Gordie he doesn’t drive me NUTS with whether or not he’s going to get to play, but he had the lowest number of minutes in the tourney of anyone on our team. Fortunately, I think he’s the kind of kid who doesn’t mind sitting on the bench as much. He loves sitting next to me (I sit in the middle of the kids rather than at the end) and I think he enjoys hearing me talk about the game.
Scott – He has many of the best qualities of his two brothers. When we were talking I told him how if he saw his brothers getting frustrated he might be able to, where I cannot, to get him to calm. I told him if he ever felt uncomfortable saying something, that he shouldn’t, but that he might be able to say chill, where it would be meaningless coming from me.
Tom – The mystery that is Tom continues. I don’t think Tom is having as good of a time as the other kids, which is a shame. I don’t know if the problem is with me, or himself, or what. I’m going to try and give him some time at point and see if he does better there, which I think is a definite possibility. I really like Tom and I wish I could know what I could do to make him succeed and seem like he’s having more fun.
Me – Tom’s mom cracked me up. She and I were talking after the championship game. And she said to me, “Did you know you were entering them in the A tourney?” I mean what did she think it came as complete surprise to me? Perhaps this was the adult version of “Did you know they we were this good?” It was very gratifying to receive so many complements on what a well coached team they were. Of course when you’re winning there are always complements to be had. The complement I appreciated most was a comment from Lucas’s father. He sent me a congratulatory e-mail and referenced how much he liked one particular thing. David had made an awful pass in the 4th quarter of the championship game. He’d made another not so good pass a little earlier. He was really upset with himself and I told him to smile. Normally moments like that are done away from the parents, so they don’t get to hear it, but it was nice that someone heard it and though to say something about it. I think I did a good job of keeping the team on an even keel. While I talk about in baseball how Steve is the better rah-rah guy, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of getting them going when they needed it.
Refs – The officiating overall at this tournament was very good. Except for the one guy I talked about during the WM game, there weren’t any disputes or problems. There was a woman ref who reffed both of our JCC games and our game against Karzen. She was excellent. She always had a smile on her face and would naturally give an explanation if an explanation was needed to the players. She was fabulous and by far the best ref I’d seen at this level of play.
After the tournament I decided to go out and celebrate by having dinner at my favorite steak place. My parents came along as well and we had wonderful dinner. However, I was not the only winning coach in the restaurant that day. Lovie Smith was there as well and my family had finished dinner and desert just as the Colts/Pats game was ending so I got to watch the end of that game with Lovie standing about six feet away. It was a really neat experience.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Tourney Report: Championship Game
We had just won a game now a few minutes later we had to be ready to play for the championship. The JCC team had come over and watched at one point. A couple of parents did the same and actively rooted for us. It was clear they wanted their re-match and they were going to have it. As the Karzen game wound down I asked Brian how much time we’d have to warm up. He replied 5 minutes. In reality it was closer to 10, maybe even a bit more.
Since we’d already played two games of basketball, I didn’t bother having us do any sort of special warm-up and instead I just let them shoot. At one point I had to chase away Luke’s brother who had the audacity to shoot around with us. After it became clear we were going to have more than 5 minutes, I let them shoot around for a minute or two more than sat them down. My big focus for this game was on our help defense doing a good job of picking Luke up. We knew we were going to force him to our left, so defenders on that side had to be ready to step in for the double team if he got close to the basket.
JCC got off to a quick start. At that point I believed the game could easily turn into a blow-out. We were tired. I knew that they’d be playing their best ball and they were. Most of their points came-off of a couple plays. One was a clear-out for Luke. Now the good thing about this was that it wasn’t Luke who was scoring. Instead it was either their center scoring a put back, or someone left a little open from our double team making a shot. Still we were tired. After being down by as much as 7, we’d closed the gap to with-in three.
At half time I complemented the team on their great defense. I said we were playing a good game and that we were a second half team and we’d get this game done. We’d beaten this team once and there was no reason we couldn’t beat them again. I did also make a remark that no matter what happened in the game that we should be proud of how’d we played. Where as for the first two parts, and even into the third part, of the first half I really believed that we’d lose, and it could even be a blow-out, by the end of the first half we were playing better basketball.
Right out of half we came out and cut the game to with-in a basket. As the second half played on I was finding it harder and harder to find time to play guys like Tom, Noah, and Gordie. They all got their time in, but it was a hard thing for me to do. During the start of the third part of the second half, Luke went on his only tear of the game. In rapid succession he stole a few balls and created some exciting points to give his team a 5 point lead, after being down by 1 when his tear started. The good news out of this all, was that’s basically his whole contribution, offensively and defensively for the whole game. We had so shut down the inside game that Luke was constantly settling for three point shots. His shooting percentage was better outside the arc this game than the last game, but still nowhere near as good as what he can do inside. We had also made the proper adjustments to their two set plays and so they’d often have to run the play two or three times before they could get a shot off of it. What I was more proud of than how well we were playing him on defense as how we’d neutralized him when HE was on defense. His coaches made it clear that they expected him to stay in his zone, since when he’d wondered we’d made them pay for it.
As Luke went on this run, I was forced to call a time-out to try and stop the momentum. I pointed out that we could make up this score. We had PLENTY of time so we had to play our offense. And during the next five minutes we played some excellent basketball. All half long Scott had done an excellent job of getting rebounds, with 7 second half rebounds. However, he was tired so I put in Jack P as a post player. Jack M decided that maybe he could drive to the basket and he did so, creating all sorts of nice opportunities both in terms of baskets he made, fouls, and creating shots for others, notably Jack P. It was clear that they came out of the time-out with the philosophy that they weren’t going to let David beat them. This was fine for us. Slowly we came back. Dante all year long would shoot 6 or 7 good shots each game and often miss all of them. However, all of a sudden he was getting open in the mid-post and he drained a couple of beautiful shots. The game became a nail biter, but we continued to be down.
Finally with about 25 seconds they went up by 3. I called our final time-out. Basically it was just a “relax out there”. We needed a 3 and everyone knew it. I said that we would tie the game, have momentum and win in over time. I really believed that we’d either lose it in regulation or win it in over time. They had begun earlier in the half wasting time, with Luke bringing the ball just over half court and sitting there. I kept yelling at David that he had to go and guard Luke so they couldn’t keep waste time. However, it was this attitude of that we’d score, while they were just trying to hang-on that gave me such confidence. So we came down on offense and worked it around for a bit, before getting it back to David who pulls up for the jumper and drains it. We’ve tied the game. Our bench explodes. They call a time out with 8 seconds and change on the clock. By this point we were rocking the gym. The atmosphere was unbelievable coming out of the time-out they’d called.
We all knew what they were going to do. They were going to get the ball to Luke and with plenty of time. However, as they went down they were never able to find a good a shot. They ended up launching a bad shot which missed. And we headed into OT.
It really was cliché. Here we had the championship game, with a team that had made a comeback only to make a crucial late shot to tie the game and send it into overtime. That first overtime period was just a bundle of nerves. The period only lasted 2 minutes. I think each team scored 1 basket. We once again had the ball late in the period. There entire focus was so on stepping David that they left Jack M with a good shot, but it missed. We got the ball back and David took and missed a jumper. What upset me was that we all just stood around looking at it, instead of trying for the rebound. The ball actually hit the floor and bounced, meaning that JCC was doing the same thing. Still if we’d done what we should have we might have been able to heave up one last shot. But momentum was on our side. When Jack started to drive in, the coaches were clearly pained. We’d just come out of a time-out and it was clear that the message had been so strong on stop David, that the team left itself open to being beaten by one of our other players.
So now we were in the second overtime. We come out quickly and make a basket and another. They come back and make a basket of their own. On this next possession down they foul Jack M on the ground for a 1 and 1. Jack makes both of the shots and we now have a 4 point lead with about 45 seconds left. Noah asks “Can we storm the court when we win?” I say “Of course” which I don’t think they were expecting. Luke comes down and lofts up a 3, and misses, but gets fouled. Luke’s now at the line for 3 shots. He drains the first two, but misses the 3rd. I don’t know if the play was intentional or not, but they do get the rebound. The put up a shot and miss. Dante comes down with the rebound and is immediately fouled. Another 1 and 1. Dante drains both shots and that’s the game. There is a desperation 3 launched, we get the rebound, and the game is over.
There’s chest bumping and thumping. The team is absolutely stoked. We go through and shake their hands. My opinion of Luke’s father mellowed this game. He was very nice after the game. I think as the game went on he realized that we weren’t some team that had no right competing with his team, but instead was a legitimate competitor. On the other hand, his co-coach was insane and did enough yelling for the two of them. Regardless, I really felt like the better team won this game. At different points we had several players step up when needed, it wasn’t just the David show, like JCC was the Luke show.
There was a real nice ceremony where they were presented with t-shirts for second place and we were presented with our championship t-shirts. We went over to the side, I complemented them on how I often talk about what great teams do, and in this tournament we played like a great team. They posed for a couple of team pictures. It was just great. Here we were champions of an A tourney, having played two games which were as good as basketball games get. What a feeling.
Next time: tournament summary/overview and a recap of Monday’s practice.
Since we’d already played two games of basketball, I didn’t bother having us do any sort of special warm-up and instead I just let them shoot. At one point I had to chase away Luke’s brother who had the audacity to shoot around with us. After it became clear we were going to have more than 5 minutes, I let them shoot around for a minute or two more than sat them down. My big focus for this game was on our help defense doing a good job of picking Luke up. We knew we were going to force him to our left, so defenders on that side had to be ready to step in for the double team if he got close to the basket.
JCC got off to a quick start. At that point I believed the game could easily turn into a blow-out. We were tired. I knew that they’d be playing their best ball and they were. Most of their points came-off of a couple plays. One was a clear-out for Luke. Now the good thing about this was that it wasn’t Luke who was scoring. Instead it was either their center scoring a put back, or someone left a little open from our double team making a shot. Still we were tired. After being down by as much as 7, we’d closed the gap to with-in three.
At half time I complemented the team on their great defense. I said we were playing a good game and that we were a second half team and we’d get this game done. We’d beaten this team once and there was no reason we couldn’t beat them again. I did also make a remark that no matter what happened in the game that we should be proud of how’d we played. Where as for the first two parts, and even into the third part, of the first half I really believed that we’d lose, and it could even be a blow-out, by the end of the first half we were playing better basketball.
Right out of half we came out and cut the game to with-in a basket. As the second half played on I was finding it harder and harder to find time to play guys like Tom, Noah, and Gordie. They all got their time in, but it was a hard thing for me to do. During the start of the third part of the second half, Luke went on his only tear of the game. In rapid succession he stole a few balls and created some exciting points to give his team a 5 point lead, after being down by 1 when his tear started. The good news out of this all, was that’s basically his whole contribution, offensively and defensively for the whole game. We had so shut down the inside game that Luke was constantly settling for three point shots. His shooting percentage was better outside the arc this game than the last game, but still nowhere near as good as what he can do inside. We had also made the proper adjustments to their two set plays and so they’d often have to run the play two or three times before they could get a shot off of it. What I was more proud of than how well we were playing him on defense as how we’d neutralized him when HE was on defense. His coaches made it clear that they expected him to stay in his zone, since when he’d wondered we’d made them pay for it.
As Luke went on this run, I was forced to call a time-out to try and stop the momentum. I pointed out that we could make up this score. We had PLENTY of time so we had to play our offense. And during the next five minutes we played some excellent basketball. All half long Scott had done an excellent job of getting rebounds, with 7 second half rebounds. However, he was tired so I put in Jack P as a post player. Jack M decided that maybe he could drive to the basket and he did so, creating all sorts of nice opportunities both in terms of baskets he made, fouls, and creating shots for others, notably Jack P. It was clear that they came out of the time-out with the philosophy that they weren’t going to let David beat them. This was fine for us. Slowly we came back. Dante all year long would shoot 6 or 7 good shots each game and often miss all of them. However, all of a sudden he was getting open in the mid-post and he drained a couple of beautiful shots. The game became a nail biter, but we continued to be down.
Finally with about 25 seconds they went up by 3. I called our final time-out. Basically it was just a “relax out there”. We needed a 3 and everyone knew it. I said that we would tie the game, have momentum and win in over time. I really believed that we’d either lose it in regulation or win it in over time. They had begun earlier in the half wasting time, with Luke bringing the ball just over half court and sitting there. I kept yelling at David that he had to go and guard Luke so they couldn’t keep waste time. However, it was this attitude of that we’d score, while they were just trying to hang-on that gave me such confidence. So we came down on offense and worked it around for a bit, before getting it back to David who pulls up for the jumper and drains it. We’ve tied the game. Our bench explodes. They call a time out with 8 seconds and change on the clock. By this point we were rocking the gym. The atmosphere was unbelievable coming out of the time-out they’d called.
We all knew what they were going to do. They were going to get the ball to Luke and with plenty of time. However, as they went down they were never able to find a good a shot. They ended up launching a bad shot which missed. And we headed into OT.
It really was cliché. Here we had the championship game, with a team that had made a comeback only to make a crucial late shot to tie the game and send it into overtime. That first overtime period was just a bundle of nerves. The period only lasted 2 minutes. I think each team scored 1 basket. We once again had the ball late in the period. There entire focus was so on stepping David that they left Jack M with a good shot, but it missed. We got the ball back and David took and missed a jumper. What upset me was that we all just stood around looking at it, instead of trying for the rebound. The ball actually hit the floor and bounced, meaning that JCC was doing the same thing. Still if we’d done what we should have we might have been able to heave up one last shot. But momentum was on our side. When Jack started to drive in, the coaches were clearly pained. We’d just come out of a time-out and it was clear that the message had been so strong on stop David, that the team left itself open to being beaten by one of our other players.
So now we were in the second overtime. We come out quickly and make a basket and another. They come back and make a basket of their own. On this next possession down they foul Jack M on the ground for a 1 and 1. Jack makes both of the shots and we now have a 4 point lead with about 45 seconds left. Noah asks “Can we storm the court when we win?” I say “Of course” which I don’t think they were expecting. Luke comes down and lofts up a 3, and misses, but gets fouled. Luke’s now at the line for 3 shots. He drains the first two, but misses the 3rd. I don’t know if the play was intentional or not, but they do get the rebound. The put up a shot and miss. Dante comes down with the rebound and is immediately fouled. Another 1 and 1. Dante drains both shots and that’s the game. There is a desperation 3 launched, we get the rebound, and the game is over.
There’s chest bumping and thumping. The team is absolutely stoked. We go through and shake their hands. My opinion of Luke’s father mellowed this game. He was very nice after the game. I think as the game went on he realized that we weren’t some team that had no right competing with his team, but instead was a legitimate competitor. On the other hand, his co-coach was insane and did enough yelling for the two of them. Regardless, I really felt like the better team won this game. At different points we had several players step up when needed, it wasn’t just the David show, like JCC was the Luke show.
There was a real nice ceremony where they were presented with t-shirts for second place and we were presented with our championship t-shirts. We went over to the side, I complemented them on how I often talk about what great teams do, and in this tournament we played like a great team. They posed for a couple of team pictures. It was just great. Here we were champions of an A tourney, having played two games which were as good as basketball games get. What a feeling.
Next time: tournament summary/overview and a recap of Monday’s practice.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Tourney Report: Karzen Game
For Lunch we went to a well known hot dog/hamburger place in HP. Scott had suggested we go to Hooters (which considering there isn’t a Hooters anywhere near by was a particularly amusing suggestion), while Brian was pushing hard core for Wendy’s. However, my suggestion won out when I said that if we went there they’d be able to see what I looked like when I was 10 (I played on a basketball team that they sponsored). Not to mention I knew that they had TVs that we could watch the Bears game on, before heading back to the rec center for what I hoped would be two more games.
We caravaned over there. Gordie’s, Noah’s, and Jack P’s mothers insisted on paying for my lunch, which was very nice of them. Lunch was a very nice affair. The kids all sat together and talked and then watched the Bears game together. I sat with the parents, doing stuff on my laptop, while they all talked and gossiped. Dante’s father and I talked a little bit and he asked me the very legitimate question of why I didn’t go for the three point shot late in the HP game when it would have tied the game. I answered that I felt that we had a better chance of making the basket and stealing the ball than making the shot. In reality? I blew it. Lunch was a real nice way to kill a couple of hours. Towards the end the kids got a little antsy, but it wasn’t too bad, and it was a great team experience.
During lunch a conversation which began towards the end of the WM game continued. Basically the question was would I be coaching the fifth grade team. I gave a non-committal answer along the lines of “I would love to move up with the team, but it’s a long time between then and now so who knows.” Dante’s father had said, even before that “Who do we need to write to about keeping you?” I smiled and he went, “No seriously, who?” It was a very gratifying experience. Part of this conversation, with the players, was also would everyone on the team make it again next year. I obviously had to tread very carefully here. My answer was “I love the team we have this year. Next year at try-outs I’ve got to choose the best 10 or 12 players for the team. I would be thrilled if we had the same team, but I’ll have to put together the best team.”
I was thrilled about something I had heard from the triplet's (and their step-mom). During the interim on Saturday between games Brian and I were talking. He told me that next year they planned on trying out for an And1 team. My heart sank. I asked if he was planning on doing two teams, and he responded, weakly, that he was. I think we'd be a really competitive B league team with-out the triplets but we wouldn't be as good as we are. The idea that we might lose them compounded my misery after the HP loss, and tempered some of my excitement from the JCC win. Well, during the game as we were talking about whether I'd pick the same team next year, David said, "I hope that it would be the same 10 people. We are such a good team." Step-mom also indicated how much all of them loved basketball this year. Losing David would be bad, but I think we'd still be a great team. Losing all the triplets would be catastrophic as they are 3 of our 4 or 5 best players, easily.
Just before half time in the Bears game we headed back to the gym. We caught some of the 4B and 5B championship games. More importantly we waited a long time. Games were still far behind schedule on our court. This meant that JCC was already comfortably ahead by the time our game began. I knew from watching the other team that this team would be scrappy. It was also clear that their coach spent a lot of time on fundamentals. Even in warm-ups they were doing defensive slides and such.
During the first part of the first half the game was a virtual tie, even a little bit in their favor. They played us real well. We seemed a little off balance. They weren’t any bigger than us, but they were really out rebounding us. They wanted the ball more than we did, which was just an amazing thing to happen to our team. In a tough game like this it can be a game of Russian Roulette to see who’ll blink first on calling a time out. While they had an early edge, we had fought back some, again thanks to very good ball movement and use of the post, and with about 6 minutes left in the half, the other coach blinked first and called a time-out. I had decided to call one at 5 minutes to get my last group of subs in and make the rebounding comment.
We have a small lead at half, but again it is the first part of the second half where we make our mark. What had been a close game, with us up by about four at half, suddenly became a game where we were very much in control. Our control only increased as the half went on. Finally with about 5 minutes left we were up by 13. I just couldn’t see them closing the gap, so I went with a weaker line-up with the intent of starting the players on the bench at the start of the JCC game.
At the same time I was backing off, Karzen made a push. The started a very effective press that we just didn’t have the skill on the court to beat. And slowly, bit by bit, they worked their way back. Finally it got to the point where I needed to insert Jack M with about 2 and a half minutes left just to make sure the game didn’t get out of hand. The combo of Jack P and Jack M were able to break through their press. Press break is something I had anticipated we’d really need, but never gotten around to teaching. David is practically a one man press breaking machine. And even if he’s stopped Scott, Brian, Jack M, and to a lesser extent Tom, Lucas and Jack P, all understand the basics of how to beat a press so it seemed like a poor use of time. Fortunately as it got late in the game they were forced to foul us and we did well on our free throws. We ended up winning by a far too close six points. A situation like this is difficult. If it weren’t for the pressure of the JCC game, I’d likely have inserted more of our a unit back into the game. You don’t want momentum to swing so far that your team is helpless to counter act it. However, JCC had finished their game well before the end of our game, and I wanted to give our players as much of a rest as possible. This game never got out of control, but it was might close there for a while.
So we had done it. After an inauspicious beginning we’d reached the tournament final. However, I was not confident. Perhaps the late swing in Karzen had contributed, but knowing that we’d have to play another near perfect game against JCC to beat them just did not inspire confidence. I was left in the trick position of trying to get us ready for another game against the JCC, while also not setting up a situation where we’d feel like failures if we came up short. It was in this mental state that we headed next door to play our now clear foes.
We caravaned over there. Gordie’s, Noah’s, and Jack P’s mothers insisted on paying for my lunch, which was very nice of them. Lunch was a very nice affair. The kids all sat together and talked and then watched the Bears game together. I sat with the parents, doing stuff on my laptop, while they all talked and gossiped. Dante’s father and I talked a little bit and he asked me the very legitimate question of why I didn’t go for the three point shot late in the HP game when it would have tied the game. I answered that I felt that we had a better chance of making the basket and stealing the ball than making the shot. In reality? I blew it. Lunch was a real nice way to kill a couple of hours. Towards the end the kids got a little antsy, but it wasn’t too bad, and it was a great team experience.
During lunch a conversation which began towards the end of the WM game continued. Basically the question was would I be coaching the fifth grade team. I gave a non-committal answer along the lines of “I would love to move up with the team, but it’s a long time between then and now so who knows.” Dante’s father had said, even before that “Who do we need to write to about keeping you?” I smiled and he went, “No seriously, who?” It was a very gratifying experience. Part of this conversation, with the players, was also would everyone on the team make it again next year. I obviously had to tread very carefully here. My answer was “I love the team we have this year. Next year at try-outs I’ve got to choose the best 10 or 12 players for the team. I would be thrilled if we had the same team, but I’ll have to put together the best team.”
I was thrilled about something I had heard from the triplet's (and their step-mom). During the interim on Saturday between games Brian and I were talking. He told me that next year they planned on trying out for an And1 team. My heart sank. I asked if he was planning on doing two teams, and he responded, weakly, that he was. I think we'd be a really competitive B league team with-out the triplets but we wouldn't be as good as we are. The idea that we might lose them compounded my misery after the HP loss, and tempered some of my excitement from the JCC win. Well, during the game as we were talking about whether I'd pick the same team next year, David said, "I hope that it would be the same 10 people. We are such a good team." Step-mom also indicated how much all of them loved basketball this year. Losing David would be bad, but I think we'd still be a great team. Losing all the triplets would be catastrophic as they are 3 of our 4 or 5 best players, easily.
Just before half time in the Bears game we headed back to the gym. We caught some of the 4B and 5B championship games. More importantly we waited a long time. Games were still far behind schedule on our court. This meant that JCC was already comfortably ahead by the time our game began. I knew from watching the other team that this team would be scrappy. It was also clear that their coach spent a lot of time on fundamentals. Even in warm-ups they were doing defensive slides and such.
During the first part of the first half the game was a virtual tie, even a little bit in their favor. They played us real well. We seemed a little off balance. They weren’t any bigger than us, but they were really out rebounding us. They wanted the ball more than we did, which was just an amazing thing to happen to our team. In a tough game like this it can be a game of Russian Roulette to see who’ll blink first on calling a time out. While they had an early edge, we had fought back some, again thanks to very good ball movement and use of the post, and with about 6 minutes left in the half, the other coach blinked first and called a time-out. I had decided to call one at 5 minutes to get my last group of subs in and make the rebounding comment.
We have a small lead at half, but again it is the first part of the second half where we make our mark. What had been a close game, with us up by about four at half, suddenly became a game where we were very much in control. Our control only increased as the half went on. Finally with about 5 minutes left we were up by 13. I just couldn’t see them closing the gap, so I went with a weaker line-up with the intent of starting the players on the bench at the start of the JCC game.
At the same time I was backing off, Karzen made a push. The started a very effective press that we just didn’t have the skill on the court to beat. And slowly, bit by bit, they worked their way back. Finally it got to the point where I needed to insert Jack M with about 2 and a half minutes left just to make sure the game didn’t get out of hand. The combo of Jack P and Jack M were able to break through their press. Press break is something I had anticipated we’d really need, but never gotten around to teaching. David is practically a one man press breaking machine. And even if he’s stopped Scott, Brian, Jack M, and to a lesser extent Tom, Lucas and Jack P, all understand the basics of how to beat a press so it seemed like a poor use of time. Fortunately as it got late in the game they were forced to foul us and we did well on our free throws. We ended up winning by a far too close six points. A situation like this is difficult. If it weren’t for the pressure of the JCC game, I’d likely have inserted more of our a unit back into the game. You don’t want momentum to swing so far that your team is helpless to counter act it. However, JCC had finished their game well before the end of our game, and I wanted to give our players as much of a rest as possible. This game never got out of control, but it was might close there for a while.
So we had done it. After an inauspicious beginning we’d reached the tournament final. However, I was not confident. Perhaps the late swing in Karzen had contributed, but knowing that we’d have to play another near perfect game against JCC to beat them just did not inspire confidence. I was left in the trick position of trying to get us ready for another game against the JCC, while also not setting up a situation where we’d feel like failures if we came up short. It was in this mental state that we headed next door to play our now clear foes.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Tourney Report: Spartans vs. WM
Following our dramatic last second victory over the JCC we looked at the following as our “road to the championship”:
12 game versus WM – The team is in the A division and was winless when we played them.
If we won that we’d have a 4 o’clock game against the winner of the other pool, which was a team called Karzen. Basically they were a group of players recruited by this guy named Karzen from a tennis academy in a nearby suburb (this was the A team of the same group that had played and defeated HP in overtime).
If we won both of those games we would be in a 5 o’clock championship. JCC had a similar path to the finals.
Now our 12 game against WM was not going to start on time since WM had a game at 11 (owing to the fact that on the original schedule the earliest Sunday game was to be 2 and so they’d rescheduled a league game). The Park District thought we’d start at 12:15, but I always found that to be an optimistic outlook. Still I had the team get there a little before noon in anticipation of an “on-time” start.
Of course this was not to be. We ended up playing a couple of games of lightening with a ref (I even knocked him out of one game, which we joked wasn’t likely my best move). There was a lot of random waiting. The best thing to come out of the waiting was that the team agreed we’d go to lunch following the game.
Finally just after 12:30 they got their fifth player there. We started the game moments later, when they had six or seven of their players there. I had been warned by several players on my team that they had a kid who was HUGE. They weren’t exaggerating. This kid was likely 5”5’ and 190 pounds and, as someone on our team (I think it was Noah) later said, “I didn’t realize a kid so big could also be so fast”. For whatever reason, my guess being he’d played a lot earlier, he didn’t start.
With the exception of this player at center we were pretty much stronger than them top to bottom. By the third part of the first half we had the game solidly in hand, though certainly not out of reach of WM. After half, with a lineup that did not include David nor Scott (who had the thankless job of guarding the huge guy most of the time and consequently had worked himself into foul trouble) we came out and went on a role. We increased, in 5 minutes, or lead from 5 to 15. This would not have been a lineup I’d have expected to go on such a run, but several people seemed to get hot at once including Jack M, who did a nice job of playing point and on defense after having had a couple of lackluster games at point, and Lucas, who finally seemed willing to take shots in the game and not just on put backs. After that it was never really a game. We won the game by 18.
Of note was that the ref who played lightening with us was a real jerk towards the opposing coach. At one point in the first half the coach was unhappy with a travel call (based on the kid carrying the ball). The ref said something to the effect of “Coach if you taught your players how to play I wouldn’t have had to call that travel”. Which was like WHOA. Then at the start of the second half, WM was EXCEEDINGLY slow at coming out of their huddle. In order to make-up for lost time, half time had been shortened to 1 minute, so basically just a time-out. Finally WM comes out of the huddle. There is then some confusion over which way they were going and the ref called over and back on the kid. His argument was that he’d stated several times which way they were going, he had. But c’mon they’re 9 years old. He didn’t favor us, in the sense that calls were called the same going both ways, but I was still glad to know that we wouldn’t be seeing him again (he’d mentioned that this was his only game of the day officiating).
It was really interesting because this was the first game where we were clearly out rebounded. When he was in there their center grabbed a HUGE amount of the boards, offensively and defensively. He also displayed a pretty soft touch on farther out shots. This kid needs a little help on his inside offensive game, and assuming puberty doesn’t completely wreck his coordination, could be a dominating force, but it was not to be on Sunday. In a gam
I had entered the tournament figuring us to be a middle of the road A team in terms of quality of play. The game against HP did nothing to change that estimate. When I crunched the stats of the JCC game I discovered we’d played nearly perfectly. Turnovers were WAY down compared to our normal games, even ones against inferior teams like NF. This took some of the wind out of my sails. I was VERY confident that we would see JCC again entering the day, as I thought we matched up well against the teams we’d have to play today. Knowing that we had managed to just squeak out a 1 point victory when we played our best game, statistically, of the season? Not encouraging. The only redeeming factor was that while most players were at their best, David’s shooting percentage was terrible. It was actually bad in both of the games Saturday, so that was a ray of hope. Of course that could also mean we had fallen into the trap of “David feels like he has to do everything to help us win”, which wasn’t so far from the truth in the JCC game.
On the other hand, where we might have won the JCC game because of one player, this was our best team game yet. Every player on the team, except Tom, had 2 or more shots. The most anyone shot was 10 shots and most players had multiple good looks. Several parents remarked how well we spread around the ball. It was certainly a good TEAM game. This gave me some hope about our future chances should we meet the JCC in the finals.
I had expected to win this game easily, and it was nice that we did so and it was then off to lunch we went.
12 game versus WM – The team is in the A division and was winless when we played them.
If we won that we’d have a 4 o’clock game against the winner of the other pool, which was a team called Karzen. Basically they were a group of players recruited by this guy named Karzen from a tennis academy in a nearby suburb (this was the A team of the same group that had played and defeated HP in overtime).
If we won both of those games we would be in a 5 o’clock championship. JCC had a similar path to the finals.
Now our 12 game against WM was not going to start on time since WM had a game at 11 (owing to the fact that on the original schedule the earliest Sunday game was to be 2 and so they’d rescheduled a league game). The Park District thought we’d start at 12:15, but I always found that to be an optimistic outlook. Still I had the team get there a little before noon in anticipation of an “on-time” start.
Of course this was not to be. We ended up playing a couple of games of lightening with a ref (I even knocked him out of one game, which we joked wasn’t likely my best move). There was a lot of random waiting. The best thing to come out of the waiting was that the team agreed we’d go to lunch following the game.
Finally just after 12:30 they got their fifth player there. We started the game moments later, when they had six or seven of their players there. I had been warned by several players on my team that they had a kid who was HUGE. They weren’t exaggerating. This kid was likely 5”5’ and 190 pounds and, as someone on our team (I think it was Noah) later said, “I didn’t realize a kid so big could also be so fast”. For whatever reason, my guess being he’d played a lot earlier, he didn’t start.
With the exception of this player at center we were pretty much stronger than them top to bottom. By the third part of the first half we had the game solidly in hand, though certainly not out of reach of WM. After half, with a lineup that did not include David nor Scott (who had the thankless job of guarding the huge guy most of the time and consequently had worked himself into foul trouble) we came out and went on a role. We increased, in 5 minutes, or lead from 5 to 15. This would not have been a lineup I’d have expected to go on such a run, but several people seemed to get hot at once including Jack M, who did a nice job of playing point and on defense after having had a couple of lackluster games at point, and Lucas, who finally seemed willing to take shots in the game and not just on put backs. After that it was never really a game. We won the game by 18.
Of note was that the ref who played lightening with us was a real jerk towards the opposing coach. At one point in the first half the coach was unhappy with a travel call (based on the kid carrying the ball). The ref said something to the effect of “Coach if you taught your players how to play I wouldn’t have had to call that travel”. Which was like WHOA. Then at the start of the second half, WM was EXCEEDINGLY slow at coming out of their huddle. In order to make-up for lost time, half time had been shortened to 1 minute, so basically just a time-out. Finally WM comes out of the huddle. There is then some confusion over which way they were going and the ref called over and back on the kid. His argument was that he’d stated several times which way they were going, he had. But c’mon they’re 9 years old. He didn’t favor us, in the sense that calls were called the same going both ways, but I was still glad to know that we wouldn’t be seeing him again (he’d mentioned that this was his only game of the day officiating).
It was really interesting because this was the first game where we were clearly out rebounded. When he was in there their center grabbed a HUGE amount of the boards, offensively and defensively. He also displayed a pretty soft touch on farther out shots. This kid needs a little help on his inside offensive game, and assuming puberty doesn’t completely wreck his coordination, could be a dominating force, but it was not to be on Sunday. In a gam
I had entered the tournament figuring us to be a middle of the road A team in terms of quality of play. The game against HP did nothing to change that estimate. When I crunched the stats of the JCC game I discovered we’d played nearly perfectly. Turnovers were WAY down compared to our normal games, even ones against inferior teams like NF. This took some of the wind out of my sails. I was VERY confident that we would see JCC again entering the day, as I thought we matched up well against the teams we’d have to play today. Knowing that we had managed to just squeak out a 1 point victory when we played our best game, statistically, of the season? Not encouraging. The only redeeming factor was that while most players were at their best, David’s shooting percentage was terrible. It was actually bad in both of the games Saturday, so that was a ray of hope. Of course that could also mean we had fallen into the trap of “David feels like he has to do everything to help us win”, which wasn’t so far from the truth in the JCC game.
On the other hand, where we might have won the JCC game because of one player, this was our best team game yet. Every player on the team, except Tom, had 2 or more shots. The most anyone shot was 10 shots and most players had multiple good looks. Several parents remarked how well we spread around the ball. It was certainly a good TEAM game. This gave me some hope about our future chances should we meet the JCC in the finals.
I had expected to win this game easily, and it was nice that we did so and it was then off to lunch we went.
Tourney Report: JCC Game
Jack M could not hide his thoughts that we were going to lose to JCC. During the time in between games I had taken some time to talk to him, again, about the importance of a positive attitude. Now in fairness, I felt a good deal of trepidation myself about the game, but the idea of having a positive team attitude is an incredibly important thing to me. I also talked to David about his frustration. As the HP game slipped away, David’s frustration grew and grew and this was not helpful for us as a team or for him individually. I approached him under the guise of “what is frustrating you out there?” and we had a good conversation. I emphasized the need to use the whole team. It was a good discussion.
After a little bit of warm-up, our team sat down for our pre-game meeting. The pre-game meeting revolved around, #3, Luke. When we played the team last time they were basically a one man show and so we talked about forcing Luke to his left. I talked about how happy I was to have the chance to play this team again since I didn’t think we had done our best the last time we played them. I said that I don’t think anyone, including me, was ready last time for how good this team was. We would be ready this time and it would make the difference. At least, I thought to myself, I hoped it would.
The game began. Luke tried his best to go to the right, but David, being the monster defender that he was, kept forcing him left. Luke was clearly uncomfortable with this. His coaches kept yelling “If he’s giving you the left, go left.” The game was hard fought the whole first half. We started off strong, as I think the HP game had us in game shape. The first half was fought tooth and nail, but by half time we were up to a four point lead.
A big controversy occurred late in the first half. JCC called its second time-out, as we continued to build momentum. It was clear what had happened: the rules as sent to me via e-mail said 3 time outs per half, a lot of time outs. I asked a question about this before our first game and was told 3 per game but obviously the JCC coaches had never been informed. In the end the decision was made to give each team 3 time-outs per half. This meant that my saving of all my time outs was for naught.
It was easy to be positive at half. The focus was on momentum. We also talked about the 1-3-1 zone they would sometime play. In the first half the JCC had done a good job of forcing us to score in transition or to settle for longer shots. We were fighting hard for rebounds and getting some put-back points, but the zone was doing exactly what it had been designed to do. I pointed out a few ways we could do better against the zone.
For subbing purposes I had every 5 minutes inserted 2 or 3 (and once in a while 4) players into the game. So I sort divided the halves into 4 parts. During this first part the game remained virtually unchanged. We did have our most remarkable possession of the season. We got the ball at half and held onto the ball, basically just passing it around, for 54 seconds before we found a good shot. The patience on that possession was just amazing. We didn’t end up with a basket, but it was an just an incredible display of passing and team work.
During the second part of the half I rested David. Jack P did an admirable job, both here and in the first half of guarding Luke. Where as David sat in both halves, Luke sat about 2 minutes, if even that, the whole game.
It was during the 3rd part that things changed dramatically. We were up by 4 points about half way through the part when Luke went on a tear. He started stealing every ball around him and taking them in for baskets. We got a basket here and there, but he got 7 points, including an incredibly lucky 3 point shot, in a space of only about 2 minutes. Luke’s 3 point shooting was actually a big bonus for us. There were several times where he just settled for the three, with his coach’s encouragement, and he missed a lot of the time and since we’re a good rebounding team we got the rebound a lot of the time. I’m guessing that in the long run this might not be a bad strategy, since many teams won’t out rebound them, but I am about as virulently against shooting regular 3 pointers at this age as you can get.
So now we’re entering the last part of the game and we’re down. And then we get down by some more, losing by 3 with about 90 seconds to go. I call our second time out (I had called one after the lucky three to try and calm the momentum, which was largely successful) and tried to get our team back on track. With 30 seconds left to go we narrow the game to 1. We get the ball with 14 seconds left in the game and I call our final time-out. I explain that there’s plenty of time left and we need to get a good shot. I tell them that I want to work the ball around since it’s likely we would get a good shot that way. My thinking was that they would so overload coverage on David, who has been playing his normally fantastic game, that they would leave someone else open.
JCC came out of the time-out and their defense was tough. We made a few passes around the perimeter of their zone and nothing was happening. Finally David gets the ball back. The clock is ticking down. I call on him to shoot. He pulls up just behind the free throw line and NAILS a jumper with 2.5 seconds left. JCC immediately calls their final time-out. In the huddle my speech is simple “We all know where this ball is going to go, to Luke. Make sure they in-bound the ball so the clock starts, and then pick-up your men at half court. Don’t foul.”
The ball is in bounded. Luke sprints up the court. He launches his final shot on the sideline, by our bench, just behind the half court line. The ball goes up and it’s got a real shot. My heart absolutely sinks as the ball looks might good. But it turns out to be long and we win the game at the buzzer. Luke literally crumples to the floor.
We did it. We had beaten, at the last second, the one team who had beaten us. Our team goes wild. We shake hands and I immediately pulled away by the conference organizer, before I can even talk to my team, for an explanation of some time changes for the next day. At the time I didn’t realize this, but our win basically finished us in second in our pool. We did discuss the various possibilities, but I predicted that JCC would blow-out HP. Eric, the HP Park District tournament organizer was skeptical, but I knew that’s what would happen. When he called later, he told me I was right and that we’d gotten the second seed.
I was so happy that we beat the JCC team. As the game went on I grew to dislike the JCC coaches more and more. They were loud. They didn’t promote team basketball. Their players didn’t look like they were having as much fun as we were. After the game as we shook hands they were clearly stunned. While we’d both said before the game how much we were looking forward to this match-up, I honestly don’t believe they thought for a moment we could beat them. What is funny is that after the first game we’d played against them I’d told one of the coaches how Luke was just not comfortable being forced left. So it should have come as no surprise that we forced him left. As we were shaking hands I had said “I think we’ll play each other again” with the only way of that happening is if we met in the championship. If we could beat the JCC, at that moment I knew that we really could win it all.
After a little bit of warm-up, our team sat down for our pre-game meeting. The pre-game meeting revolved around, #3, Luke. When we played the team last time they were basically a one man show and so we talked about forcing Luke to his left. I talked about how happy I was to have the chance to play this team again since I didn’t think we had done our best the last time we played them. I said that I don’t think anyone, including me, was ready last time for how good this team was. We would be ready this time and it would make the difference. At least, I thought to myself, I hoped it would.
The game began. Luke tried his best to go to the right, but David, being the monster defender that he was, kept forcing him left. Luke was clearly uncomfortable with this. His coaches kept yelling “If he’s giving you the left, go left.” The game was hard fought the whole first half. We started off strong, as I think the HP game had us in game shape. The first half was fought tooth and nail, but by half time we were up to a four point lead.
A big controversy occurred late in the first half. JCC called its second time-out, as we continued to build momentum. It was clear what had happened: the rules as sent to me via e-mail said 3 time outs per half, a lot of time outs. I asked a question about this before our first game and was told 3 per game but obviously the JCC coaches had never been informed. In the end the decision was made to give each team 3 time-outs per half. This meant that my saving of all my time outs was for naught.
It was easy to be positive at half. The focus was on momentum. We also talked about the 1-3-1 zone they would sometime play. In the first half the JCC had done a good job of forcing us to score in transition or to settle for longer shots. We were fighting hard for rebounds and getting some put-back points, but the zone was doing exactly what it had been designed to do. I pointed out a few ways we could do better against the zone.
For subbing purposes I had every 5 minutes inserted 2 or 3 (and once in a while 4) players into the game. So I sort divided the halves into 4 parts. During this first part the game remained virtually unchanged. We did have our most remarkable possession of the season. We got the ball at half and held onto the ball, basically just passing it around, for 54 seconds before we found a good shot. The patience on that possession was just amazing. We didn’t end up with a basket, but it was an just an incredible display of passing and team work.
During the second part of the half I rested David. Jack P did an admirable job, both here and in the first half of guarding Luke. Where as David sat in both halves, Luke sat about 2 minutes, if even that, the whole game.
It was during the 3rd part that things changed dramatically. We were up by 4 points about half way through the part when Luke went on a tear. He started stealing every ball around him and taking them in for baskets. We got a basket here and there, but he got 7 points, including an incredibly lucky 3 point shot, in a space of only about 2 minutes. Luke’s 3 point shooting was actually a big bonus for us. There were several times where he just settled for the three, with his coach’s encouragement, and he missed a lot of the time and since we’re a good rebounding team we got the rebound a lot of the time. I’m guessing that in the long run this might not be a bad strategy, since many teams won’t out rebound them, but I am about as virulently against shooting regular 3 pointers at this age as you can get.
So now we’re entering the last part of the game and we’re down. And then we get down by some more, losing by 3 with about 90 seconds to go. I call our second time out (I had called one after the lucky three to try and calm the momentum, which was largely successful) and tried to get our team back on track. With 30 seconds left to go we narrow the game to 1. We get the ball with 14 seconds left in the game and I call our final time-out. I explain that there’s plenty of time left and we need to get a good shot. I tell them that I want to work the ball around since it’s likely we would get a good shot that way. My thinking was that they would so overload coverage on David, who has been playing his normally fantastic game, that they would leave someone else open.
JCC came out of the time-out and their defense was tough. We made a few passes around the perimeter of their zone and nothing was happening. Finally David gets the ball back. The clock is ticking down. I call on him to shoot. He pulls up just behind the free throw line and NAILS a jumper with 2.5 seconds left. JCC immediately calls their final time-out. In the huddle my speech is simple “We all know where this ball is going to go, to Luke. Make sure they in-bound the ball so the clock starts, and then pick-up your men at half court. Don’t foul.”
The ball is in bounded. Luke sprints up the court. He launches his final shot on the sideline, by our bench, just behind the half court line. The ball goes up and it’s got a real shot. My heart absolutely sinks as the ball looks might good. But it turns out to be long and we win the game at the buzzer. Luke literally crumples to the floor.
We did it. We had beaten, at the last second, the one team who had beaten us. Our team goes wild. We shake hands and I immediately pulled away by the conference organizer, before I can even talk to my team, for an explanation of some time changes for the next day. At the time I didn’t realize this, but our win basically finished us in second in our pool. We did discuss the various possibilities, but I predicted that JCC would blow-out HP. Eric, the HP Park District tournament organizer was skeptical, but I knew that’s what would happen. When he called later, he told me I was right and that we’d gotten the second seed.
I was so happy that we beat the JCC team. As the game went on I grew to dislike the JCC coaches more and more. They were loud. They didn’t promote team basketball. Their players didn’t look like they were having as much fun as we were. After the game as we shook hands they were clearly stunned. While we’d both said before the game how much we were looking forward to this match-up, I honestly don’t believe they thought for a moment we could beat them. What is funny is that after the first game we’d played against them I’d told one of the coaches how Luke was just not comfortable being forced left. So it should have come as no surprise that we forced him left. As we were shaking hands I had said “I think we’ll play each other again” with the only way of that happening is if we met in the championship. If we could beat the JCC, at that moment I knew that we really could win it all.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Tourney Report: Game 1 vs. HP (A Team)
The day of the tournament was finally here. I get to the facility nice and early. I have two games to chose from watching, with HP playing in one and MP2 in the other (I had originally thought it would be MP1 in this tourney, but evidentially not). I decided to watch the HP game and while I did so I decided to keep stats myself, just to see how hard/easy it is to do. One of the parents there and I started talking. HP was playing this team called Karzen, which turns out to be their coach’s name. The team I was watching, in the B conference, were really mostly 3rd graders, with their connection being attendance at a tennis facility in a nearby suburb. I later learned that this was their first game, which you would never know. However, while I was watching HP has handling them easily.
Right on time, my team started to arrive. The HP team had already arrived much earlier (why do kids need to be 45 minutes early to a game at their own facility?) and we established that I was to be the home team. This caused some consternation from the HP team, as they figured since they were at home they’d be home, but it was agreed we’d wear our home jerseys as it was scheduled.
As I’m sitting there, who should arrive, but Michael. Michael, for those of you who didn’t read my dynasty, and I had a long meeting at the end of the baseball season. The baseball season had not been particularly well run and I had written a long letter with very constructive suggestions for the future. Michael was the boss, at the time, of the person who ran the baseball league. We talked for a moment, with him being surprised o see me, as he knew I wasn’t an HP coach, but I explained I was coaching Glencoe. Then, in a moment which is VERY unlike me, I said “And we’re going to win your tournament.” Did I really believe this? Not so much, but the words came flowing out of my mouth.
We finally get to game time. It is clear from the start that this will be a good game. We get off to a quick 2-0 lead before falling behind. I somehow messed up my sub sheet and so I end up winging it. The game is fairly low scoring in the first 6-8 minutes, remembering that we’re playing two 20 minute halves with a running clock which only stops in the final two minutes of a half or for a time-out. The game opens up a bit after that and HP pulls ahead, by as many as 4 or 5. However, right before half we narrow the gap and on a late shot we actually pull ahead by a point.
At half time, I remind them that we can be a great second half team. I feel confident that this game is one we can win. They’re a good team, but we do tend to do better in the second half. We go out there and it’s neck and neck for a while. Just as we look to be pulling ahead, we hit a brick wall and HP comes roaring back. Highland Park pulls up by 5. Despite our best efforts we end up losing by 3. It was a disappointing loss to be sure, since this was a team we could have beaten.
We were not the happiest team in the world after this loss. And there was a fair amount of anxiety over the fact that our next opponent was the JCC. It was hard to think that we wouldn’t start of the tourney 0-2.
Luckily we had a little over an hour to kill before our game. I took in a game between HP and MP2. HP, despite having a comfortable lead going into the second half of their first game, ended up losing the game in OT. HP never bounces back and gets destroyed by MP2. It was a bit of awful sportsmanship as the final score was something like 51-19 and unlike some of our lopsided victories, MP2 played all out the whole game, though they did have their reserves in the game for most of the second half. It really made me mad to see them so needlessly run up the score.
The game on the court we were to play on finally ended and we started to warm-up against our foes, JCC.
Sorry for the slowness of this update. I hope to have the JCC update tomorrow. I do promise to be caught up before our next game on Sunday (no practice Friday).
Right on time, my team started to arrive. The HP team had already arrived much earlier (why do kids need to be 45 minutes early to a game at their own facility?) and we established that I was to be the home team. This caused some consternation from the HP team, as they figured since they were at home they’d be home, but it was agreed we’d wear our home jerseys as it was scheduled.
As I’m sitting there, who should arrive, but Michael. Michael, for those of you who didn’t read my dynasty, and I had a long meeting at the end of the baseball season. The baseball season had not been particularly well run and I had written a long letter with very constructive suggestions for the future. Michael was the boss, at the time, of the person who ran the baseball league. We talked for a moment, with him being surprised o see me, as he knew I wasn’t an HP coach, but I explained I was coaching Glencoe. Then, in a moment which is VERY unlike me, I said “And we’re going to win your tournament.” Did I really believe this? Not so much, but the words came flowing out of my mouth.
We finally get to game time. It is clear from the start that this will be a good game. We get off to a quick 2-0 lead before falling behind. I somehow messed up my sub sheet and so I end up winging it. The game is fairly low scoring in the first 6-8 minutes, remembering that we’re playing two 20 minute halves with a running clock which only stops in the final two minutes of a half or for a time-out. The game opens up a bit after that and HP pulls ahead, by as many as 4 or 5. However, right before half we narrow the gap and on a late shot we actually pull ahead by a point.
At half time, I remind them that we can be a great second half team. I feel confident that this game is one we can win. They’re a good team, but we do tend to do better in the second half. We go out there and it’s neck and neck for a while. Just as we look to be pulling ahead, we hit a brick wall and HP comes roaring back. Highland Park pulls up by 5. Despite our best efforts we end up losing by 3. It was a disappointing loss to be sure, since this was a team we could have beaten.
We were not the happiest team in the world after this loss. And there was a fair amount of anxiety over the fact that our next opponent was the JCC. It was hard to think that we wouldn’t start of the tourney 0-2.
Luckily we had a little over an hour to kill before our game. I took in a game between HP and MP2. HP, despite having a comfortable lead going into the second half of their first game, ended up losing the game in OT. HP never bounces back and gets destroyed by MP2. It was a bit of awful sportsmanship as the final score was something like 51-19 and unlike some of our lopsided victories, MP2 played all out the whole game, though they did have their reserves in the game for most of the second half. It really made me mad to see them so needlessly run up the score.
The game on the court we were to play on finally ended and we started to warm-up against our foes, JCC.
Sorry for the slowness of this update. I hope to have the JCC update tomorrow. I do promise to be caught up before our next game on Sunday (no practice Friday).
Saturday, January 20, 2007
January 19th Practice Report
I don’t expect this to be a very long practice report.
I strained my vocal cords this week. After not talking for all of Wednesday and Thursday I was at around 85%. However, I knew that this practice would have a different flavor since I was going to be quieter than normal.
As I’m raising the baskets a strange kid appears. Turns out Noah brought a friend with him to practice. This does not make me a happy camper. I’m a stickler about having closed practices, but since it wasn’t poor Charlie’s (Noah’s friend’s name) fault, Charlie was allowed to stay.
We did our continuous motion drill. Noah has taken to the habit of going to the bathroom. He did it right at the start of the drill. I was annoyed after our little agreement, which I expected him to live up to.
Following the continuous motion we ran our Zone Buster. I introduced a couple of slight changes, really more variations than anything. The players clearly don’t believe in the play, so we likely won’t run it against JCC but perhaps we can run it against HP. It’s very frustrating because I know the play works if run right and I think there’s no reason our team can’t run it correctly. Perhaps I’m just not a good enough coach to teach it. Perhaps I’m wrong about them not being capable of running the play. As I think there’s a good chance I’ll be coaching this team next year I am willing to consider the time this year an investment.
Following that work we did some work on screens. This included some double screens, which worked pretty well. We might have to try and use that in a game or two against man defense as an occasional play. It was easy and effective, though I suppose I already knew that after how MP had played against us. It was nice to see that we could execute it offensively though.
Next we worked on our fast break drill. I added a new twist in where sometimes I yelled two players names on defense to give a 4-2 advantage. We’re loads better at the fast break on both offense and defense, which is good.
Finally, I decided that we would do a scrimmage of sorts. It was a normal game of basketball, but each player on a team was allowed only one dribble (once the ball got past the half court line). The idea was to work on screens and post play. While there were some good teaching moments, the players really struggled on offense. I think we’ll do it again since we do rely a fair amount on the dribble and this really forces them to start looking at other ways besides dribble penetration, which is effective, but can be shut down and thus leads us into trouble.
We ran our suicides, I previewed the tourney a little, and we went home.
The practice went fine. We’d had a few pretty good practices and this was sort of lackluster. But some of that was by design. There was a lot more slow paced activities at this practice, since I figure we’ll have enough basketball over the weekend to tire us out.
In a couple of hours we have our first game. I hope we win it. I know the team is going to feel a little intimidated when we fact the JCC again and I haven’t quite decided on my approach. I hope to get one of the game’s recapped tonight and another tomorrow before our game, but we’ll see. I haven’t been this unsure of our team since the first game. In many ways it’s very similar since I have no clue how we stack up against the talent we’re going against. Hopefully, I’ll be as pleasantly surprised today as I was on that day.
I strained my vocal cords this week. After not talking for all of Wednesday and Thursday I was at around 85%. However, I knew that this practice would have a different flavor since I was going to be quieter than normal.
As I’m raising the baskets a strange kid appears. Turns out Noah brought a friend with him to practice. This does not make me a happy camper. I’m a stickler about having closed practices, but since it wasn’t poor Charlie’s (Noah’s friend’s name) fault, Charlie was allowed to stay.
We did our continuous motion drill. Noah has taken to the habit of going to the bathroom. He did it right at the start of the drill. I was annoyed after our little agreement, which I expected him to live up to.
Following the continuous motion we ran our Zone Buster. I introduced a couple of slight changes, really more variations than anything. The players clearly don’t believe in the play, so we likely won’t run it against JCC but perhaps we can run it against HP. It’s very frustrating because I know the play works if run right and I think there’s no reason our team can’t run it correctly. Perhaps I’m just not a good enough coach to teach it. Perhaps I’m wrong about them not being capable of running the play. As I think there’s a good chance I’ll be coaching this team next year I am willing to consider the time this year an investment.
Following that work we did some work on screens. This included some double screens, which worked pretty well. We might have to try and use that in a game or two against man defense as an occasional play. It was easy and effective, though I suppose I already knew that after how MP had played against us. It was nice to see that we could execute it offensively though.
Next we worked on our fast break drill. I added a new twist in where sometimes I yelled two players names on defense to give a 4-2 advantage. We’re loads better at the fast break on both offense and defense, which is good.
Finally, I decided that we would do a scrimmage of sorts. It was a normal game of basketball, but each player on a team was allowed only one dribble (once the ball got past the half court line). The idea was to work on screens and post play. While there were some good teaching moments, the players really struggled on offense. I think we’ll do it again since we do rely a fair amount on the dribble and this really forces them to start looking at other ways besides dribble penetration, which is effective, but can be shut down and thus leads us into trouble.
We ran our suicides, I previewed the tourney a little, and we went home.
The practice went fine. We’d had a few pretty good practices and this was sort of lackluster. But some of that was by design. There was a lot more slow paced activities at this practice, since I figure we’ll have enough basketball over the weekend to tire us out.
In a couple of hours we have our first game. I hope we win it. I know the team is going to feel a little intimidated when we fact the JCC again and I haven’t quite decided on my approach. I hope to get one of the game’s recapped tonight and another tomorrow before our game, but we’ll see. I haven’t been this unsure of our team since the first game. In many ways it’s very similar since I have no clue how we stack up against the talent we’re going against. Hopefully, I’ll be as pleasantly surprised today as I was on that day.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Assorted Items
HP Tourney
So 6 teams are in the A bracket for the tourney. I really like the format they are using. Two pools of three teams apiece. You play the other two teams in your pool. Based on your standing in the pool you then either get a bye (if you finish first) or play a team from the other pool, with the 2nd place teams playing the 3rd place teams.
About a week ago I sent Emily an email asking for a copy of the tourney rules. Today, after numerous emails and phone calls from her, I got a copy. Somehow, it does not surprise me that the HP Park District still does not have their act together. Reminds me of why I chose to coach the Spartans rather than in HP and just how right I was with that choice. Anyhow the tourney rules are:
I’m not really sure how the running clock will effect us, but I don’t think it’ll be our friend. We’re an aggressive team and we foul a lot. If the clock runs during free throw shots (which is sometimes done on running clocks and sometimes not) it’ll cut way down on possessions. On the other hand a running clock can increase the tempo of the game, and an increased tempo? Good for us.
In our pool we play HP. They’re a middle of the road team in the A bracket, 3-3, which suggests to me that we should have a shot, as I would guess we’d be a middle of the road team. I hope we win this game, because our next game is against the JCC team.
Now, that JCC team? It’s a good team. I know we didn’t play our best basketball against them. But, I’m not sure that even our best is good enough against them. I am glad we get another shot. I think we’ll be able to play #3 much better and our ball movement has looked good the last couple of games which should help us even if we can’t run our zone breaker. Of course that’s really the deal breaker. I expect us to get more transition points this game than we did last game. But even if we get more transition points, if we can’t beat their zone, which gave them numerous transition points, than we can’t beat them.
I haven’t told the team that we’re playing the JCC team again. I am glad that they’re the second game we play. I think it’ll mean they’ll come into the game warmed up and hopefully we can get off to a bit of a quick lead and place some pressure on them. Of course if we get blown out in the first game, or lose a real nail biter, we’re likely dead in the water once they see who we’re playing. On the other hand, if we can beat HP, I think we can build off that momentum and give the JCC team a surprise.
The only other team I can find out anything about is WM, another A bracket team. However, they’re in the cellar of the A bracket, having yet to win a game, so it’s likely if we can get the #2 seeding out of our pool we’ll make it into the final four.
I’m very excited to see how we fair against this tougher competition. There’s little doubt in my mind that we’ll lose more than 2 games in the regular season, and there’s an excellent chance we’ll go undefeated. If we win the post-season tourney, as I expect we will, there would be a lot of pressure to move up to the A bracket next year. This will be a preview of whether we have what it takes to succeed there.
Conference Update
We are, for the time being, the undisputed first place team, though MP is clearly nipping at our heels. We’re in good shape for the tie breaker, however, currently owning the first one (head-to-head record). The second one is points allowed in head-to-head games, so even if we were to lose to MP in the rematch, we’d just need to keep the margin of victory to with-in 12 to keep the tie breaker. After that it’s overall points allowed, and removing our game from the record, MP has been doing better than us here, allowing fewer points against the same teams. However, because of our 36 point game we are ahead here as well for the moment. Of interest is that MP is playing in the B bracket of the HP tourney. I’d have to think they’d stand a chance of doing well.
After us, there’s then the middle tier. In this grouping you have HP, MP2, and LS. MP2 is clearly the top of this heap and LS the worst. I think HP is a scrappy team and if they were to get the #4 seed in the post season tourney could upset us.
At the bottom of the barrel you have NF, NF2, and WK. None of these teams will give us any trouble, but it’ll be interesting to see how they sort themselves out.
Wages of Wins
I’ve mentioned several times that I like to use Win Score (WS) as a measure of player’s productivity. This stat (really more of a formula) came out of the book Wages of Wins, by Dave Berri (and several other authors whose names I don’t remember). This was a great book where three economists use the tools of economics to analyze sports.
They spend a lot of the book arguing that the current measures of performance in basketball do not strongly correlate to wins. In essence, they argue that scoring is over valued, and other statistics, such as turnovers, assists, rebounding, and the like are undervalued. To counter this perceived problem they formulated something called Wins Produced. This is an incredibly complicated formula. So, they made a simplified version of this called Win Score that an average fan could use from the box score to see how players on their teams performed. It is this measure that I use to evaluate my team. The formula is
I take this total and divide by minutes played to give me WS/M.
There has been some criticism of the methods that were used in this method, but none which I really felt exposed a flaw. That is until today. Over at the Saving Darko blog there is a post which suggests that while scoring might be over valued, this is because scoring is a far riskier proposition than rebounding, assists, and the such. One of the things that I like about WS is that unlike some other stats, such as PER, it recognizes the full opportunity cost of a possession. However, taken to its extreme players would have a disincentive to shoot were WS/WP to become the norm because, again, shooting is more risky.
So one needs to still encourage shooting, while looking at the other parts of the game as well. Now granted my players don’t know that I’m rating them on this, thought they do receive feedback in practice during drills/games based on what their WS is showing, but despite my thinking quite highly of WS, I still think highly of Jack P. This is a kid who shoots a lot, and misses a lot. However, his willingness to try and score, even if he’s not the highest % shooter, is helpful overall to the team. I’m happy that I intuitively made the adjustment that Saving Darko seems to be suggesting.
So 6 teams are in the A bracket for the tourney. I really like the format they are using. Two pools of three teams apiece. You play the other two teams in your pool. Based on your standing in the pool you then either get a bye (if you finish first) or play a team from the other pool, with the 2nd place teams playing the 3rd place teams.
About a week ago I sent Emily an email asking for a copy of the tourney rules. Today, after numerous emails and phone calls from her, I got a copy. Somehow, it does not surprise me that the HP Park District still does not have their act together. Reminds me of why I chose to coach the Spartans rather than in HP and just how right I was with that choice. Anyhow the tourney rules are:
1. All games are officiated under IHSA rules
2. All games have two, 20 minute running halves. The clock will stop only during the last two minutes of each half. Three timeouts per half.
3. 4th grade level may press only during the last 5minutes of each half with a 10 point limit.
4. Half times and warm-ups are five minutes long. All teams must provide a volunteer to work the table. Duties may include working the scoreboard or keeping the book
5. All teams must have light and dark color uniforms and bring them to each game.
6. No protests allowed. All scores are final.
8. Overtimes are two minutes long, 1 timeout per team no carryover.
I’m not really sure how the running clock will effect us, but I don’t think it’ll be our friend. We’re an aggressive team and we foul a lot. If the clock runs during free throw shots (which is sometimes done on running clocks and sometimes not) it’ll cut way down on possessions. On the other hand a running clock can increase the tempo of the game, and an increased tempo? Good for us.
In our pool we play HP. They’re a middle of the road team in the A bracket, 3-3, which suggests to me that we should have a shot, as I would guess we’d be a middle of the road team. I hope we win this game, because our next game is against the JCC team.
Now, that JCC team? It’s a good team. I know we didn’t play our best basketball against them. But, I’m not sure that even our best is good enough against them. I am glad we get another shot. I think we’ll be able to play #3 much better and our ball movement has looked good the last couple of games which should help us even if we can’t run our zone breaker. Of course that’s really the deal breaker. I expect us to get more transition points this game than we did last game. But even if we get more transition points, if we can’t beat their zone, which gave them numerous transition points, than we can’t beat them.
I haven’t told the team that we’re playing the JCC team again. I am glad that they’re the second game we play. I think it’ll mean they’ll come into the game warmed up and hopefully we can get off to a bit of a quick lead and place some pressure on them. Of course if we get blown out in the first game, or lose a real nail biter, we’re likely dead in the water once they see who we’re playing. On the other hand, if we can beat HP, I think we can build off that momentum and give the JCC team a surprise.
The only other team I can find out anything about is WM, another A bracket team. However, they’re in the cellar of the A bracket, having yet to win a game, so it’s likely if we can get the #2 seeding out of our pool we’ll make it into the final four.
I’m very excited to see how we fair against this tougher competition. There’s little doubt in my mind that we’ll lose more than 2 games in the regular season, and there’s an excellent chance we’ll go undefeated. If we win the post-season tourney, as I expect we will, there would be a lot of pressure to move up to the A bracket next year. This will be a preview of whether we have what it takes to succeed there.
Conference Update
We are, for the time being, the undisputed first place team, though MP is clearly nipping at our heels. We’re in good shape for the tie breaker, however, currently owning the first one (head-to-head record). The second one is points allowed in head-to-head games, so even if we were to lose to MP in the rematch, we’d just need to keep the margin of victory to with-in 12 to keep the tie breaker. After that it’s overall points allowed, and removing our game from the record, MP has been doing better than us here, allowing fewer points against the same teams. However, because of our 36 point game we are ahead here as well for the moment. Of interest is that MP is playing in the B bracket of the HP tourney. I’d have to think they’d stand a chance of doing well.
After us, there’s then the middle tier. In this grouping you have HP, MP2, and LS. MP2 is clearly the top of this heap and LS the worst. I think HP is a scrappy team and if they were to get the #4 seed in the post season tourney could upset us.
At the bottom of the barrel you have NF, NF2, and WK. None of these teams will give us any trouble, but it’ll be interesting to see how they sort themselves out.
Wages of Wins
I’ve mentioned several times that I like to use Win Score (WS) as a measure of player’s productivity. This stat (really more of a formula) came out of the book Wages of Wins, by Dave Berri (and several other authors whose names I don’t remember). This was a great book where three economists use the tools of economics to analyze sports.
They spend a lot of the book arguing that the current measures of performance in basketball do not strongly correlate to wins. In essence, they argue that scoring is over valued, and other statistics, such as turnovers, assists, rebounding, and the like are undervalued. To counter this perceived problem they formulated something called Wins Produced. This is an incredibly complicated formula. So, they made a simplified version of this called Win Score that an average fan could use from the box score to see how players on their teams performed. It is this measure that I use to evaluate my team. The formula is
Points + Rebounds + Steals + ½Assists + ½Blocked Shots – Field Goal Attempts – Turnovers - ½Free Throw Attempts - ½Personal Fouls
I take this total and divide by minutes played to give me WS/M.
There has been some criticism of the methods that were used in this method, but none which I really felt exposed a flaw. That is until today. Over at the Saving Darko blog there is a post which suggests that while scoring might be over valued, this is because scoring is a far riskier proposition than rebounding, assists, and the such. One of the things that I like about WS is that unlike some other stats, such as PER, it recognizes the full opportunity cost of a possession. However, taken to its extreme players would have a disincentive to shoot were WS/WP to become the norm because, again, shooting is more risky.
So one needs to still encourage shooting, while looking at the other parts of the game as well. Now granted my players don’t know that I’m rating them on this, thought they do receive feedback in practice during drills/games based on what their WS is showing, but despite my thinking quite highly of WS, I still think highly of Jack P. This is a kid who shoots a lot, and misses a lot. However, his willingness to try and score, even if he’s not the highest % shooter, is helpful overall to the team. I’m happy that I intuitively made the adjustment that Saving Darko seems to be suggesting.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Spartans vs. WK
I get to the game and the 5th grade boys travel team game is well under way. I find Noah and Jack P already at the game. We go and sit down on some empty bleachers and watch the game. The team filters in and we have some nice hang-out time, a luxury we don’t normally get. Finally with about 90 seconds in the game there’s a free throw at the far basket and I take the team out of the gym and we have our pregame meeting. I figure they’ll be hot to start the next game and so we can save time by doing that first. I should point out that when I get to the game more than a half hour early the entire WK team is there and sitting in a corner. Seems like a huge waste of their time, but hey what do I know?
In our pregame talk I retell the last three games of the season for my beloved 49’ers. How they have a huge game against the Seahawks, win, and then lose to Arizona, which after they beat Denver the next week proved to be the difference between making the playoffs and not. I emphasized it was Arizona. It’s nice that it was the Cardinals since even at 9 boys are going to know that they’re a laughing stock. I pointed out that the 9’ers played a great game against a good team but then had a let down game the next game against a bad team. A few of the swifter boys understood the analogy, but for our slower ones I connected the dots. I emphasized that I wanted to come out running. I named our starting five (Jack M at 1, Brian at 2, David at 3, Jack P at 4, Dante at 5)
We then head back into the gym at almost the same time that the other game had ended (must have been a lot of end of game free throws). One of the refs (we have our normal crew, meaning it is the same set of brothers) asks how long I want to warm-up. I say that 3 minutes should do it. And so three minutes goes on the clock. I have our team start with a quick set of layups and then after I’ve gotten some business squared away, we go into our 3 on 2 half-court warm-up. From where we started to where we are now on this is amazing. We’re making good quick passes that takes advantage of the space and numerical superiority. We had enough time that everyone got to go once before there was about 20 seconds left. I send our starting five out. WK comes in. Just to recap, while the previous game was going on the coach was talking at them. Clearly they then had another pre-game meeting. That’s a lot of talking.
The game starts, David tips it to Brian, standing towards our basket, Brian dribbles two steps, makes a pass to Jack P who goes in for the easy lay-up. And with-in 10 seconds we’re out to a 2-0 lead. The game was absurd. 18-0 at half. At half time we do a “name something good you saw” since there was so much. Whether it was the alley oop to David, Lucas’s rebounding (more about this later), or several other things I’ve forgotten there wasn’t too much trouble for each kid to give a specific positive.
Almost from the start I work hard to get Gordie and Noah in there and getting some playing time, trying as much as possible to put our B time out on the court. By the 4th quarter WK has still failed to score a point. By this point they were not to run a fast break, period, and had to work around for good passes. In particular I was vocally encouraging working the ball into the posts (high and low) and we had some nice looks with that, though not as many conversions as we could since poor Dante couldn’t make a shot (more on this later as well). With about 3 minutes left, WK finally scores a point. Everyone, cheered. I kind of felt bad for WK as it was kind of like if we were playing a 3rd grade travel team in terms of their skills. The WK coach happens to be commissioner of the league and he made a joke at one point about immediately moving us into the A league.
The only negative is that we still couldn’t run Indiana even against their rather hapless 3-2 defense. I really don’t know what we’re going to do when we face the killer 1-3-1 of the JCC team next Saturday.
Final score as 32-7. I was really making an effort to get our lesser players in the game more and sit people like David, but wasn’t nearly as successful as I’d like to have been as the minutes for the game were pretty universal. Let’s take a look at the players:
Brian – Got the wind knocked out of him hard one time. He didn’t play his best game on offense, but his defense was superb while guarding his man on ball. He is too willing on defense to free lance, leaving his player open, but when I told him he needed to stay on his man more he adjusted nicely.
Dante – So I think I’ve discovered the reason why he hasn’t been playing well in several of our games: soccer. Turns out he’s had a soccer game before our basketball game on several of the days he hasn’t done well. Yesterday when he played well? No soccer. I need to get a hold of his soccer schedule so I can know I which Dante is going to show.
David – I was really trying to sit him a lot and he still got 11 minutes of play. I told him that he’d played ¾ of the game yesterday and would be playing a lot in the tourney, so he was going to sit more today. David, being David, found this perfectly reasonable and gave no complaint.
Gordie – He had his best game to date, which isn’t saying much. Excepting the first game (when we only had 7 players) he had the most minutes he’s had. Overall he did some things well, but in a game where 7 of our 10 players had a positive WS (Dante and Jack M were the others with negative ones), and remembering that for the season only 4 have positive WS, one could expect him to have played well against a clearly over matched team and he still managed to turn over the ball 5 times.
Jack M – I’m not really sure why he didn’t play better. This is a team he should have eaten alive. I especially thought with the start he’d do better, but perhaps he put more pressure on himself and that negated the implied confidence boost. He led the team in minutes so perhaps fatigue had something to do with it as well.
Jack P – He actually did very well this game with his shooting percentage, which is the biggest thing which holds him back. I was happy, in other words, with the game he played. He made a couple of fast break layups which is what I have been hoping to see.
Lucas – At half someone gave as their positive all of the rebounds Lucas had. I agreed it was definitely a positive. However, when the game ended and I looked over the stats I had no idea of just how right this was. Lucas had a team-high (for the season) 12 rebounds. He was just eating them alive out there. Amazing.
Noah – He scored two baskets, which was nice for him. Still a huge liability on defense and a smaller one on offense. I was sad to see I had only gotten him 13 minutes of play. I’d rather have seen this in the 15-17 minute range.
Scott – Scott only played 8 minutes, and if it hadn’t been for a late game “shift change” we did he’d have only had 7 minutes. Something was wrong with Scott’s ankle. He denied that he was hurt in any way, but I don’t think that’s true (just as it wasn’t true with Noah). Hopefully he’ll be at 100% by Saturday.
Tom – Tom saw time at 1, 2, 3, and 4 today. I was hoping one of those positions would really ignite him and we could see explode. Sadly, nothing clicked. I had thought he’d turned a corner with how he was playing before break, but perhaps he just had a couple of good games. I maintain there is potential with him that we’re not seeing.
No practice tomorrow. Instead I will preview the HP tourney a bit (not that I haven’t been talking about the JCC team enough already).
In our pregame talk I retell the last three games of the season for my beloved 49’ers. How they have a huge game against the Seahawks, win, and then lose to Arizona, which after they beat Denver the next week proved to be the difference between making the playoffs and not. I emphasized it was Arizona. It’s nice that it was the Cardinals since even at 9 boys are going to know that they’re a laughing stock. I pointed out that the 9’ers played a great game against a good team but then had a let down game the next game against a bad team. A few of the swifter boys understood the analogy, but for our slower ones I connected the dots. I emphasized that I wanted to come out running. I named our starting five (Jack M at 1, Brian at 2, David at 3, Jack P at 4, Dante at 5)
We then head back into the gym at almost the same time that the other game had ended (must have been a lot of end of game free throws). One of the refs (we have our normal crew, meaning it is the same set of brothers) asks how long I want to warm-up. I say that 3 minutes should do it. And so three minutes goes on the clock. I have our team start with a quick set of layups and then after I’ve gotten some business squared away, we go into our 3 on 2 half-court warm-up. From where we started to where we are now on this is amazing. We’re making good quick passes that takes advantage of the space and numerical superiority. We had enough time that everyone got to go once before there was about 20 seconds left. I send our starting five out. WK comes in. Just to recap, while the previous game was going on the coach was talking at them. Clearly they then had another pre-game meeting. That’s a lot of talking.
The game starts, David tips it to Brian, standing towards our basket, Brian dribbles two steps, makes a pass to Jack P who goes in for the easy lay-up. And with-in 10 seconds we’re out to a 2-0 lead. The game was absurd. 18-0 at half. At half time we do a “name something good you saw” since there was so much. Whether it was the alley oop to David, Lucas’s rebounding (more about this later), or several other things I’ve forgotten there wasn’t too much trouble for each kid to give a specific positive.
Almost from the start I work hard to get Gordie and Noah in there and getting some playing time, trying as much as possible to put our B time out on the court. By the 4th quarter WK has still failed to score a point. By this point they were not to run a fast break, period, and had to work around for good passes. In particular I was vocally encouraging working the ball into the posts (high and low) and we had some nice looks with that, though not as many conversions as we could since poor Dante couldn’t make a shot (more on this later as well). With about 3 minutes left, WK finally scores a point. Everyone, cheered. I kind of felt bad for WK as it was kind of like if we were playing a 3rd grade travel team in terms of their skills. The WK coach happens to be commissioner of the league and he made a joke at one point about immediately moving us into the A league.
The only negative is that we still couldn’t run Indiana even against their rather hapless 3-2 defense. I really don’t know what we’re going to do when we face the killer 1-3-1 of the JCC team next Saturday.
Final score as 32-7. I was really making an effort to get our lesser players in the game more and sit people like David, but wasn’t nearly as successful as I’d like to have been as the minutes for the game were pretty universal. Let’s take a look at the players:
Brian – Got the wind knocked out of him hard one time. He didn’t play his best game on offense, but his defense was superb while guarding his man on ball. He is too willing on defense to free lance, leaving his player open, but when I told him he needed to stay on his man more he adjusted nicely.
Dante – So I think I’ve discovered the reason why he hasn’t been playing well in several of our games: soccer. Turns out he’s had a soccer game before our basketball game on several of the days he hasn’t done well. Yesterday when he played well? No soccer. I need to get a hold of his soccer schedule so I can know I which Dante is going to show.
David – I was really trying to sit him a lot and he still got 11 minutes of play. I told him that he’d played ¾ of the game yesterday and would be playing a lot in the tourney, so he was going to sit more today. David, being David, found this perfectly reasonable and gave no complaint.
Gordie – He had his best game to date, which isn’t saying much. Excepting the first game (when we only had 7 players) he had the most minutes he’s had. Overall he did some things well, but in a game where 7 of our 10 players had a positive WS (Dante and Jack M were the others with negative ones), and remembering that for the season only 4 have positive WS, one could expect him to have played well against a clearly over matched team and he still managed to turn over the ball 5 times.
Jack M – I’m not really sure why he didn’t play better. This is a team he should have eaten alive. I especially thought with the start he’d do better, but perhaps he put more pressure on himself and that negated the implied confidence boost. He led the team in minutes so perhaps fatigue had something to do with it as well.
Jack P – He actually did very well this game with his shooting percentage, which is the biggest thing which holds him back. I was happy, in other words, with the game he played. He made a couple of fast break layups which is what I have been hoping to see.
Lucas – At half someone gave as their positive all of the rebounds Lucas had. I agreed it was definitely a positive. However, when the game ended and I looked over the stats I had no idea of just how right this was. Lucas had a team-high (for the season) 12 rebounds. He was just eating them alive out there. Amazing.
Noah – He scored two baskets, which was nice for him. Still a huge liability on defense and a smaller one on offense. I was sad to see I had only gotten him 13 minutes of play. I’d rather have seen this in the 15-17 minute range.
Scott – Scott only played 8 minutes, and if it hadn’t been for a late game “shift change” we did he’d have only had 7 minutes. Something was wrong with Scott’s ankle. He denied that he was hurt in any way, but I don’t think that’s true (just as it wasn’t true with Noah). Hopefully he’ll be at 100% by Saturday.
Tom – Tom saw time at 1, 2, 3, and 4 today. I was hoping one of those positions would really ignite him and we could see explode. Sadly, nothing clicked. I had thought he’d turned a corner with how he was playing before break, but perhaps he just had a couple of good games. I maintain there is potential with him that we’re not seeing.
No practice tomorrow. Instead I will preview the HP tourney a bit (not that I haven’t been talking about the JCC team enough already).
Spartans vs. MP1
Well yesterday was the day. After essentially a month of anticipation we finally got to have our go against MP and the game was every bit as competitive as I’d expected.
I get to the game a little bit earlier than a half hour and get to see a good portion of the 6th grade girls team getting blown out by another team. It was not a pretty sight. The MP coach arrived early and we chatted a little bit before the game. He seemed like a nice guy and we chatted with each other quite amiably. Anyhow we straggle in, with 9 of the 10 players getting there by the designated time of 5:30. I had been informed we were going to start the game 10 minutes early, which I objected to under the grounds that my whole team might not be there. However, when at 5:35 we had all buy Gordie there I said we can go ahead and Goride arrived just as we were going over to the huddle to talk.
In the pregame huddle I reminded them of some of the highlights of last night’s speech and then explained that our offensive focus would be beating them back. I wanted that ball in bounded quickly, sent to the outlet even quicker. On defense I identified our priority as helping out in our man-to-man defense. And then it was time to send our starting five of David, Tom, Brian, Scott, and Lucas out there. The good news is that this team is not particularly tall. It seems like when the two MP teams were divvying up the players MP2 took the taller players, who were slightly less athletic, while MP took the slightly more athletic players.
They come out and right off the bat run basically the same high screen play that MP2 ran. As they were running this play the third time, (they called it 1) though not on consecutive possessions I shouted out “Watch the high pick. Just like the other MP team ran.” My players adjusted accordingly and we only saw this play one other time during the game. They also ran a double pick play that proved quite effective. It led to numerous fouls being called on us and several baskets as well. They were a good shooting free throw team and we quickly fell behind. I was not surprised that we were committing so many fouls. I didn’t do a good job of calling fouls during the 3 on 3 drill we did and the Animal Rebounding drill is predicated on not calling too many fouls, so our team had gotten a little sloppy.
Meanwhile on our side of the ball, they were running a 2-1-2 defense. I basically let our offense try and work the motion and see if they could create something, but to no avail. I called a 30 second time out, switched Brian and David, and instructed them to run Indiana. We ran it on a few possessions and on one of them it actually resulted in a basket. There were a couple of other times where when we had a look, but the player didn’t take it before the play broke down. MP basically shut down the play by preventing us from making the first pass. Part of this was because Tom and David were going down the court on the same side each time, so the pass was going the same direction each time. Even if that first pass was getting there they were then executing a very high trap leading to a turn over. I think I’m going to make a few minor changes to the play, or rather teach them a variant, that should help us out in that situation. But I’m glad we had a success with it. We’re going to need it against the JCC team in the HP tourney so I’m pleased with our improvement.
Between their offense and defense they had opened up a 7 point lead at the end of the first. In many ways we were lucky it wasn’t 11 or so. During the huddle between quarters I diagramed the double screen play that they were running for the team. David, bless his heart, had already figured out the whole play, and a couple of others in the game had figured out parts of it, which is again a testament to their basketball IQs. There was a funny moment. We were kind of slow getting into our huddle. I heard their coach start to diagram their press break. A kid asked how he knew that we were going to press and the coach just replied that he knew. I smiled since I knew I had no intention of pressing, or even pressuring them at the start of the quarter. I wanted to save it until we were either in slightly more dire straights, or for the 4th quarter.
We come out pretty flat in the second quarter. They don’t have their first string in there and the subs I’ve made didn’t really hurt our quality of player out there much, so the game stays pretty much at a standstill for a bit. However, then the phantom calls started happening. In the first quarter ever call that was made was legitimate. But in that second quarter we were getting called for all sorts of things which simply weren’t there. We quickly go into bonus and then double bonus. At one point Lucas gets called for a foul which was not a foul. In fact Lucas was called for 3 fouls none of which were great calls, not surprising as coming into the game Lucas had committed only 2 fouls the whole season. After this call which was not a call, I asked what the foul was. They said Lucas’s number. I said I heard who it was on. What was the call. I say it in an inquiring tone, but it was my way of asking “what the heck?” During baseball I NEVER question the umpire. And really I hadn’t talked to these refs too much, but the officiating was highly suspect this game and it was too close of a game for me not to grow a bit frustrated.
Anyhow, we’re really out of sorts. They are basically running a trapping defense against us in the second quarter and it had some success. However, our offense FINALLY kicked into gear and we started to create some fast break opportunities. This allowed the refs to call some specious travel violations, but it also caught us up from what had been at one point a 9 point deficit to only 5. Credit for this change in offensive pace really belongs with David and Jack P, though Jack M helped as well here.
During half time I kept the talk simple. I asked what our offensive goal for the day was. I’m met with blank stares. I pointed out that it was beating the other team back down the court. That’s what we needed to be doing and weren’t doing. Then I talked about the fouls. I said that they were calling things in this game that they hadn’t in previous games and we needed to recognize that. I reminded them that basically any contact in the lane was going to be called a foul so if you were playing help defense, which we’d been doing a good job of doing, make sure you tried to meet the man outside of the lane. We talked a little bit about how to take a charge and then I sent them back out there.
The big difference in the 3rd quarter was our defense. They kept going back to the well of the play with the double screen, but it got less and less effective, until finally by the end of the quarter they stopped running it. Meanwhile, their zone started to get sloppy. We were running enough transition offense that they weren’t making their traps work. Plus having David and the Jacks being able to dribble through a lot of them helped. By the end of the 3rd quarter we’d pulled to with-in 2. And then we tied it up. We got the ball back with 9 seconds. I told David, who was taking the ball up the court, that we had plenty of time. Someone on the bench scoffed at this and I pointed out that 8 seconds was enough time for two shots. Sure enough we got a good shot off with about 3 seconds left, but it missed. Lucas grabbed the rebound and put it back in half a second before the buzzer went off and we entered the fourth quarter up by two. After Lucas made that shot, our bench exploded. Honestly you’d have thought that was the end of the game. However, seeing the pure joy of his teammates caused Lucas to flash one of the best smiles I’ve seen in a long time. That moment right there is a big reason I coach sports.
I pulled the team together and said “It’s games like this that make me love basketball. This is fun. Each quarter we’ve been doing better. We started off down by 7, narrowed it down to 5 at half and now we’re up by 2. We’ve got 7 more minutes to play and we’re going to win this game.” And sure enough the 4th quarter was ours. We were still getting called for a bunch of fouls, but they weren’t making as many of their shots, and there were less shooting fouls anyway. More importantly we were doing a great job of moving the ball around on offense. Brian hit a couple of clutch outside shots which made them guard our perimeter more giving us more players open inside. On defense we continued to hold them SO tightly. Lucas drew a key offensive foul that was a big moral booster. With about 2 minutes left we’d extended our lead to 6. Tom had started doing a chant of “Defense” from the bench that was great. Our players were pumped and their side was not. With about 90 seconds their PG, who was a pretty good player, fouled out.
Not too long after that they decided to start fouling us. Now they’d had their own share of fouls in the second half and so when they foul Scott and they went to the line, I thought it was a 1 and 1. Scott missed the first shot, and there’s no jostling or anything, which didn’t even register at the time. Jack P ends up with the ball. I tell him to shoot. At that point one of the MP players starts guarding him. Jack goes in strong for a lay-up, which he makes and there’s a whistle. Looks like it’s going to be a possible three point play.
Their coach starts asking if the foul wasn’t an intentional foul. He thought they did the signal for an intentional foul. I had been talking with someone on the bench, so while I saw the foul, I didn’t pay attention to the call. The two refs conferred and agreed it’d been a called an intentional foul. And let me say that I thought that was an awful call. I mean granted they were trying to intentionally foul us, but it wasn’t like they Scott was in any danger of being hurt. After it was agreed that it was a two shot foul, the coach gets very upset and starts going off at the refs on how they don’t even know the rules of the game. He’s really livid about the poor officiating.
Something I’d never mentioned before is that the refs who typically do our games are a pair of brothers, while the scoreboard operator is a third brother. So as the MP coach is going off on the refs, the scoreboard operator tells him to cool it. They go back and forth for a little and finally the MP coach does quiet down. Since it was an intentional foul, we get the ball back. When the ref comes over, the scoreboard guy whispers to him about the MP coach. The ref then tells the coach not to yell at the scorer’s table. This starts a heated discussion between the ref and the MP coach. At one point the ref had to say, “Coach lower your voice there are kids around.” The MP’s coach was two fold: the scoreboard operator started it, he doesn’t really have the authority to tell me to be quiet, and because of this if he talks to me I’ll talk back. While I think the scoreboard operator did have the authority to say what he said, I otherwise agree with the MP coach. This discussion, which took a minute or two, really took a lot of the good feeling out of the game, which was unfortunate. As it was going on, I even said “this is a shame.” Gordie asked me why and I said that it was taking away from our great victory. Finally that whole discussion finishes.
They keep fouling us and in the end we win by 12, 36-24, though it was far more of a 6 or 8 point victory, just because of the way the end of the game went down. Our bench leapt up with great joy. We were very happy at winning this game, no doubt about it. We went through and shook their hands. At the end I shook the hand of the MP coach and we exchanged a few pleasant words about each others team and agreed that the officiating was horrible. I had been quite pleased with the officiating we’d had up until this point, but this game was just not called well.
This game reinforces a few things. One we thrive off a transition offense. In the 3rd and 4th quarters we did a good job of running a half-court offense, but it was because we’d changed the tempo of the game. My dad, who is obviously biased, feels that the other team was out coached. I’m not sure that’s true at all. I think I’m getting a lot of credit, from not only my dad but the other parents for things that the team did naturally. Now a few of my decisions have been good decisions. So, for instance, we don’t have plays. Instead we work on drills and offense more abstractly. When MP was forced to stop using their plays and go into more just playing basketball, we were more than up for the task. So I guess I do deserve credit for that. At the same time, their coach has taught them how to trap pretty well, both full and half court, and we haven’t done that at all. So I’ll add that to our list of goals of things to do between now and the end of the season.
One thing I did, and it was a pretty conscious decision, was weight the playing time in favor of certain players. I don’t think I did as good of job of balancing our need to win with players having the right to play as I did in some other games. I’ll talk about those specific cases as we look at individual performances.
Brian – Talked with him before the game. The conversation went well and he had a great game. Took four shots and made them all. He is definitely our best jump shot player. He will be getting the start again today against WK.
Dante – Only saw 7.5 minutes of play and did much better in that time than he had in the last couple of games, pulling down 4 rebounds, a block, and a steal in that time. He’s going to start as well today. Scott and Lucas were having good games as well, and so I felt bad at the time that Dante wasn’t getting more time, but was reluctant to pull the trigger in getting him more time.
David – Another excellent game. He and Jack P helped get our game going. My dad thought he’d only sat like 3 or 4 minutes, but really he played about 21 minutes, or ¾ of a game. I don’t feel bad about that at all and David could easily be seeing that kind of playing time again in our games. Everyone is a better player with David on the court. He leads our team in points, but is also second in assists. He’s a true team player and doesn’t act like a star, so I don’t feel bad at all about giving him the chance to shine.
Gordie – Gordie got into serious foul trouble which limited his time to only 6 and a half minutes. Once again his turnovers killed us. He also lost time since I yanked him earlier than I would have in the 4th after he put up an atrocious shot while double teamed. He knew it was a bad shot, but claimed he was open when he started to take it. I responded that if he’d said that and had used good form, I would have been ok with the shot. But the shot was with awful form and in a bad spot. What was interesting was that even after this conversation he said after Lucas drew the offensive foul, “I’ve never had a coach who is nice and good before.” That was a really nice thing to hear and shows how if you’re fair and respectful to a kid, you can impose consequences (you shoot bad shots and you come out) and they won’t hold it against you.
Jack M – Here was another player I’d like to have played more in the end of the game but for whom there wasn’t a spot and so he too will get the start today. He did have 12 minutes on the game, and played well in that time. There was something slippery on the basket by our bench and so a couple of times Jack turned the ball over when it wasn’t his fault. I was pleased with how he played and feel good about giving him the start today.
Jack P – He had a great first half, as mentioned. While he missed a lot of shots in the second half, which is typical for him, I felt he was key to our victory and he was the only player I named specifically in our post game talk. He’ll start again today.
Lucas – While he didn’t rebound particularly well in his time (only 3 in 15 minutes of play) he made the basket off our zone breaker, on a nice feed from David, and was clutch when we needed it. Not his best game, but he’s an important piece of our puzzle.
Noah – A continued nothing in his 8.5 minutes of play. He’s a really nice kid and I told him that if he will go a whole continuous motion without walking or stopping that I would start him, he doesn’t really bring much to the game either offensively or defensively. Gordie, has some play making instincts, but Noah is pretty much over matched on the court. I really like him, but he just hasn’t progressed as much as a player as I’d like.
Scott – He continues to play big. He came in second on the team in minutes, with 21. In reality we’d likely have been OK if some of those minutes had gone to Dante/Lucas, but he works well with David (in other words he’s excellent at finding David as an outlet) and you’ll rarely have anything but positive energy from him.
Tom – Tom is a crucial member of the team. I played him the whole first quarter and he only saw 3 minutes of play after that, at the end of the 3rd and beginning of the 4th. When I took him out in the 4th he said “I stink”. I was not pleased to hear him say this, as Tom is the one who will start us cheering, as he did here. Or provide that comic relief. While he gets frustrated with himself he never is anything but positive and supportive of his teammates. While I think he’s slightly under achieving for his basketball skills, so the frustration is somewhat understandable, I don’t think he’s as bad as he thinks he is. I hope that he can have a break out game one of these games to give himself some confidence.
Today we play WK. They’ve put up a lot of points lately and I think that they’re going to upset someone soon, despite their 1-4 record. I don’t want it to be us. In my pregame talk I’m going to focus on not having a “let down game”. We’re a superior team and if we play like it, we’ll win easily. However, if we don’t play our top game we could be in trouble.
Let me just close with this: the best thing about this victory was that we were behind the whole first half. I talk about the difference between a good and a great team. And I knew they had it in them to come from behind. However, they didn’t know that. Now they do. While over confidence was starting to become a problem, and will likely rear its head again depending on how we do in the HP tourney, we needed to know that not only could we get out to a lead and hold it, but that we could come back. We didn’t believe it when we played the JCC team last time, but this team we should believe it. If we can win well today, in what could be a potential pitfall game, we’ll be in a good place for the HP tourney, which I’ll talk about more in a post tomorrow or Tuesday.
I get to the game a little bit earlier than a half hour and get to see a good portion of the 6th grade girls team getting blown out by another team. It was not a pretty sight. The MP coach arrived early and we chatted a little bit before the game. He seemed like a nice guy and we chatted with each other quite amiably. Anyhow we straggle in, with 9 of the 10 players getting there by the designated time of 5:30. I had been informed we were going to start the game 10 minutes early, which I objected to under the grounds that my whole team might not be there. However, when at 5:35 we had all buy Gordie there I said we can go ahead and Goride arrived just as we were going over to the huddle to talk.
In the pregame huddle I reminded them of some of the highlights of last night’s speech and then explained that our offensive focus would be beating them back. I wanted that ball in bounded quickly, sent to the outlet even quicker. On defense I identified our priority as helping out in our man-to-man defense. And then it was time to send our starting five of David, Tom, Brian, Scott, and Lucas out there. The good news is that this team is not particularly tall. It seems like when the two MP teams were divvying up the players MP2 took the taller players, who were slightly less athletic, while MP took the slightly more athletic players.
They come out and right off the bat run basically the same high screen play that MP2 ran. As they were running this play the third time, (they called it 1) though not on consecutive possessions I shouted out “Watch the high pick. Just like the other MP team ran.” My players adjusted accordingly and we only saw this play one other time during the game. They also ran a double pick play that proved quite effective. It led to numerous fouls being called on us and several baskets as well. They were a good shooting free throw team and we quickly fell behind. I was not surprised that we were committing so many fouls. I didn’t do a good job of calling fouls during the 3 on 3 drill we did and the Animal Rebounding drill is predicated on not calling too many fouls, so our team had gotten a little sloppy.
Meanwhile on our side of the ball, they were running a 2-1-2 defense. I basically let our offense try and work the motion and see if they could create something, but to no avail. I called a 30 second time out, switched Brian and David, and instructed them to run Indiana. We ran it on a few possessions and on one of them it actually resulted in a basket. There were a couple of other times where when we had a look, but the player didn’t take it before the play broke down. MP basically shut down the play by preventing us from making the first pass. Part of this was because Tom and David were going down the court on the same side each time, so the pass was going the same direction each time. Even if that first pass was getting there they were then executing a very high trap leading to a turn over. I think I’m going to make a few minor changes to the play, or rather teach them a variant, that should help us out in that situation. But I’m glad we had a success with it. We’re going to need it against the JCC team in the HP tourney so I’m pleased with our improvement.
Between their offense and defense they had opened up a 7 point lead at the end of the first. In many ways we were lucky it wasn’t 11 or so. During the huddle between quarters I diagramed the double screen play that they were running for the team. David, bless his heart, had already figured out the whole play, and a couple of others in the game had figured out parts of it, which is again a testament to their basketball IQs. There was a funny moment. We were kind of slow getting into our huddle. I heard their coach start to diagram their press break. A kid asked how he knew that we were going to press and the coach just replied that he knew. I smiled since I knew I had no intention of pressing, or even pressuring them at the start of the quarter. I wanted to save it until we were either in slightly more dire straights, or for the 4th quarter.
We come out pretty flat in the second quarter. They don’t have their first string in there and the subs I’ve made didn’t really hurt our quality of player out there much, so the game stays pretty much at a standstill for a bit. However, then the phantom calls started happening. In the first quarter ever call that was made was legitimate. But in that second quarter we were getting called for all sorts of things which simply weren’t there. We quickly go into bonus and then double bonus. At one point Lucas gets called for a foul which was not a foul. In fact Lucas was called for 3 fouls none of which were great calls, not surprising as coming into the game Lucas had committed only 2 fouls the whole season. After this call which was not a call, I asked what the foul was. They said Lucas’s number. I said I heard who it was on. What was the call. I say it in an inquiring tone, but it was my way of asking “what the heck?” During baseball I NEVER question the umpire. And really I hadn’t talked to these refs too much, but the officiating was highly suspect this game and it was too close of a game for me not to grow a bit frustrated.
Anyhow, we’re really out of sorts. They are basically running a trapping defense against us in the second quarter and it had some success. However, our offense FINALLY kicked into gear and we started to create some fast break opportunities. This allowed the refs to call some specious travel violations, but it also caught us up from what had been at one point a 9 point deficit to only 5. Credit for this change in offensive pace really belongs with David and Jack P, though Jack M helped as well here.
During half time I kept the talk simple. I asked what our offensive goal for the day was. I’m met with blank stares. I pointed out that it was beating the other team back down the court. That’s what we needed to be doing and weren’t doing. Then I talked about the fouls. I said that they were calling things in this game that they hadn’t in previous games and we needed to recognize that. I reminded them that basically any contact in the lane was going to be called a foul so if you were playing help defense, which we’d been doing a good job of doing, make sure you tried to meet the man outside of the lane. We talked a little bit about how to take a charge and then I sent them back out there.
The big difference in the 3rd quarter was our defense. They kept going back to the well of the play with the double screen, but it got less and less effective, until finally by the end of the quarter they stopped running it. Meanwhile, their zone started to get sloppy. We were running enough transition offense that they weren’t making their traps work. Plus having David and the Jacks being able to dribble through a lot of them helped. By the end of the 3rd quarter we’d pulled to with-in 2. And then we tied it up. We got the ball back with 9 seconds. I told David, who was taking the ball up the court, that we had plenty of time. Someone on the bench scoffed at this and I pointed out that 8 seconds was enough time for two shots. Sure enough we got a good shot off with about 3 seconds left, but it missed. Lucas grabbed the rebound and put it back in half a second before the buzzer went off and we entered the fourth quarter up by two. After Lucas made that shot, our bench exploded. Honestly you’d have thought that was the end of the game. However, seeing the pure joy of his teammates caused Lucas to flash one of the best smiles I’ve seen in a long time. That moment right there is a big reason I coach sports.
I pulled the team together and said “It’s games like this that make me love basketball. This is fun. Each quarter we’ve been doing better. We started off down by 7, narrowed it down to 5 at half and now we’re up by 2. We’ve got 7 more minutes to play and we’re going to win this game.” And sure enough the 4th quarter was ours. We were still getting called for a bunch of fouls, but they weren’t making as many of their shots, and there were less shooting fouls anyway. More importantly we were doing a great job of moving the ball around on offense. Brian hit a couple of clutch outside shots which made them guard our perimeter more giving us more players open inside. On defense we continued to hold them SO tightly. Lucas drew a key offensive foul that was a big moral booster. With about 2 minutes left we’d extended our lead to 6. Tom had started doing a chant of “Defense” from the bench that was great. Our players were pumped and their side was not. With about 90 seconds their PG, who was a pretty good player, fouled out.
Not too long after that they decided to start fouling us. Now they’d had their own share of fouls in the second half and so when they foul Scott and they went to the line, I thought it was a 1 and 1. Scott missed the first shot, and there’s no jostling or anything, which didn’t even register at the time. Jack P ends up with the ball. I tell him to shoot. At that point one of the MP players starts guarding him. Jack goes in strong for a lay-up, which he makes and there’s a whistle. Looks like it’s going to be a possible three point play.
Their coach starts asking if the foul wasn’t an intentional foul. He thought they did the signal for an intentional foul. I had been talking with someone on the bench, so while I saw the foul, I didn’t pay attention to the call. The two refs conferred and agreed it’d been a called an intentional foul. And let me say that I thought that was an awful call. I mean granted they were trying to intentionally foul us, but it wasn’t like they Scott was in any danger of being hurt. After it was agreed that it was a two shot foul, the coach gets very upset and starts going off at the refs on how they don’t even know the rules of the game. He’s really livid about the poor officiating.
Something I’d never mentioned before is that the refs who typically do our games are a pair of brothers, while the scoreboard operator is a third brother. So as the MP coach is going off on the refs, the scoreboard operator tells him to cool it. They go back and forth for a little and finally the MP coach does quiet down. Since it was an intentional foul, we get the ball back. When the ref comes over, the scoreboard guy whispers to him about the MP coach. The ref then tells the coach not to yell at the scorer’s table. This starts a heated discussion between the ref and the MP coach. At one point the ref had to say, “Coach lower your voice there are kids around.” The MP’s coach was two fold: the scoreboard operator started it, he doesn’t really have the authority to tell me to be quiet, and because of this if he talks to me I’ll talk back. While I think the scoreboard operator did have the authority to say what he said, I otherwise agree with the MP coach. This discussion, which took a minute or two, really took a lot of the good feeling out of the game, which was unfortunate. As it was going on, I even said “this is a shame.” Gordie asked me why and I said that it was taking away from our great victory. Finally that whole discussion finishes.
They keep fouling us and in the end we win by 12, 36-24, though it was far more of a 6 or 8 point victory, just because of the way the end of the game went down. Our bench leapt up with great joy. We were very happy at winning this game, no doubt about it. We went through and shook their hands. At the end I shook the hand of the MP coach and we exchanged a few pleasant words about each others team and agreed that the officiating was horrible. I had been quite pleased with the officiating we’d had up until this point, but this game was just not called well.
This game reinforces a few things. One we thrive off a transition offense. In the 3rd and 4th quarters we did a good job of running a half-court offense, but it was because we’d changed the tempo of the game. My dad, who is obviously biased, feels that the other team was out coached. I’m not sure that’s true at all. I think I’m getting a lot of credit, from not only my dad but the other parents for things that the team did naturally. Now a few of my decisions have been good decisions. So, for instance, we don’t have plays. Instead we work on drills and offense more abstractly. When MP was forced to stop using their plays and go into more just playing basketball, we were more than up for the task. So I guess I do deserve credit for that. At the same time, their coach has taught them how to trap pretty well, both full and half court, and we haven’t done that at all. So I’ll add that to our list of goals of things to do between now and the end of the season.
One thing I did, and it was a pretty conscious decision, was weight the playing time in favor of certain players. I don’t think I did as good of job of balancing our need to win with players having the right to play as I did in some other games. I’ll talk about those specific cases as we look at individual performances.
Brian – Talked with him before the game. The conversation went well and he had a great game. Took four shots and made them all. He is definitely our best jump shot player. He will be getting the start again today against WK.
Dante – Only saw 7.5 minutes of play and did much better in that time than he had in the last couple of games, pulling down 4 rebounds, a block, and a steal in that time. He’s going to start as well today. Scott and Lucas were having good games as well, and so I felt bad at the time that Dante wasn’t getting more time, but was reluctant to pull the trigger in getting him more time.
David – Another excellent game. He and Jack P helped get our game going. My dad thought he’d only sat like 3 or 4 minutes, but really he played about 21 minutes, or ¾ of a game. I don’t feel bad about that at all and David could easily be seeing that kind of playing time again in our games. Everyone is a better player with David on the court. He leads our team in points, but is also second in assists. He’s a true team player and doesn’t act like a star, so I don’t feel bad at all about giving him the chance to shine.
Gordie – Gordie got into serious foul trouble which limited his time to only 6 and a half minutes. Once again his turnovers killed us. He also lost time since I yanked him earlier than I would have in the 4th after he put up an atrocious shot while double teamed. He knew it was a bad shot, but claimed he was open when he started to take it. I responded that if he’d said that and had used good form, I would have been ok with the shot. But the shot was with awful form and in a bad spot. What was interesting was that even after this conversation he said after Lucas drew the offensive foul, “I’ve never had a coach who is nice and good before.” That was a really nice thing to hear and shows how if you’re fair and respectful to a kid, you can impose consequences (you shoot bad shots and you come out) and they won’t hold it against you.
Jack M – Here was another player I’d like to have played more in the end of the game but for whom there wasn’t a spot and so he too will get the start today. He did have 12 minutes on the game, and played well in that time. There was something slippery on the basket by our bench and so a couple of times Jack turned the ball over when it wasn’t his fault. I was pleased with how he played and feel good about giving him the start today.
Jack P – He had a great first half, as mentioned. While he missed a lot of shots in the second half, which is typical for him, I felt he was key to our victory and he was the only player I named specifically in our post game talk. He’ll start again today.
Lucas – While he didn’t rebound particularly well in his time (only 3 in 15 minutes of play) he made the basket off our zone breaker, on a nice feed from David, and was clutch when we needed it. Not his best game, but he’s an important piece of our puzzle.
Noah – A continued nothing in his 8.5 minutes of play. He’s a really nice kid and I told him that if he will go a whole continuous motion without walking or stopping that I would start him, he doesn’t really bring much to the game either offensively or defensively. Gordie, has some play making instincts, but Noah is pretty much over matched on the court. I really like him, but he just hasn’t progressed as much as a player as I’d like.
Scott – He continues to play big. He came in second on the team in minutes, with 21. In reality we’d likely have been OK if some of those minutes had gone to Dante/Lucas, but he works well with David (in other words he’s excellent at finding David as an outlet) and you’ll rarely have anything but positive energy from him.
Tom – Tom is a crucial member of the team. I played him the whole first quarter and he only saw 3 minutes of play after that, at the end of the 3rd and beginning of the 4th. When I took him out in the 4th he said “I stink”. I was not pleased to hear him say this, as Tom is the one who will start us cheering, as he did here. Or provide that comic relief. While he gets frustrated with himself he never is anything but positive and supportive of his teammates. While I think he’s slightly under achieving for his basketball skills, so the frustration is somewhat understandable, I don’t think he’s as bad as he thinks he is. I hope that he can have a break out game one of these games to give himself some confidence.
Today we play WK. They’ve put up a lot of points lately and I think that they’re going to upset someone soon, despite their 1-4 record. I don’t want it to be us. In my pregame talk I’m going to focus on not having a “let down game”. We’re a superior team and if we play like it, we’ll win easily. However, if we don’t play our top game we could be in trouble.
Let me just close with this: the best thing about this victory was that we were behind the whole first half. I talk about the difference between a good and a great team. And I knew they had it in them to come from behind. However, they didn’t know that. Now they do. While over confidence was starting to become a problem, and will likely rear its head again depending on how we do in the HP tourney, we needed to know that not only could we get out to a lead and hold it, but that we could come back. We didn’t believe it when we played the JCC team last time, but this team we should believe it. If we can win well today, in what could be a potential pitfall game, we’ll be in a good place for the HP tourney, which I’ll talk about more in a post tomorrow or Tuesday.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Friday January 12 Practice Report
For Monday’s practice I seriously over prepared. Making yesterday’s practice the “what we didn’t get to on Monday” practice to a large extent. Of course one of the more important things I wanted to do, practice our in bounds play, I completely forgot to put on the practice plan and so we didn’t end up doing it.
As usual we started practice a few minutes a few minutes late since I had to raise the baskets from 8 to 10 feet. I arrived particularly early as I wanted to make sure I could grab Brian and Jack M to talk to them before we started. As I was watching the house league team practice, I liked a lot of what the coach was doing with the team. Skills that I assume my team has (well cause they do) this team most definitely did not have. Watching the practice it made me sorta want to coach a house league team next year as it would force me to think about the fundamentals more, which would only benefit my travel coaching. I had to bite my tongue at one point. They were working on a movement drill trying to get open. It was a pretty good drill. Only problem was that when one of their players got stuck at the top of the arc by the sideline the coach was encouraging everyone to come to the ball. While I understood what he was saying what he was really encouraging them to do was converge on the ball. That’s bad basketball. Our ability to space the floor is actually one of the things that’s made us so successful. Anyhow it was fun to watch their practice.
The triplets were the first to arrive. I pulled Brian aside. It was clear that he feels I disrespect the team at times. I had a two pronged message: first I think we’re a good team. Second, my stating things such as certain players shouldn’t be shooting three pointers isn’t disrespect, but instead is trying to put us in the best position to win by giving players a shot at winning. I also particularly emphasized what a good player I thought he was. He seemed very receptive to the message.
When it is time to start, after raising the basket, we had 7 players. Dante I wasn’t expecting to be there. However, I had no idea where Jack or Gordie were. I later checked and Gordie’s mom had told me that he was going to be gone at his grandmother’s birthday and I’d forgotten to mark that down. I talk for a few moments about our upcoming games and who should arrive but Dante just as we’re about to start our continuous motion. And evidently he’ll be at the game tomorrow as well. I don’t quite understand what happened with soccer, but I’m not complaining.
We did our continuous motion. I really need a new drill besides the dribbling and Princeton for continuous motion. Anyhow that went on. I then had a decision to make. We really needed to practice our zone buster, but only had 8 players. Despite it not being optimal I decided to just run it with the groups I’d made out and whoever was playing a particular position where there should have been a missing player. If I’d known we were going to have 8 players I’d have planned something for the three who weren’t in at any given time, but I couldn’t think of anything good at this particular moment (things are complicated since there is only one 10 foot basket in our Friday practice gym and so I couldn’t even send each of them to a basket to shoot lay-ups). Good news was that our play was a lot sharper today than it had been on Monday overall. Even better was that Jack arrived just as we were about to start out third rotation. As I had Gordie playing the clueless 4 (simply because I need to give Scott and Jack some reps at 3 and David needs reps at all the positions so I need to put a guard at the 4/5 once in a while to make sure that everyone gets some looks at spots they might play in the game) in the last drill, his not being there made it possible to run it with 9 players. Brian who had run things so well in the 2 on Monday actually didn’t do so hot. Jack M continued to struggle to play the two position as well. Tom actually did the best job of it. This changes my plans slightly for how I am going to handle starters for the game, which I’ll talk about more below. Anyway, we look better overall in our Zone Buster. I talked a fair amount last night about how if it breaks down we just have to reset it. Resetting is easier said than done, but I feel a lot better about them being able to run 3 or 4 iterations of the play in a game.
I then decided it was time for the Animal Rebounding drill. This time I didn’t quite do the shorties and tallies. Instead in group 2 was David, Tom, Lucas, Scott, and Brian and group 1 was Jack M, Jack P, Dante, and Noah. I honestly don’t really remember how the drill went except that Brian finished in 4th and Tom in 5th in Group 2. After they had finished their round I had them shoot two free throws. Except that Brian was having trouble doing his push-up and David felt the need to point this out. This set-off Brian. I reminded David that his job as a player was to be supportive of his teammates. Brian had been having a pretty good practice until this point however after his brother’s taunt he got very frustrated and tried to turn that determination into finishing his pushups. And then when he couldn’t do those he changed into running suicides. He was doing this while everyone else was at a water break. As people filtered back in I tried to release him from his obligation, but he wasn’t having it. I finally got him to shoot his two free throws however his temper was still raised.
I then partnered people up and we did a speed shooting drill where they shot from two feet away, but had to move around the free throw line before shooting from the other side. The team did a really great job of being supportive of their teammates as this was going on which was great to see. Brian, however, was in a world to himself. The team made between 5 and 9 of these shots in 30 seconds. I told them they were competing against themselves and didn’t even record their scores. This was the by product of a discussion Jack M had started. He was stating how he doesn’t like it when we’re competing, even if it’s just for a permission. This was quite interesting to hear. Jack had really toughened up in the Animal Rebounding drill between Monday and today, despite playing with bigger people, but it’s always good to be reminded about that with Jack.
Anyhow after we did the speed shooting drill, which we’ll do again, we did a drill we had done a long time ago, where it was 3 on 3 with the goal of the defense forcing offensive turn-overs. Things went OK, despite Brian moaning and moaning and moaning about his team until it was time for Brian’s team (on defense) to face David’s team on offense. And Brian went into full tilt meltdown. He was playing recklessly and could have easily hurt someone. He was just off the wall. We ran our suicides with Brian not fully participating.
We gathered around for our post-practice talk. I was a little more rah rah than normal. But Jack M wasn’t buying it. I asked to speak to Jack and Brian after practice. Unfortunately Brian had to leave quickly so I only got to speak to Jack. Jack actually did a great job of giving the “you have to be a more positive player” speech and used reasons I don’t normally use so clearly he’s heard this before and not just from me. I told him that I sincerely believe us to be a very good team and part of being a very good team is acting like it and that he should try acting like it, even if he doesn’t fully believe it since it makes a difference in how you play.
At some point I had decided that our starting five would be David, Tom, Brian, Scott, and Lucas (in # order). Despite Brian’s completely unacceptable behavior at practice I’m still going to start him. I will be talking with him before hand and telling him there will be serious consequences if he puts up a performance like he did at our last practice again. We’ll talk about how he can calm down if he starts to get frustrated, but going off and doing his own thing will not be OK. I’m going to use the “complement sandwich” strategy with him and hopefully it’ll go well.
My initial plan had been to announce our starting five, but state that if they come out in a strong zone that I would be using the line up of Jack M, Brian, David, Jack P, and Lucas (again in # order). Except that with Brian not showing as much ability to run the play as the 2, and Tom showing great ability, that would likely be the switch I’d want to make. The idea of announcing this switch was to give Jack and Jack some feeling of recognition. However, I don’t want to take away Brian’s sense, I think. So, Jack M will start tomorrow against WK and we’ll simply have David and Brian switch roles if we run Indiana.
If we’re going to win today, and going forward, we need David to play a great game. However, he seems to have been lacking in much of his normal confidence ever since the JCC game. A lot of it seems to be the fact that he’s been having trouble making free throws. I haven’t had a chance to work with him to see if there’s a flaw in his mechanics but I’m going to tell him that despite what may happen in practice with free throws that he’s a great player and he shouldn’t stress about it, and instead should just play good basketball.
It’s a big game today and I think we’re ready for it. Hopefully I’m right.
As usual we started practice a few minutes a few minutes late since I had to raise the baskets from 8 to 10 feet. I arrived particularly early as I wanted to make sure I could grab Brian and Jack M to talk to them before we started. As I was watching the house league team practice, I liked a lot of what the coach was doing with the team. Skills that I assume my team has (well cause they do) this team most definitely did not have. Watching the practice it made me sorta want to coach a house league team next year as it would force me to think about the fundamentals more, which would only benefit my travel coaching. I had to bite my tongue at one point. They were working on a movement drill trying to get open. It was a pretty good drill. Only problem was that when one of their players got stuck at the top of the arc by the sideline the coach was encouraging everyone to come to the ball. While I understood what he was saying what he was really encouraging them to do was converge on the ball. That’s bad basketball. Our ability to space the floor is actually one of the things that’s made us so successful. Anyhow it was fun to watch their practice.
The triplets were the first to arrive. I pulled Brian aside. It was clear that he feels I disrespect the team at times. I had a two pronged message: first I think we’re a good team. Second, my stating things such as certain players shouldn’t be shooting three pointers isn’t disrespect, but instead is trying to put us in the best position to win by giving players a shot at winning. I also particularly emphasized what a good player I thought he was. He seemed very receptive to the message.
When it is time to start, after raising the basket, we had 7 players. Dante I wasn’t expecting to be there. However, I had no idea where Jack or Gordie were. I later checked and Gordie’s mom had told me that he was going to be gone at his grandmother’s birthday and I’d forgotten to mark that down. I talk for a few moments about our upcoming games and who should arrive but Dante just as we’re about to start our continuous motion. And evidently he’ll be at the game tomorrow as well. I don’t quite understand what happened with soccer, but I’m not complaining.
We did our continuous motion. I really need a new drill besides the dribbling and Princeton for continuous motion. Anyhow that went on. I then had a decision to make. We really needed to practice our zone buster, but only had 8 players. Despite it not being optimal I decided to just run it with the groups I’d made out and whoever was playing a particular position where there should have been a missing player. If I’d known we were going to have 8 players I’d have planned something for the three who weren’t in at any given time, but I couldn’t think of anything good at this particular moment (things are complicated since there is only one 10 foot basket in our Friday practice gym and so I couldn’t even send each of them to a basket to shoot lay-ups). Good news was that our play was a lot sharper today than it had been on Monday overall. Even better was that Jack arrived just as we were about to start out third rotation. As I had Gordie playing the clueless 4 (simply because I need to give Scott and Jack some reps at 3 and David needs reps at all the positions so I need to put a guard at the 4/5 once in a while to make sure that everyone gets some looks at spots they might play in the game) in the last drill, his not being there made it possible to run it with 9 players. Brian who had run things so well in the 2 on Monday actually didn’t do so hot. Jack M continued to struggle to play the two position as well. Tom actually did the best job of it. This changes my plans slightly for how I am going to handle starters for the game, which I’ll talk about more below. Anyway, we look better overall in our Zone Buster. I talked a fair amount last night about how if it breaks down we just have to reset it. Resetting is easier said than done, but I feel a lot better about them being able to run 3 or 4 iterations of the play in a game.
I then decided it was time for the Animal Rebounding drill. This time I didn’t quite do the shorties and tallies. Instead in group 2 was David, Tom, Lucas, Scott, and Brian and group 1 was Jack M, Jack P, Dante, and Noah. I honestly don’t really remember how the drill went except that Brian finished in 4th and Tom in 5th in Group 2. After they had finished their round I had them shoot two free throws. Except that Brian was having trouble doing his push-up and David felt the need to point this out. This set-off Brian. I reminded David that his job as a player was to be supportive of his teammates. Brian had been having a pretty good practice until this point however after his brother’s taunt he got very frustrated and tried to turn that determination into finishing his pushups. And then when he couldn’t do those he changed into running suicides. He was doing this while everyone else was at a water break. As people filtered back in I tried to release him from his obligation, but he wasn’t having it. I finally got him to shoot his two free throws however his temper was still raised.
I then partnered people up and we did a speed shooting drill where they shot from two feet away, but had to move around the free throw line before shooting from the other side. The team did a really great job of being supportive of their teammates as this was going on which was great to see. Brian, however, was in a world to himself. The team made between 5 and 9 of these shots in 30 seconds. I told them they were competing against themselves and didn’t even record their scores. This was the by product of a discussion Jack M had started. He was stating how he doesn’t like it when we’re competing, even if it’s just for a permission. This was quite interesting to hear. Jack had really toughened up in the Animal Rebounding drill between Monday and today, despite playing with bigger people, but it’s always good to be reminded about that with Jack.
Anyhow after we did the speed shooting drill, which we’ll do again, we did a drill we had done a long time ago, where it was 3 on 3 with the goal of the defense forcing offensive turn-overs. Things went OK, despite Brian moaning and moaning and moaning about his team until it was time for Brian’s team (on defense) to face David’s team on offense. And Brian went into full tilt meltdown. He was playing recklessly and could have easily hurt someone. He was just off the wall. We ran our suicides with Brian not fully participating.
We gathered around for our post-practice talk. I was a little more rah rah than normal. But Jack M wasn’t buying it. I asked to speak to Jack and Brian after practice. Unfortunately Brian had to leave quickly so I only got to speak to Jack. Jack actually did a great job of giving the “you have to be a more positive player” speech and used reasons I don’t normally use so clearly he’s heard this before and not just from me. I told him that I sincerely believe us to be a very good team and part of being a very good team is acting like it and that he should try acting like it, even if he doesn’t fully believe it since it makes a difference in how you play.
At some point I had decided that our starting five would be David, Tom, Brian, Scott, and Lucas (in # order). Despite Brian’s completely unacceptable behavior at practice I’m still going to start him. I will be talking with him before hand and telling him there will be serious consequences if he puts up a performance like he did at our last practice again. We’ll talk about how he can calm down if he starts to get frustrated, but going off and doing his own thing will not be OK. I’m going to use the “complement sandwich” strategy with him and hopefully it’ll go well.
My initial plan had been to announce our starting five, but state that if they come out in a strong zone that I would be using the line up of Jack M, Brian, David, Jack P, and Lucas (again in # order). Except that with Brian not showing as much ability to run the play as the 2, and Tom showing great ability, that would likely be the switch I’d want to make. The idea of announcing this switch was to give Jack and Jack some feeling of recognition. However, I don’t want to take away Brian’s sense, I think. So, Jack M will start tomorrow against WK and we’ll simply have David and Brian switch roles if we run Indiana.
If we’re going to win today, and going forward, we need David to play a great game. However, he seems to have been lacking in much of his normal confidence ever since the JCC game. A lot of it seems to be the fact that he’s been having trouble making free throws. I haven’t had a chance to work with him to see if there’s a flaw in his mechanics but I’m going to tell him that despite what may happen in practice with free throws that he’s a great player and he shouldn’t stress about it, and instead should just play good basketball.
It’s a big game today and I think we’re ready for it. Hopefully I’m right.
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