DF Game; Catching up to Today

Another long break between updates, though that has been a function of schedule as much as anything.

We had a very disappointing loss to DF on Dec 7th, 31-18. They jumped out to an early lead and were up after the first quarter by 5. We then closed to with-in 3 at half and 1 at the start of the 4th quarter. Unfortunately we fell apart in the 4th quarter as they scored 14 points, nearly as much as they scored the rest of the game. The real problem came after they made the first of thee 3s, which put them up by 5. The team just fell apart and while I called a TO fairly quickly, the run continued after the time out. Some of this was lucky shooting as our opponents shot 5 of 6 from 3 point distance. Some of this was the fact that our team struggled mightily against the zone and didn’t create turnovers, as the 18 points was by far the fewest points we had scored.
The bad news was compounded by the fact that the tournament we were supposed to play in the following weekend was cancelled. This meant, with winter break thrown-in, we will have gone 5 weeks when we play another game tomorrow.
The good news is that I was able to schedule a scrimmage yesterday against the 4th grade boys, which have a really fantastic team. The bad news is that if we’d have been keeping score, I think we’d have lost. They basically have forgotten several aspects of the offense. The good news is that the one weakness that I had noticed at DF, and had subsequently focused on, cutting to the basket and passing to those cutters, is hugely improved and was happening several times during the scrimmage. The bad news is that more fundamental aspects, such as rotation and spacing, was weak/forgotten. Hopefully there will be time before the game tomorrow to run through our basic offense.

And honestly if our basic offense were all that was struggling I’d be OK. But our defense has been weak, and continues to be weak. They seem to get the idea of needing to help on defense, but they seem to think they can do this by walking there, so the help gets there too late so a shot can be had.

Even this, while unacceptable, could be countered somewhat if the team could press well. However, the team seems unable to trap. At Monday’s practice we even ran a 3 on 5 drill, and the 5 defensive players were nearly hopeless in stopping the 3 offensive players. It basically means that if we get behind in a game we’re going to have to rely on our porous defense to make stops, rather than in creating turnovers. I have installed a trapping zone, which works fairly well, but I refuse to use that just to create wins. Not to mention it would lose its effectiveness if we played it for too long. It will be a 4th quarter change of pace defense. So basically let’s hope we don’t down by more than say 6 points cause between the lack of defense, lack of press, and lack of mental toughness, we’re in trouble.
Which brings us to tomorrow. It’s frustrating since I still don’t have a good grasp of how hard our opponents will be yet since, our opponent, WK, has played to and beaten DF, who just stomped us, and lost to KW, who we beat, though not decisively. So perhaps they’re of about equal talent to us. I do know that if we played the way we played yesterday we won’t stand a chance. Hopefully we’ll be able to kick it into a different gear. We’ve kind of stalled in our progress since about the 3rd game. I’m hoping that as we review and refine we’ll be able to take our play into a new gear for the last two months of the season.