Spartans vs. NF1

Another day, another victory. There were a few hiccups. Like the fact that Northfield had a 1:45 start time. We ended up starting closer to 1:30 and it all worked out. When I announced that Scott would be playing the 3, he freaked. I guess he didn’t feel capable of playing a wing in our offense. It got to the point where I said “You can play the three, but if you really insist you can’t then I have to start someone else.” And so Jack P got the nod. So we go out with a starting five of David, Dante, Lucas, Jack P, and Gordie.

It’s clear from the start that we’re a substantially better team. The other coach used 3 of his 5 timeouts in the first quarter, and I hardly had my killer’s row out there. The group did well. I sub in Noah and Jack P with about 2 and a half minutes left in the first quarter and it soon becomes clear that Noah is playing injured. Noah had his game time limited accordingly, though I probably still over played him relative to his injury. At the end of the first quarter it’s 8-0. We quickly come out on a tear in the early second quarter and are soon up 12-0. NF didn’t come out with a press until about 3 minutes in the second quarter which unfortunately for them was about the same time that I put David back in. They try and run their press once, except David simply dribbles through it like swiss cheese. It’s certainly not the press break method I recommend but we never did see the press again. We have a commanding lead at half time and a ref, who we hadn’t had before, gives me the “we’re going to put them down softly” speech. OK.

The second half is not noteworthy except NF comes out in a zone towards the middle of the 3rd quarter. And let me tell you they looked hapless in it. So I basically do a line change we go with Indiana, our name for our zone breaker. And we can’t run it. We run the initial progression just fine, but when it comes time to get the ball back to the other side of the court the offense just falls apart, which is roughly the same time it falls apart in practice. At least it’s clear what we need to work on. We continue to run Indiana and some ineffectual practice with it, but I do gain a pretty good understanding of what some players need to work on. At one point Tom was in at the 3 and was completely not running it right and so I pulled him and was diagramming the play when he made some disparaging comments about himself. While I disagreed with David’s overall assessment on Friday I could not disagree with the idea that Tom does say an awful lot of negative things about himself. I told Tom I wanted to talk with him after the game.

The game ends and we’ve achieved another easy 37-12 victory. The second quarter seems to be our bugaboo as we allowed 6 points in it, 4 in the 3rd, and only 2 in the 4th. Though we did get sloppy in the fourth giving them better looks than I would have liked. On a personal note, except for Noah, I did an exceptional job of distributing playing time today. Everyone else had between 12 and 16 minutes of playing time. Considering if things were perfectly equal everyone would have 14 minutes, I think that’s pretty damn good.

Let’s look our individual players:

Brian – Played fairly well in his time. He had a great second quarter, which he played all of, but cooled off in the second half. In particular I think he was cheating too much on defense which allowed his man some easy shots.

Dante – Dante has been in a slump. I’m going to talk to him tomorrow before the game and tell him I want him to go hard on the boards. He had a few open shots he couldn’t quite convert, but more importantly his rebounds are way down.

David – He had an amazing 11 points in only 12 minutes and 9 shots. At this level getting 50% shooting is incredible, but that’s David. I told him at half that he wouldn’t be seeing much second half playing time, which of course he understood, and actually had him in as the 4 in Indiana in the 3rd quarter which he did a nice job with. I did get annoyed with him when after he had an early foul he was playing slack defense against their point guard. This was a kid who was practically dribbling at his shoulder. I actually subbed in Jack M at one point just to get some tighter pressure in the first quarter, but unfortunately they subbed the kid out at the same time. I called my only timeout in the second quarter to give David a mild scolding and tell him that this kid is nowhere nearly as impressive as the kid he was guarding last week, though this kid went with the “head full of steam” method of getting across half-court which proved to be effective. This wasn’t even a case of treating David differently as I think I’d have been equally upset if either of the Jacks, for instance, had played defense like that.

Gordie – He felt proud at how he did. He talked about how he took better shots and I agreed. He only took two shots and made one of them. He did have 5 turnovers so that part of his game still needs work, but this was his best game to date. Of course on the Win Score measure I use for productivity he still had a negative number, but it was less of a negative number. If we can cut down on his turnovers he could find some more playing time, though I’m not quite sure what role I would have for him, since we don’t exactly need a short kid who can’t guard all that well on either offense or defense. Nevertheless, I was happy for Gordie and how he played and the better shot selection was a huge first step.

Jack M – Clearly he was disappointed at not starting, though to his credit he didn’t say a thing. He did get very annoyed, however, that NF kept running their play “Brady Quinn”. I am not quite sure why they had an offensive set named after a QB. It was basically just a motion offense. But Jack did not like it. He was a pretty much non-factor until the 4th quarter when he exploded for six easy points.

Jack P – Jack actually led our team in minutes but didn’t do anything exceptional or poor. His defense wasn’t quite up to its normal stuff, so perhaps he was still feeling the after effects of his sickness. On the good side he only had two fouls so that part was good. Of course I’d rather have another foul or two and get some better defense.

Lucas – I’m going to make Lucas our MVP. He came up with the second highest win score for the game, and is actually third on the team for the season (behind Scott and David). He played some really nice help defense, mostly to make up for Brian’s lackings. And he had a HUGE stuff, where he came out of nowhere to prevent an easy basket on a sidelines play. Good enough for a game MVP and it gives me a chance to remind the team how important role players are. The just scoring baskets doesn’t make you a great player.

Noah – As discussed above was injured. He will not be playing in our exhibition game to give his ankle some time to rest.

Scott – Led our team in rebounds with only 5. We had a lot fewer rebounds this game than previous games and I’m not quite sure if it’s because we just allowed fewer shots or were getting out rebounded. I think it’s the latter and not the former, however.

Tom – Played pretty well in his time in the game. After the game I told him in no uncertain terms that he belonged on the team, was an important member of the team, and I was not going to tolerate him being so negative about himself.

For tomorrow’s game I think we’ll go with a starting lineup of Dante, Lucas, Tom, Jack P, and either David or Jack M. I think we’re in a good place heading into winter break and hope we’re in as equally a good place when we come back January 8, so essentially 3 weeks of no basketball, which is a long time. And then we have a killer schedule: MP1, our only competition for best in the league, some other shlubs, and then the HP tourney. I talked about this some at practice on Friday and will be doing so again tomorrow, but we need to stay in shape over break, otherwise we could be in some real trouble when we come back.