Game Report: HP

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.