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).