One of the reasons that I was jazzed for our own tournament this year was because it gave our guys a chance to play some good teams in a tournament setting early in the season, and we got both Sunday evening.
Our opponent in the championship game demolished both of their first two opponents in the tournament. They had a strong first five that featured a beast of a center, two extremely good guards, and two other very good role players. We had a game plan ready and believed that our first five could hang with them if we played ball the way we are capable of playing.
We headed to our designated room at halftime of the 3rd place game with only 7 players present, four of which were our starters. We were going to make a couple minor adjustments to offensive and defensive sets we had worked on, so it was a little bit troubling that our forward was not present. Before I could get into our game plan, I had to get on a few of our guys who were fully dressed but still wearing sandals instead of their shoes. In this exchange my shooting guard (who often has words for me), decided to tell me how he really felt about my asking him to be ready for a championship game. So, I told him he would not be playing the first quarter. We were now down to 3 starters present and ready to hear the game plan. Not quite the way I wanted to get ready for a game. Fortunately, within five minutes our forward showed up and our shooting guard apologized in front of the team. (I changed his punishment from a quarter to two minutes)
We started the game out sloppily, just as we had the previous game. This team was too good to come out flat against and we immediately found ourselves in a 7-0 hole. We settled down, regrouped and were able to put together a decent run to close the gap to 11-10 at the end of the first quarter, and we would never be that close again.
The second quarter was a mess. The officials were impossible to figure out. They allowed very physical play on the ball from defenders but not down low when two or three guys were defending a shot or going for a rebound. We made several key mistakes but also could not get back on track after a series of calls that went against us. We lost the quarter 19-2 and trailed 30-12 at the half. We made a couple adjustments to our offense and everyone of our boys was convinced we could still win the game.
The third quarter started out with more of the same. Our opponent made good plays, we made some mistakes and the officials continued to confound me. At one point one official told me that I needed to pay better attention to our offense because that was where my boys were failing the most. This started to light a fire under our guys and we immediately rattled off 8 straight points to cut the lead to 11. But then our point guard got called for traveling and our rally was over. We were down 18 at the end of 3 quarters and ended up losing 61-35.
- Offensively our bigs still do not understand what we are asking from them.
- Defensively they are not much further along.
- We were also totally lost on both ends when our shooting guard (who went 6/9 from behind the arc) was not on the floor.
- The modified offense that we used in the second half is something that we could easily incorporate into our sets from this point forward.
- Overall, I think the two intense games we played will serve us well going forward from here.
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