This season marks the first time I have ever had a tournament over Christmas break, particularly the weekend before kids return to school and I was really looking forward to it. In the past, players tend to come back from the long break with a little rust, thus I was glad to have a tournament waiting to get some of that rust taken care of before an important week when we got back.
The tournament had six teams with two divisions, so we played the other two teams in our division before advancing to a "place" game. Also, instead of four quarters, this tournament played two 20 minute halves with a running clock (which amounts to basically the same amount of actual playing time). Of the six teams, four were from the city and two were elite academy schools from the 'burbs. Our first game was against one of those schools.
After our two practices at the end of our break I was fairly sure our guys were as ready as they ever could be after two weeks off, but the first couple minutes of our first game showed me otherwise. We were flat and lazy and fell behind 4-2. We took a time-out, shook off the silliness, got our press in order and closed out the first half up 34-15. This game marked the coming out party for our 6'2" center. Since our opponent did not have anyone to match his size, he got lay-up after lay-up on his way to a 16 point half. The second half was more of the same but at a slower pace as we ended up winning 56-36.
Our second game was against a public school that featured an older brother of one of our seventh graders. In their match-up with our first opponent, they did not look like a great team. However, in our game with them- they had a player or two that did not play in the first game and they apparently decided to bring their "A" game.
Like most city schools they played a fast paced offense and added a very effective trapping defense. Our guys hung with them for about 30 seconds before falling behind for good. Their defense rattled us enough that we ended up with a season high for turnovers and were unable to get anything going offensively. We trailed 32-12 at half on our way to losing 58-31. Our center - coming off of his biggest game of the year - failed to score until the very end of the game. Our shooting guard - who averages around 16-17 points a game - had one basket. The gym had low ceilings and arches that extended even lower and got hit at least twice in every game of the tournament. This clearly messed with our shooters' heads as we failed to record even one 3-point basket in the game and the entire tournament. Overall, we looked scared, slow and sloppy. We had no heart and we looked exactly like a team that had taken two weeks off. Very frustrating.
To finish the tournament, we played for third place against a team we had already beaten this year at our tournament. They came to this tournament with essentially the same team we played. Our team, however, was not the team they had played - at least not on this day. Besides our lackadaisical play, we were missing our starting power forward who had missed our two practices and had not called me or anyone else, for that matter.
The game was close the whole way, both teams playing sloppy. Defensively, we were never able to settle on either man-to-man or our 1-3-1 zone as our most effective way of stopping them. Offensively, we ran our new set against a zone fairly well, but our guys were not paying close enough attention to their roles to be effective in carrying it out. At half-time, we were down 13-11. The second half looked a lot like the first half, except now several of our players were beginning to show signs of being tired and showed no heart in battling to try to win the game. I ended up benching our leading scorer for the final 5+ minutes after twice taking him out of the game to plead with him to give us whatever fight and energy he had left, to no avail. We ended up losing 36-30, the only bright spot being that we got to get some of our younger guys into a tense, meaningful situation at the end.
Hopefully, this tournament served as a "taking out of the garbage" for the guys and they return this week to school determined to play better this week as we face two of our closest conference foes.
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