November Basketball
Monday was the last day of open gym before the break, and we managed to turn out eleven players for the usual lunchtime game. That was good, because it let us run five-on-five full court. Something was a little bit off all day, though.
It's not that the games weren't competitive-- the scores were 15-12, 15-13, and 7-5 (my team lost the first, and won the next two)-- they were just sloppy. Dropped passes, missed lay-ups, weird lapses of communication that sent passes flying into empty space. The start of the second game was sort of like a soccer match-- everybody ran around for half an hour, and the score was 1-0.
That's November basketball for you, though. Granted, we come at it from a different direction than the college kids do (we're all at the end of our "season," giving and taking final exams, while Div. I teams are just starting up, and a little bit rusty), but the results are more or less the same. Basketball games played in the month of November just go a little bit wrong, at whatever level. (Whatever it is that they play in the NBA is probably a little sloppy, too, but I couldn't really say.)
Take, for example, Maryland's loss to Gonzaga on Monday night. It was an impressively intense game, particularly on the part of Maryland's D.J. Strawberry, but sloppy as hell. The two teams combined for 26 turnovers in the first half of play (14 by the Terps), most of them the same sort of weird mental lapses as in our lunchtime game. Passes were thrown to guys who weren't cutting, who were cutting, but in a different direction, or who just plain weren't there.
Gonzaga pulled it together a bit in the second half, and came back from an early six-point deficit to take control and cruise to victory down the stretch. Maryland went about four minutes without scoring in the middle of the second half, and continued to turn the ball over far too much (they finished with 26 turnovers), and that was pretty much your ball game. They should also expect to see a lot of zone this year, because damn, their zone offense looked awful.
But then again, that's November basketball for you. It's rare to find two good teams playing each other at all in November, let alone two good teams playing ball well. Last night's triple overtime thriller between Gonzaga and Michigan State was an exception, but you'll note that the decisive play in the game involved a Michigan State player chunking an open lay-up. November basketball, baby.
Meanwhile, Maryland beat Div. II Chaminade by 30 (though they trailed at the half, like a pack of mopey knuckleheads), so all is more or less normal. Not good, mind-- Syracuse dropped a home game to Bucknell (and there was much rejoicing among people who aren't me)-- but typical.
The important thing about November basketball isn't the quality of the games themselves, it's the simple fact that there are games. November basketball is the herald of March Madness, a lone sneaker squeaking in the wilderness to tell us all that we've made it through another desolate summer. Roast up a turkey, it's time to give thanks.
Still, would it kill them to look before throwing those stupid passes?
Posted at 8:01 AM | link | follow-ups |