Summer Session 08' - Game #2

Clip Joint 60 O'Donnel 42

O'Donnel....what can I say about this team? They played hard despite the fact that they lacked any true talent on the their team. Going into the game we found out a couple hours before tip that we were once again going to be short-handed. D.T. was off in O.C. for the weekend and A.H. was busy celebrating a belated b-day at his house. J.P. was still recovering from a loss in the family so he was only 50-50 leading up to game time. So there we were with 6 guys once again this week, minus two of our better players. It really did not make a huge difference other than the winning margin. If we had a full roster I am pretty sure we win this game by 30+ but I suppose I should not get too greedy. We turned the ball over too many times against a defense that was not pressuring us, we just got lazy on some passes. Overall, we struggled at times to score and went through a couple of bad stretches where we simply could not get it in the basket. I mean seriously, we might have shot around 30% as a team for the whole game. We had the lead for the entire game and it varied from as little as 5 points all the way up to the final margin throughout the game. They did some good things inside but that is to be expected when our tallest player was 6-1 or so in the middle. It would have been nice to hold them to less than 40 because we gave them some cheap baskets late in the game when the balance was already decided but what can you do? It is hard to play intense basketball for 40 minutes when you know in your head that your opponent is inferior. Alas, it is also hard for guys to take showing up to games seriously when THEY know that the opposition is most likely not going to beat us. I guess you get a little jaded after 3 straight titles...the regular season while not meaningless is really just a tune up for us as we pretty much are guaranteed a spot in the top 2 at the end of the season. Knowing all that makes it easy sometimes for guys to miss games or play at less than 100% full speed. I'm not sure how you fix that or if it is worth fixing. I guess once we jump to the big leagues next season that should all change because every week will be a challenge.

So 2-0 headed into a bye week for the holiday. We come back against a team who is 1-1 but won via the forfeit last night. They do not scare me much but they do seem to have a couple of decent players and from what I could tell they have a few big bodies so we might get a decent game. I predicted a wider margin before this past game so I am going to be conservative on this one. Taking into consideration that we should have a full team for the next game the final score should be right around 69-51. Yeah that sounds about right...