Monday, October 12, 2009

Games 2 and 3

I'm sorry. It has been awhile since I have blogged but I have a very good excuse. I have been busy. That's always a good excuse right? OK. We have played 2 games since the Fribourg game and I have good news, SAM Massagno has won their first game of the season. On Sunday October 11, we beat the Birstal Starwings. Please don't ask me what a Starwing is because I have no idea. I just sit back and enjoy Euro team names.

I have to be honest though, we picked up another loss before we got the first win. We played Vacallo (reigning Swiss Cup and LNBA champions) on October 7. It was a very good test for us. I would have preferred for us to play the game at full strength but that was just not possible. We were down some important players in the game and it hurt our depth and our game. I hope that its not a sign of things to come because it is too early in the season to have so many injuries.

Poor defense, bad offense and missed shots were added to our troubles against Vacallo. It was a good learning experience though. We gave them a scare in the second half but it wasn't enough to beat them. The final score of the game was 79-64.

As for myself. I could have definitely played better. I had my mind on other things and I slept very poorly the night before. I missed some easy shots that I normally make. I finished the game with 8 points (4-8) and 10 rebounds. A solid game but definitely could have played better.

The good thing about this year is we play more games so we had a chance to rebound. We took full advantage of this opportunity and beat Birstal on Sunday. It felt so good to get that win. I/we didn't win a lot last year but we have a much better team now and I feel that we can finish in the top 5 of the league and we took our first step on Sunday.

If I can take positive things out of losses then I can take negative things out of wins to get better. Our offense is not up to par. We are not utilizing our weapons on offense. I am not going to get into specifics but I feel that we are no where near scratching our potential on offense and it would be better to find it sooner rather than later.

Our defense could also get better. Too many times we don't know what we are doing on the pick and roll our cross screens. Also, there is not enough help side. I say this with myself being included. There are a lot of athletes on the court and I know we can make some athletic plays.

We won the game 82-76. It was a close won and came down to the final minutes. In standard anything can happen in European basketball fashion, Coach told us 15 minutes before the game that we would not have a clock or scoreboard for the game. Something happened and they couldn't get it up and working in time before the game. So, they pulled out the old flip scoreboards and had on official clock at the scorers table. It was difficult to keep track of the time to say the least. We were constantly asking how much time was left. You would have thought that the announcer could announce the time on the speaker in English rather than Italian (because everyone playing can speak English) but hey, this is Europe. We are in their country.

I played pretty well in the game. The official stat line for me is 12 points and 10 rebounds. I call shenanigans on the rebounds though. I cant tell you how many I had but I'm fairly positive that I had more than 10. Our stat keeper this year likes to watch rather than keep stats. He only had me for 3 offensive rebounds at the end of the game when I scored off of 4. Its pretty frustrating but hopefully it will get better as the season progresses. And if not then there will be complaints from one angry center.

We only have 1 game this week and I'm pretty happy about that. I'm pretty beat up after the 3 games last week and I'm going to try and rehab and get back to 100%. We play at Boncourt on Saturday. Ill try and post a pre game report before then.

Until then......

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