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Yeah, pretty disheartening loss. A couple quick thoughts here, and I'll try to post a more thorough recap on the offsite in the next few days.

- Our loss combined with Argentina's comeback win means we'll have to qualify for worlds through the repechage. This is how the u21 team qualified this year, so it's certainly possible, but it's a huge disappointment.

- We know Portugal and Turkey are also in the repe from Europe, along with the losers of their semi's (Germany-France, Spain-Italy). Panama and the losers of the America's semis (Chile-Uruguay, Arg-Brasil) will also be there, but we won't be paired with any of them.

- We only lost two games this season, but that was enough. Both games were vs a 3-2 defense, despite having pretty good lineups/tactics to try to beat the 3-2 (especially vs Colombia). This offseason we'll have to work on this, and I'd expect a pretty revamped roster for next season.

- For those curious, this last game was a normal for us, vs Colombia's CT. We knew that was coming, but thought a normal should have been enough. CT wasn't really an option, as it would have left us with no chance in the semi's, in which case we'd be right back where we are now.

More to come, but now it's time to update our scouting lists and prepare for the next step.

Tough one and definitely raises some questions. Bit perplexed that we couldn't beat them on the boards overall considering their 3-2 zone. Even more surprising was that this game wasn't lost at the "swing" SF position. Unfortunately we just got killed at SG, both on off and def.

Not sure why our SG's took so many shots, ended up with our lowest efficiency position also being the highest usage. That combined with their superior GS in all the right places along with the CT-normal doomed us.

Last edited by brian at 3/16/2010 10:51:33 AM

After a little more time of looking at the result, tactics, etc, all I'm clear about its that this result defies explanation. Two good guards and a well rounded SF feeding two good inside scoring centers against a weak 3-2 zone is a recipe for a huge USA win.

Apparently we took lots of late in the shot clock long range desperation 3pfg. Why? Look inside is the faster paced inside option, were those really the best opportunities over 24 seconds?

The only thing that stands out is the CT vs Normal. Effort and enthusiasm, love it.

Well, on the boards, 3-2 doesn't hurt rebounding. You would think with LI vs RnG we'd get more OReb's, but they were up 18-9 there, which is very odd.

As for the rest, yeah, there's definitely some frustrations. The crazy long 3s suggest we weren't able to get any inside passes off in time. I had hoped the high tempo good passing guards would help that, but apparently not.

Bronson definitely struggled. Only 1 assist from a high passing SG wasn't what we needed (compared to 5 for billingsley who has slightly worse passing). And we couldn't really have put more OD on their SG than we did, unless guys had been in better GS. There might be an argument that Bronson's low experience hurt, but that seems a little like grasping at straws.

Colombia probably TIE'd every game up til now, and so was probably a bit higher than us on enthusiasm. That with the extra effort was apparently enough to do it. I don't really like that explanation, though, because it implies that 2-3 enthus points + 1 level of effort was enough to flip a +42 point margin for us to +13 for them. Some of that 55 point swing must be improved tactics from them, but, well, that's a big swing.

wozz teaches me that 3-2 has virtually no influence on RB

Even says in the manual: 3-2 Zone: Increased perimeter defense at the expense of interior defense. Slow pace.

Nonetheless I'm still confused by the result. Makes the game planning process even more murky.

I think their 3-2 zone was not as weak as it may seem? We know what OD we put up at SG/PG/SF, and we still put up only a 9.5-10 OD in the team ratings, after our big men's OD was mixed into the team rating. They put up a 10.5 in the team ratings with probably an equal amount of dragging down from their big men. They get some bonus from the zone, but you can still imagine where their PG/SG/SF's OD must be at if they are putting up higher OD than Bronson/Dillard/Serrano. Plus I think I read somewhere (Parrot monologues?) that outside offenses will reduce the decline in perimeter defense slightly over the course of the game via reduced fatigue?

You can estimate the salaries too, and this is after using the database to estimate our own guys salaries right now, not what they began the season with:

USA -- Colombia
PG 76k 102k
SG 85k 85k
SF 51k 120k (PG)

If you think that Colombia has been training their own guys too (likely enough given their ages?) it's not hard to imagine that they actually had a fairly decent advantage on the outside. My impression is that they put up a really strong perimeter defense which smothered us into submission.

The rebounds are less clear but assuming 3-2 doesn't hurt rebounding, you can give the GE some credit and assume it mirrors real life pretty well, and imagine that playing RnG and jacking up 3's will result in a lot of long rebounds, and hence more ORs. I don't have any data to back that up, but my impression over this first season has been that a lot of results make sense if you ignore all the GE lore and just imagine what may happen in a real life basketball game.

Defensively, we played a M2M and it looks like they just got a nice SG matchup: Bronson is great but he's still only 21 and it looks like their starter was at worst Bronson's equal right now (and probably better if he's gotten any training). If Bronson wears down at all stamina wise they probably have a big game. Plus their backup is an aggresive player who gets a lot of FTs, may have gotten to the rim some despite RnG and been tough to defend on the inside, etc.

Throw enthusiasm, GS, and effort on top of that and I don't think it's unexplainable to lose by 13 at a neutral site.