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Great win tonight, especially given:
"New Zealand put more into this game than Nippon."

Our bigs did VERY well, but Kishita's gotta do better on the FT line! This week/last week: simply abysmal.

Crushed by China. I guess we weren't going to win them all.

FAIL

We missed 17 free throws, we have pretty bad game shape, probably some bad management as well. As a result we lost to Korea of all teams. Total failure.

We could really use some FT training. That's basically been the difference in the last two losses.


EDIT: Just to be clear, I blame myself as much as the FT for the loss. We should beat Korea even with 50% free throw shooting.

Last edited by Brutus at 6/10/2014 3:24:59 AM

I blame GS as well. I was wondering why Yasujiro wasn't playing of late - and then a look at the roster told me the story.
GS is pretty shyte across the board.

FTs - K-Mat's pretty good there. But on him... not sure why he'd start at C. Your call, of course. Interested to hear if there's any reason for it.

Sorry about the injury...

Sorry for the slow response. Been a busy week.

On the injury, its tough for us but its out of your control, so don't worry about it. At least its only 1 week.

Matsumoto, you're right he's better as a PF. With Yasujiro's GS being so bad I was looking for a way to fill the C spot. Maybe would have been better with Kishita at C despite his limitations..... Will look to deploy a different strategy from here. More like what worked well before.

That last loss was a set back. If we win out we may still have a chance to advance with Indonesia already having two losses and Australia still plays Hong Kong and us. Do our best.

We play our final game of this round against Australia tonight. We need to win the game by 41 Points to advance. That's going to be a really tough task.

If we hadn't lost that game to Korea then all we would need now is a win. That loss is still tough to swallow.

In the last two weeks we've gotten 4 pops on FT, Thanks everyone for adding some focus there to improve this weakness.

Our season has now ended and we play Turkey this week in a scrimmage. I will only be suiting 10 players for this game. These 10 players accounted for 96% of our minutes this season and will be held over for next season. The remaining 5 players are being evaluated for consideration in next seasons squad. I am looking to prioritize spots for our youth to be able to encourage and shape their continued development. Probably at least a few of the remaining 8 spots will go to the new kids, and I will probably hold open at least 2 spots for later consideration.

We finished 3rd in the second round of the Asia Tournament which I think earns us a spot in the Repechage (second chance) tournament to start next season. We will get 1 game each against a team from Europe, Africa, and Americas. Hopefully we can win 1-2 of these games. If we win our group we would advance to the world championships, but honestly the European teams will probably be too strong for us to overcome.

Please, Please, Please keep focused on managing game shapes next season. Low gameshape down the stretch really cost us and was a contributor to our loss to Korea. I'm aiming for making a good run in the consolation tournament so we need the gameshapes to be high. Also, we've been pretty weak on Free Throws so please continue to train this area.

Hmmm... I think playing blanks ended up killing us in the final few games. BB's playing up at the moment, so I can't access the boxscores - but I'm pretty sure it chose line-ups vs Sth Korea/Australia that had none of our top scorers in the starters, or at least fewer than optimal - it also chose some of our weakest FT shooters, which only highlighted the problem you pointed to.

Korea wasn't a blank, but was related to management decision on how to cover for Yasujiro. Not sure I made the best choice there.

Both Australia games were blanks, by the second one our GS was totally shot. This season our best performances were on blank line-ups. The game engine clearly runs better on that and many of our opponents are running blanks. If you don't use the blank line-up then you're at a disadvantage. Thus why the BBs are trying to alter it. It would probably be better without it.

Not sure I agree... for us. Blanks work when you have many, many options.

Starting line-up (vs Australia):
Amori (scored 2 points)
Ueda (5)
Tsunami (3)
Asano (15)
Kishita (1)

Not sure if there's anywhere I can see the NT averages, but I'd bet most of those guys have competition within the NT that does better.

Additionally, blanks seem to do some very strange things at times with line-ups. Playing players considerably out of position - including (at times) guys like Tsunami at the point.
I think for smaller nations, like us, we have to get creative if we want to compete with the big-boys. Now... I think you've done a pretty good job, but I don't think we're going to see improvement by running blanks/LI.

Last edited by malice at 7/7/2014 6:03:13 AM