Even without me, my boys managed to secure another tournament championship, and extending our win streak to nine. As happy as I was for them, I knew that this was not a good sign. I hate when I'm right. Last week's practices were less than stellar. No focus, no desire, and completely unproductive. To make matters worse, when some of my bench players tried to encourage some of the starters to "get it together", they were met with all kinds of attitude and disrespect. Perhaps my philosophy is a little flawed, but if you are going to get complacent and stop working hard to keep getting better, then I'm going to let you beat yourself. The great teams don't say "We're good, we don't need to get better and keep working hard," they keep getting better because with each win that target on your back gets bigger and bigger. So it was time for a Laker-esqe fall from glory (you can't tell me you didn't clown the Lakers after losing to the Cavs last season). Ok, so that might be a little extreme, but we needed a wake up call.
Well, we got it, having to be in Bound Brook, NJ at 8:30 am. Nothing more exciting than waking up on a Saturday as if it were a workday. We all get to the Central Jersey Halloween Hoops Tournament all set to dominate like we had in tournaments prior. I have to be honest, I didn't really feel all that confident the whole ride down; something felt off. I look around and I've only got 7 players. My center got himself grounded and 2 others had conflicts. Not quite the end of the world, but then we find out that the schedule was changed and we're there for an extra hour before we play. Good more time to try to get that confidence. An hour later, we're doing the warm-ups and we can't make a lay-up to save our lives. "This is going to be one of those games," I say to myself as I try to compel my guys to get back to simple basics. We come out ice cold and shoot way too many jump shots that don't even hit iron to really threaten our opponent and we suffer our first loss in a tournament. Little time to hang our heads as the second game would start in 10 minutes. No big speech, no getting angry, just a quick are we going to lose both these games, or is someone going to step up and get back to how we do things. Short roster and all, we pull out a win and control the game all the way through. Third game was a bit of a struggle, thanks to sloppy play. I guess that one loss didn't settle it in their minds that they weren't invincible, because there was way too much razzle-dazzle and not enough scoring. We turned the ball over in that games in ways I hadn't seen from this team ever. Tried to explain to the guys that our next opponent, the Gym Ratz, would take advantage of sloppy play and would easily beat us. Again, I hate when I'm right. We got out-hustled and outplayed right into our second loss.
Hopefully we get a revenge match-up, but more importantly hopefully we learned some lessons last weekend:
- Everyone on the team is there for a reason, and getting yourself grounded hurts the team
- You are never too good to stop getting better
- You play the way you practice
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