HoopClinics

Contributed by Coach Ken Sartini

There is always this situation that comes up from time to time… being behind late in the game… when do I start to foul to give myself a chance to get back in the game. This is another one of those things that you have to have a philosophy going into games. I think each game presents different problems… are we shooting well? How many touches are we going to need to give ourselves a chance for the W?

In one game we were down 18 points going into the fourth quarter… I decided at the end of the third quarter that we were going to extend our defense and go all out for steals for the entire fourth quarter and NOT worry about fouls. I told my players to go for the steal…. and IF you didn’t get the ball to foul the player… we needed to be overly aggressive and extend the game by stopping the clock IF we were going to win.

We made several steals and a lot of fouls…. we converted some steals into baskets and they were missing their free throws….. unfortunately we were having a hard time boxing our opponents out and getting the rebounds off of several of their misses… they were pushing us a lot and we were not getting the calls… but we were still creeping back into the game.

With a little under two minutes we were only down by 4 with the ball, missed the shot and jumped the player with the ball, he stepped out of bounds but the ref chose to call us for a foul which without a doubt happened after he stepped on the end line. We continued this philosophy and had a chance to get the win… but we just couldn’t finish a couple of key times down the floor. We ended up losing by 4 and that was the longest 8 minutes in the history of the game.

I liked the way my players approached that last quarter and never giving up…. they could see that we were putting ourselves in a position to win when some teams might have decided to put that one in the L column. I was very proud of them, the next day at the JV game a couple of their players came up to me and said that while they weren’t enjoying what was happening (because they weren’t making free throws) they liked the way we approached the game…. being overly aggressive and taking the game to them….. and they said ” you will never guess what we are going to do after the JV game this morning ” We all laughed… “FREE THROWS” I replied.

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