New basketball season begins 1-0
Well, the summer basketball league has begun again and most of the usual team is intact. The previous season’s PPG leader isn’t playing, but we picked up another guy who has some Juco experience. We started out playing pretty poorly and found ourselves down by 13 early in the second half. Things started to turn when we finally began clamping down on defense and getting some stops. We got some turnovers, began executing on offense and starting slowly closing the gap. Down the stretch, we ran some good set plays, hit some big shots and tied it up to send the game to overtime. In the two-minute overtime, we outscored them 2-1, all on freethrows. I felt like we were definitely the superior team for about the last 15 minutes of the game. It felt good to get the win.
The highlights for me were few. I only had six points, all on 3-pointers. The first was in the first half, and it was a nice, high shot over a very tall defender. The second was pretty critical as it was late in the second half, when we were still down by six. A player in the left corner passed me the ball and I began to dribble to the top of the key when they double-teamed me. One defender was a little behind me (on my left) and the other was coming up on my right from the freethrow line. I dribbled the ball to my right hand, crossed it over behind my back (away from the approaching defender on my right, as he was coming in very low for the steal) to my left hand, pulled up and drained the 3-pointer to bring us within 3.
Anyway, we’re off to a good start, but next week we play the team that beat us by one in the championship game. It’s gonna’ be a tough game.