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Basketball Osmosis

Basketball is a team sport. It isn't always the team with the best players that win but the team that plays best. Chemistry in so many ways is the ultimate ingredient in a good basketball team.

And speaking of which chemistry is what we lacked the most when we started my team in the American Filipino Basketball League in Franklin High School in Eagle Rock. But despite our lack of chemistry we made it to the playoffs seeded dead last and eliminated defending champs and seeded # 1 by 1 point. We lost the 2nd round of the playoffs 1 game shy of the Championship Game. It was the heartbreak of all heartbreaks. The team we played we beat mightily twice during the regular season. Somehow, i'm sure a fault of our our own, they were able to stick close enough to eventually snatch the game away with a miraculous shot with 2 seconds remaining in OT. The game shouldn't have been the close to begin with. We beat them by a hefty 25 point average our two previous meetings...

I remember that game so vividly. We sat there as a Team silent as the graves feeling very stupid. We knew exactly what we did wrong. We allowed them to stay within striking distance and when they did they caught us by surprise. Its a feeling only an upset can inflict. We were a far superior team on so many levels that losing was unthinkable and unspeakable. Hell-- we were even better looking than them haha...

With a full season under the no-chemistry belt we began the brand new season with a flourish and at Season's End we found our Team atop the standings. Number 1 seed in the playoffs. Yes our basketball team had improved in leaps and bounds. Even with only 6 full time players we destroyed a lot of teams with our High-Post, Low-Post plays which were developed arbitrarily throughout the season combined with solid outside shooting and best of all exemplary rebounding. Our defense i believe still leaves much to be desired but it has improved tremendously.

We won our 1st round playoff game with relative ease against a young team called Red Lights. They're a bunch of kids who lack discipline and perhaps play a little too fast for their own good (Their speed ultimately cost them the game turning the ball over one too many times). Because hey were not so shabby ourselves. I might be 30 but i could still run with the best of them (i just recover longer hahaha)....

In the all important 2nd round playoff game our best player did not show. Naturally i was worried. Jay although not a natural point guard is our point guard and is responsible for setting up the pace of the offense and the entry passes for our high and low post plays. And even though we led the entire game we spent the majority of the game adjusting. If it wasn't for our exemplary rebounding i think we would have lost that game easily. Jay's absence was hard felt enormously in the offensive set up. See from the onset our opponents played man-to-man which quite honestly was the worst thing they could have done. We went up by 15 in the first quarter. But anyway it got close at some point of the game and with the man to man Defense i had a mis-match that rivaled that of David and Goliath. The guy guarding was too small... Had Jay been there it would've been exploited. I only got the ball 6 times throughout the game when i posted up. I was 6 for 6 (even though i posted him up about 15 times). But we won so all is forgiven...

When the day came to crown a Champion i was ready to play. It had been over 15 years since i've won a Basketball Title (Philippines) so i was more than just hungry for a title. Because we were playing a high flying young team my teammates decided we needed reinforcement and asked Darwin to play. Darwin played one other game during the season and couple last season. Darwin is a prolific scorer and would be in the starting position in any team other team. The problem is i noticed that even though we've won every single game he has played in-- the team chemistry was disrupted. See we've established our team as the Top 4 in the league and i've noticed that these 4 teams pretty much blow other teams away routinely. Although we were seeded # 1 i believe were playing a better team and we needed to play our best game, perhaps better than our best (we did beat them in the regular season). As i expected the chemistry was disrupted but in the worse possible way. We trailed early by over 9 points which meant we played a quick-catch-up kind of an offense. Worst yet we were never able to set our offense and even though we led at the half the second half was an entirely different game as those young guns turned it up a notch winning eventually by 12 points. Darwin scored plenty of points and perhaps had a statistically efficient game, but over all, as a team we struggled to score.

To offer my personal post game analysis; we just failed to play our game which relies solely on chemistry. Sure we still scored 50+ points, which for a playoff game is average, but we as a team average 60+ points in the playoffs and even more in the regular season. We only lost 2 games in the regular season which were lost due to turnovers. Otherwise if were able to keep turnovers to a minimum we are a pretty darn hard team to beat. Our team is almost mechanical good. I told our Team Captain that we were probably better off without Darwin and he nodded in agreement. Perhaps we shared the same sentiment...

Posted by: Marc Gabay
Monday, July 24, 2006