No, you didn’t have to win by 105 points

It’s astounding that whenever one of these high school basketball blowouts like this week’s 107-2 thriller in Indiana pops up, some dudes always pop up to say, “Oh yeah, well, you wouldn’t want the other team to just stop playing. My Southwest Birdpatch County team beat a team 198-1 one time, and that was after the coach put in the fourth-grade JV players and told them to pass the ball five times before shooting.”

Let’s do some basic math, shall we?

High school basketball games are typically 32 minutes — 8 minutes per quarter.

Let’s say you slow down a bit and shoot every 30 seconds — maybe your opponent takes 10 seconds (still relatively fast) per possession and you take 20. Then let’s say you shoot mostly 2-pointers and hit a staggering 75 percent of your shots. So every 2 minutes, you put up 4 shots and hit 3 — 6 points. That’s 3 per minute. If you score 3 points per minute, that’s 96 points.

And again, that’s if you’re hitting 75 percent of your shots in a half-court offense. That’s not going to happen, no matter how weak the other defense might be.

The losing team was apparently in “an aggressive 2-3 zone.” Great! What better time to practice passing the ball against an aggressive defense?

 

Published by

Beau Dure

The guy who wrote a bunch of soccer books and now runs a Gen X-themed podcast while substitute teaching and continuing to write freelance stuff.

One thought on “No, you didn’t have to win by 105 points”

  1. And even then I think you’re giving the outmatched team too much credit with a shot every 10 seconds. If they were that physically outmatched, they’d probably need most of the shot clock every offensive possession just to get a shot off. So, if they’re taking 20-25 seconds, and the winning team is doing the same (for different reasons, obviously), this game shouldn’t have ended anywhere close to the actual final score. This was just a coach power tripping on beating up on a lesser opponent (who they probably shouldn’t have been scheduled against to begin with). Not so different from bullying, to be honest.

    There are so many ways this score could have been avoided had the “winning” coach wanted it so. Drop into a zone on defense and allow your opponents “free” jumpers; explain to your players/school that it is “rebounding/blocking out practice.” Try a motion offense where the goal is to get the ball into the paint, face up, and shoot – without putting the ball on the floor. If a defender touches the ball at any point, kick it out, reset, and start the possession over again. And most importantly: NO. FAST. BREAKS.

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