"I think everyone was nervous with the beginning of conference play. Coach Ballard emphasized that this Tulane team was going to be tough, and that the beginning of conference play was always tough. "This is going to be a brand new season," she said in the locker room before the game.
Do you ever dread something and then when you get there you find out it was a bunch of nothing? That was what this game was. Tulane couldn't hit shit. We started off on a 12-0 run and there was no comeback. Coach said that we could beat Tulane at the boards if we tried, and we made them pay for it anything they tried to get close to a rebound. I'm looking at the little piece of paper they give us and they had like, what, seven rebounds or something in the first half? That's weak.
All they could do was foul us. I heard their coach screaming about the calls, but they were just frustrated. They didn't go to the line at all in the first half. Zero for Zero, baby. At halftime, it was 44-14 and this one was in the bag.
#35 (Letell Hanson) hadn't taken a shot all during the first half, so they let her loose, and she went 4-for-5 from behind the 3-point line. Sweet. At the beginning of the second half, Coach sat me out. 'I want you to score those big points against a good team. You're going to probably be the first person I sit out when there's a rout," she told me. I had 20 after the first half, and only when our starters and scrubs were getting tired did they put me back in in the second. I scored 18 points - 38 overall - and two off my personal best. And I didn't even play the whole damned game. If you would have kept me in full time, Coach, UTEP would have got 100 points."
--Brenda Dean
I was truly surprised by the magnitude of the rout. Tulane wasn't too bad in Conference USA, UTEP was facing a conference opponent for the first time, Tulane had a couple of players who could really shoot. I never expected something of this magnitude. UTEP pretty much slowed down the game through the back half of the first half and a big part of the second, with the only rule being, "if Brenda Dean gets open, let her shoot it."
It's the first time I've seen a team go 0-for-0 at the free throw line during a half. Tulane had 7 rebounds in the first half, and 9 rebounds in the second. Patricia Clark had 12 rebounds all by her lonesome. Tulane shot 23 percent in the first half and with no rebounding power, they had no chance.
It was getting ugly in the back part of the second half. Tulane's players were in deep foul trouble - two fouled out - they had one injured player and two players with forced rests. Two players had used up their stamina and there was the real danger of an all "no stamina" team on the court. I was thinking about some exception to allow the rested players to come back on the court, with the limitation that they could only shoot on secondary.
My house rules for stamina are a bit tougher than the regular rules for Statis Pro Basketball.
a) A player who has run out of stamina may not shoot, even from secondary. If the ball ends up in the players hands after the second advance phase (a "must shoot situtation"), then I treat it as time expiring or the ball being lost in come other way. The player is not charged with a shot attempt.
b) The rebound rating of such players is lowered by five.
c) The defense rating of such players expands to +5.
d) Players who have run out of stamina may neither steal nor block. However, they can still assist.
e) Players who have run out of stamina may not take part in double-teams.
A few noted about the boxscore. First, there is no half-by-half breakdown of assists, steals, and blocks. I simply forgot to do it.
Second, note the attendance as "not recorded". Here's how I'm treating attendance. I take attendance right off the real-life UTEP-Tulane boxscore. I'm assuming that "not recorded" means that the attendance was one of those few-hundred-people affairs and that UTEP's media director decided not to print it.
I do some randomization based on the defense number. For every game that UTEP wins in my game that the real-life UTEP didn't win, I generate a random two digit number. If the number is between 01 and 25, I give UTEP an extra one percent boost in attendance. (UTEP's attendance should now run around 103 percent of normal.)
I don't want to get into some sort of advanced metric for attendance. I'd rather just do it on the fly. After all, I want to have a life outside of this game.
Oh yes, and the current UTEP RPI rankings:
AP Poll RPI: 47
Coaches Poll RPI: 34
Hey, a few more wins and we might break the Top 25 on the Coaches Poll.
My house rules for stamina are a bit tougherI'll say.
ReplyDeleteDo you let the player play at full strength again when:
1) The first sub uses all of his/her stamina?
2) The second sub, if any?
I would like to stick with 1, but I find that if the starter is hot, I'll burn up the sub faster than realistic in order to get the starter back in. So I often go with 2, but it seems stupid to get the 11th or 12th player on the floor in the third quarter because the starter was hot?
In this case, I prefer "1". I know there's some kind of rule that governs the recovery of stamina for players who spent their stamina so that a starter could come back in - but the rosters at this level just aren't deep enough for that to come into play.
ReplyDeleteYep, I'm aware of that phenomenon. "Get the ball to substitute Mary Roe as much as possible so that Roe can expend her stamina so that Jane Doe can come in and resume starting!" I try to make sure that Jane Doe's substitute is as strong as possible (sometimes, that doesn't work out in a thin roster). I console myself by mumbling that it's (sort of) in the spirit of the stamina rules - which were designed to make sure that players had court time. At least, the subs are getting court time, even if not much of it.