To be prepared is half the victory

Yee Chun Leong

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN

Sunday, August 29, 2010

GOOD coaches know what makes a good basketball team getting the players to gel as a unit.
Last season, the Barracudas hired Coach Bong Ramos from the Philippines to guide the team and he led them to a 6-9 record but they fell short of reaching the playoffs in the inaugural season.

Ramos joined the team a month before the start of the 2009/10 season but only managed to complete his roster one week before their first game.

It was impossible for him to perform a miracle in this case getting his players to understand each other's style of play in just SEVEN days.

Besides this, the team also played with only a six- to seven- man rotation throughout the season as the local players were not up to the task yet. With all the weight on the shoulders of the imports, they eventually ran out of gas.

And now the new Asean Basketball League season is back. The Barracudas have just more than a month to get their team together before their campaign starts in October.

Will they learn from history or let it repeat itself?

Bruneians are great fans of world sports. So let us look at the NBA and World Cup as references.

When the Los Angeles Lakers acquired Hall-of-Fame Wilt Chamberlain, who was the reigning NBA Most Valuable Player at that time, in 1968, everyone thought it was a sure win formula especially since the squad also featured fellow Hall-of-Fames forward Elgin Baylor and guard Jerry West.

Despite the all-star cast, it took them four years to really gel and only in 1972 did that Lakers squad lift their first championship trophy by beating the New York Knicks in five.

And then there was this year's World Cup. Argentina were one of the favourites to lift the trophy with Lionel Messi, the Fifa Footballer of the Year, on the squad.

But with his players coming from various clubs, then Argentina coach Diego Maradona had little time to gel his players and make them play as a unit.

The result: despite having very talented inviduals on his roster El Diego's men were humiliated 4-0 by Germany in the quarterfinals.

These examples show us that just as Rome was not built in a day, a good team also could not be built in a week.

To be realistic, what are the chances for the Brunei representatives to win their first title in the sophomore season in the ABL?

The other teams such as Satria Muda BritAma (Indonesia), Singapore Slingers and KL Dragons (Malaysia) almost have a year round schedule to get their gelling done.

The Southeast Asian powerhouses, the Philippines, are definitely the favourites once again. Basketball is the biggest sport in the country and even if they were to pull out a whole new roster to form the Patriots, they wouldn't have any problems. Read More…

Source: The Brunei Times