Centobasket Championships 2010

We are now 1-1 in the tournament. We opened up the tournament playing the home team Dominican Republic, in a packed, noisy, HOT gym. We will get back to the heat. We played a solid first half and ended up with an 8pt lead that should have been 12 or 14pts but we made some silly turnovers at the end of the 2nd quarter. Basketball is such a game of runs and momentum that how a team ends quarters and the half is so important. When you are playing a team on their own home court with a wild crowd it is even more important. We learned that the hard way that night. We played a below average 2nd half (that's putting in mildly) and ended up losing a game that we could have very easily won. In a tournament like this losing the first game really puts a team behind the eight ball. It was so hot in the Arena that players where slipping all over the floor. The 4th quarter was like playing basketball on ice skates. It's 90 degrees outside and 100 degrees in the Arena. No air conditioning! It's crazy that a big FIBA tournament has NBA players and European players that make millions of dollars that are now representing their countries slipping and sliding around risking injury!

On day two we had the second game at 3:30pm in the afternoon against British Virgin Islands a team we beat last year on their home court in the gold medal game to win the Caribbean Championships. I went to scout the first, 1:00pm game, US Virgin Islands vs Panama and as the night before it was very hot in the Arena and the floor was getting worse. It was so bad that with 4:47 left in the game and players sliding all over the floor the Panama coach with his team down by 17pts stopped the game and gave the other team the victory. We had been waiting in our locker room to take the court when I saw something I had never seen before in over 35 years of playing or coaching basketball. They brought buckets of saw dust out on to the court and spread it over the key areas which were the slickest part of the court. Then they wiped it off and we waited on the court or in our locker room until 6pm while the reps for all the teams met with the FIBA reps and finally decided the floor was not safe for the players to play on and the remaining games of the day were postponed until the next day. BUT not until they made the Panama and US Virgin Island teams get off their buses, get their uniforms back on and play the last 4:47 minutes of their game on an unsafe floor! Which Panama ended up still losing but only by 9pts.

SOOOO, They got some big movable air conditioning units today and piped in cool air into the arena through huge tubes that looked like clothes dryer vent tubes and rigged up a make shift air conditioning unit. We ended up playing British Virgin Islands at 3:30pm and played a very good FULL game and came away with a rewarding 17pt victory! We play US Virgin Islands tomorrow at 1:00pm to try and get to 2-1 and closer to our goal of qualifying for next years Tournament of Americas.

Oh, by the way King James made the oh so tough desicion of going to Miami, living in South Beach, playing with Wade and Bosh and making millions of dollars today in case you haven't heard yet. The only way you have not heard yet is if you don't watch TV, use the internet or read a paper or a magazine. Finally the wait is over.