Hooping it up

The past two weekends have involved covering girls basketball tournaments in Orange County and I wanted a place to put some of the links in case folks wanted to check out my coverage. This past Saturday's game, in which a very good Westminster team came out and quickly took control in the final of Ocean View's tournament, included dealing with a running clock in the fourth quarter, then finding out the system to enter statistics for the newspaper was down, so I had to read my box score over the phone the old fashioned way. Still it was a lot of fun, and we got to try out Slater's 50/50 in Huntington Beach, so that was nice as well.

Anyway, here are the links from Ocean View's Hawk Holiday Classic.

http://www.ocvarsity.com/sports/westminster-35108-hawk-holiday.html

http://www.ocvarsity.com/sports/ocean-35098-view-quarter.html

http://www.ocvarsity.com/sports/beach-35067-ocean-harbor.html

Giving the clock a shot

I had just started to care about college basketball.

Prior to 1980, whenever Channel 12 would show that slide that told me it was pre-empting whatever NBC was offering so it could show an ACC basketball game, I grumbled and found something else to watch. But with Ralph Sampson in his sophomore year at the University of Virginia, the Cavaliers had become interesting. People in school were talking about the games and I wanted to see what the excitement was about, so I started following the team through those Thursday night games with Jim Thacker and Billy Packer into the 1981 NCAA tournament.

Losing in the semifinals to UNC, the Cavaliers came back two nights later to win the last third-place game in NCAA tournament history to LSU (trivia players take note). That was about the time I took notice of the UNC-U.Va. rivalry, which would hit a sour note a year later in the 1982 ACC tournament.

The tournament final looked like it would be a thriller, the new kid on the block vs. the established kings, the North Carolina Tar Heels, coached by Dean Smith. And it was…for about 30 minutes. The problem is a college basketball game lasts 40 minutes. Smith decided to pull the Tar Heels back into a stall, going more than seven minutes without taking a shot. This was their style at the time, and UNC would use it to win the NCAA title three weeks later.

Obviously, I was stung by Virginia's 47-45 loss, but a lot of that came from watching what had become a soccer match (sorry, had to go there). Little did I know that this game would go a long way to bringing the shot clock to college basketball.

I always thought the 24-second clock in the NBA was a little out of the box. Frankly to this day I think that is too rushed. But there also has to be a way to keep teams from just passing the ball around while time bleeds off the clock. The first experiments with a shot clock in the mid-1980s set the time at 45 seconds, and actually turned it off with four minutes left in the game.

Meanwhile, the first experiments with the clock in NCAA women’s basketball…wait, I’m sorry, turns out they were using a 30-second clock since the early 1970s. And they still are.

Eventually, the men’s clock stayed on the entire game and through overtime, then in the 1990s it was shortened to 35 seconds. But high school basketball has mostly ignored the shot clock. When I was working in Virginia, it would be mentioned every couple of years, but ultimately the cost of the equipment, the need for someone to run the clock, just the fact that it probably doesn’t impact the game at that level were all mentioned as reasons against the change.

So imagine my surprise when I walked into the gym at Corona del Mar High School in Newport Beach last Wednesday and saw two shot clocks that were actually in use. Turns out that California is one of eight states where high schools use the shot clock, and it’s the same as in the NCAA -- 35 seconds for boys and 30 seconds for girls.

I asked an assistant coach from the Woodbridge High School girls team the next night how long California had been using the shot clock, and he said at least 18 years since it was part of the game as long as he had been coaching.

What was the impact on the game? Well, not a lot for the first 28 or so minutes, but in each of the first three games I saw there seems to be less fouling down the stretch. I remember a junior varsity game between Page and Luray when the entire fourth quarter consisted of Page players being fouled so Luray could get the ball back. Six minutes of this. So anything that can cut back on those types of games gets my endorsement.

The threat of two free throws after the 10^th foul of the half has not cut back on the length of games, so maybe more states adopting shot clocks could. The NBA is talking about making fouls away from the ball in the last minute or two of a game two shots plus possession of the ball. That could be effective.

In the interim, with the tight deadlines newspapers face these days, I'll endorse anything that keeps the games moving.