100% success rate means nothing at this stage - Paul Smith

Oct 12 2010

Paul Smith

Head coach Paul Smith looks back at the opening two games of the BBL championship season and considers what, if anything, they reveal about how the season will pan out.

A coach cannot ask for any more than a 100% success rate to open up the season, but I am not sure that we can read too much into these early season results.

It’s much too early in the day to indulge in predictions. Teams everywhere are fighting for fitness, chemistry and consistency at this stage so games tend to be about who performs best over the 40 minutes on any given day.

The first game of the League season against the Essex Pirates didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know about my team. I know that they have great individual skills and sometimes they combine to demonstrate outstanding teamwork.

I also know that they are the youngest and most inexperienced squad that I have had to work with and that, with a lack of competitive experience at this level, often comes a degree of inconsistency. We had much greater physical presence than our visitors, so we were able to dominate them throughout, and the result was not really ever in doubt.

Worthing Thunder, our opponents in last Sunday’s game were a much tougher prospect, although they too were not at full strength, and so that game was much more useful from a coach’s point of view.

There were periods in the game where we executed really well whilst playing at a very high tempo which is exactly the vision we are aiming for; disciplined execution with high tempo team basketball. It was not all good news, however; we are still not rebounding well at all. This is a real concern at the moment. It’s such a crucial part of the game though - you can’t win trophies without good rebounding, so we must find a way to address it.

This area formed the focus of our tape review and most of our practices this week – and next weekend’s results will show whether we have made an improvement!

For me, another high point of the Worthing game was Colin O’Reilly’s team high 21 point contribution to the win after a bit of a dip in his form as compared to last season. it was good to see and I hope he can kick on from there. He is an important member of the team and we need him to be playing well, consistently. He sets himself very high standards though and he's a very hard worker so I can only see him going from strength to strength really.