Basketball Fundamentals Matter

On Saturday, I took my annual trip to Royal Brougham Pavilion to watch Western Washington University take on Seattle Pacific University in men's basketball. As such, here is my near annual NCAA Division Two Men's Basketball blog post. The WWU-SPU game was a hard fought one, that came down to the wire, with SPU beating my WWU Vikings 91-88. Both teams showed strengths. One, a clear weakness.

SPU's David Downs was dominate. He scored 36 points on what felt like 90% shooting from the field (it was actually 52.6%). He was a three point machine. When Western players stepped up to guard him he just dribbled right past for an easy layup. When they sagged to stop the drive he drained the three. He was clearly the Falcon's best player.

Even with Downs' amazing performance, Western stayed in the game, mostly from  stellar performances from seniors Austin Bragg and Richard Woodworth. Freshman Jeffrey Parker also caught my eye, as he scored 14 points in 24 min and looked good doing it. The frosh is clearly a baller and will hopefully continue to improve and help the Vikings stay a GNAC power. Unfortunately these good performance's from the Western players were all for naught, as none of them could hit a free throw.

Tony Dominguez saying something to the effect of, "Guys, they're not that hard, just pretend you are playing bump or something."

As a team the Vikings shot 17-27 on free throws, which equates to 63.0%. Even in D2 this is an atrocious percentage. This terrible foul shooting highlighted exactly why making your free throws is so fundamental to basketball success. If the Vikings had hit just three more, completely unguarded, perfectly lined up shots, the game would have been tied. Instead, in heartbreaking fashion, we were forced to watch the Vik's clank away the game at the line.

This aspect of the game was reminiscent of watching Shaq in his prime (or for a more contemporary example, Tony Wroten). Shaq would score 20 and grab 12 rebounds, but you just knew that he left 5-8 more points out on the court by missing free throws. Watching my team blow it at the line was frustrating. They were so close and played so well in almost every other facet of the game (minus guarding David Downs). An upset against SPU on their home court would have been a great accomplishment. Instead they gave away free points by failing to convert their free throws.

The lesson here for aspiring basketball players is work on your fundamentals. The basics, such as free throwing shooting, can win or lose games for you. You just know that the WWU players were all wishing they had spent more time in the gym practicing their foul shots. The fancy passing and solid defense didn't matter because they couldn't execute on one of the most simple aspects of the whole sport.

Sources: WWUVIKING.COM