Marin’s full-court press, offensive rebounding doom Napa Valley College men in home opener
By Kyle Foster
Twitter: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
Two halves will always equal a whole.
In their home opening 80-57 loss to the College of Marin the Napa Valley College men’s basketball team played an adequate first half, but in the second half things went south.
At one point early in the first half NVC held a seven-point advantage.
“We let it slip down,” Napa Valley College coach Steve Ball said of letting the game get away from them. “We were up by seven or eight I think there midway through the first half and then we let things slip away a little bit, turned the ball over a little bit against their 1-2-2 (defense). They took a one-point lead at the half.”
The main problem in the second half for the Storm (3-11 overall, 1-1 Bay Valley Conference) was that Marin was snarling in a plethora of offensive rebounds, which gave them plenty of extra possessions.
“They’re one of the better offensive rebounding teams in Northern California,” Ball said of Marin’s strength on bringing in offensive rebounds. “They’re pretty big. If you look at their line up their point guard in 6’4”, so they’re gonna get rebounds. I don’t think they needed to get as many as we gave up, especially in the first half. I thought some guys stepped up and did a good job on the defensive glass, but I think we drill it almost every day hit, find, get. We’ve got some guys who can rebound the basketball as well, we just rotated over a lot, a little too far so we couldn’t get back and we didn’t really help the helper. I thought a couple of their guys did a good job at that, but we need to do a better job as a whole because the ball finds ugly, so you miss one box out and that’s the guy that it’s going to go to.”
Another thing that bit Napa Valley College was the large amount of turnovers they had against the Marin full-court press.
“They did a great job defensively, but we gave them a lot of extra opportunities in that press,” Ball emphasized. “Not to take anything away from the way they were playing, but they went to that press because we were doing a great job in the half court offensively, so they went to the press and we kinda threw indecisive passes and weren’t very assertive with what we were doing, and on the back side it turned into layups and free throws for them.”
Braxton Adderly led the way for NVC on the night as he had 12 points.
“I felt like personally I needed to finish more,” Adderly explained. “Around the basket I was actually struggling a little bit, but you know our blockers action three out, two in works pretty well and tonight they were actually over playing out flare screens, so you know a couple backdoor opportunities were there. And then, you know, I have confidence in my shot, so when I had the opportunity I took them.”
Tylor Gerrard added 10 points, and Tomas Gomez-Espana pitched in nine as well.
The Storm will be back in action after the calendar flips to 2019, as they’ll head to Alameda on Wednesday. The game will tip at 6 p.m.
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