TerryA88 said:
I wonder why no time out was called?
I responded to the question in a different thread, but in my opinion, if we wanted to make sure the ball was in Bazz's hands at the end, we did the right thing not calling one after the foul shots. With only nine seconds left and the length of the court, if they successfully deny Bazz the inbounds pass, we may not be able to get it back to him with enough time to do anything. If we call it at mid court with 5 or 6 seconds left, we might end up taking the ball out of our best player's (and hot hand's) possession for the last time. Houston would love to be able to force someone else to beat them, and we'd be helping them by taking the ball out of his hands voluntarily and forcing us to get it back to him again with very little clock left. The ball was already in his hands and he had a head of steam going, so go.
The earlier possession, yeah - in hindsight, I think we managed the clock and situation so poorly without one that we should have called it. You want 2 for 1 there. Ollie knows that, since that's a staple of NBA strategy, far more so than college. We wanted to shoot with around 45 seconds left - instead we gave ourselves only a 3.5 second differential, and we didn't give Bazz enough time to work with so in order to preserve the 2 for 1, the quick three was his only choice. I'm not even sure that he shot then because of 2 for 1 strategy, but it would have been nice to give him the chance to go to a couple moves or possibly look for a kickout pass.
However, if you call your last one with a minute left, you may find yourself wishing you had it later, either because you can't get the ball to Bazz, or you dive on a loose ball, or for a game management situation (such as if Houston missed that last foul shot with 2.3 left, we could have called it there and had a chance at a home run play). The biggest timeout lesson from today is don't stink so bad for so long that you have to burn them for motivational speeches. Boat called one on the floor to save a possession too, but can't fault him for that.