2024-2025: Week 7 Player Reports

Game 1: Team Orange vs. Team Yellow

-It’s almost a shame that sports tend to get remembered for individual plays rather than the collective of plays that decide the outcome of a game. The simplistic view of this one was that Yellow threw the game away with two awful possessions late. That might lead you to jump to conclusions about the construction of Yellow’s roster and whether they will continue to struggle in late game situations, which obviously would not bode well for their title aspirations. But, seen from a more holistic perspective, Yellow played well for most of this one. They raced out to a huge lead by sharing the ball and picking on mismatches. It served them well for most of the game. Orange, obviously, was not going to just take this lying down and staged a slow comeback as the game went on. They have a deep roster of size and shooters. No one is going to just blow them out of the gym for forty minutes. Yellow did their best to contain their scorers, but were forced to surrender good looks to the secondary scorers at times, leading to some absolutely wide open shots. Still, Yellow didn’t panic and continued to feed their big man and take what the defense gave them. Konrad sacrificed most of his scoring, getting blanketed by Chris far from the basket, but returned the favor playing some hard-nosed defensive of his own at the other end. Yellow had all 7 players in attendance score, but with the game on the line, they came up with two costly turnovers allowing Orange to take the lead once and for all. One turnover had the right intentions, just a horrible pass by me right at Foster’s feet. The other was just panic. Orange guts out the tough win to get to 4-1 on the year while Yellow falls to 3-2. Not much to feel ashamed of so far for Yellow. Their two losses were to the first and second place teams and both games were decided by single possession, basically. It will be fun to see both of those rematches in the second half of the season.

Game 2: Team Red vs. Team Blue

-Team Blue’s margin for error on the offensive end is razor thin and they had just about everything go wrong in this one. Rodney was out. Bob Kelly struggled to find the magic touch he had the past couple weeks. Carli seemed to have found someone who could deal with his aggressive physicality, even if he did score exactly 11 points for the fourth time this season. The end result of these handicaps was a miserable 44 points on the board after forty minutes of play. Sterna finally scored a couple field goals and Jay had his moments, but this was a pretty depressing version of Blue as they finally had a game be decided by a large margin. Team “Practice Makes Perfect” continues to coalesce. Even while waiting for Declan to return, they appear to be playing more cohesive, team basketball each week. Keaton and Kamba finally broke out with some nice shooting games, reducing the burden on Colin to fire up tough shots in traffic. TJ Kennedy also added 18 points to his solid defense on Carli, showing he can score in a variety of ways. He seems to thrive on the proclivity of the refs to allow tons of contact. I heard Ralph was upset he isn’t getting recognized in these writeups, so let me go out of my way to mention that Ralph went something like 1-10 from the field. Team Blue falls to 2-4 on the year while Red moves ahead to 4-2 and a league leading 4-game win streak. Some of that may be due to a favorable schedule recently, but they’ve begun to establish themselves in the top half of the league. And, honestly, who cares? Wins are wins.

Game 3: - Team Purple vs. Team Pink

-With the “every other season” theory for Matt Koll teams starting to solidify, Team Pink has fallen into a familiar script each week of playing competitive basketball for 75% of the game before quickly fading down the stretch. On paper, they continue to have what should be a balanced, competitive starting 5. Paul had an off game, likely still dealing with the effects of illness, but it’s hard to believe this team is 1-5. Some of that might be attributable to playing without and eventually losing their fifth rounder, but it’s shocking they were apparently so reliant on one more reliable player. Sometimes the individual talents just don’t seem to mesh as well. One thing that sticks out? Screens. Matt and Bradley are both guys who play hard and impact lots of plays at both ends of the court. However, neither of them are great screeners. They don’t set many screens and they don’t set many QUALITY screens. This isn’t a fault of theirs, it just feels like a missed opportunity with Ed and Paul, who operate so well off of good screens. Bradley likes to duck down in the post and patrol the baseline. Matt mostly doesn’t want the ball, so he hides on the perimeter. If they can get Rhoads’ huge ass to just put a body on the guy guarding Ed or Paul every possession, it might unlock some upside for this team. They’re currently 1-5 with only a -11 point differential on the year. Leads me to think a turnaround is still within reach. Team Purple continues to get a healthy balance of scoring from their entire roster. Other than their Week 5 overtime matchup with Yellow, the entire team usually gets in on the action, which is a huge advantage to close out games. All 8 players scored in this one, which is the third time they’ve accomplished that this season. All wins.

Standings

Team	Captain	Win	Loss	Record	Win %	Streak	PS	PA	DIFF
PURPLE	MATT VITALIANO	5	1	5 - 1	0.833	W3	381	321	60
ORANGE	KYLE GARMES	4	1	4 - 1	0.800	W2	339	306	33
RED	STEVE DUDEK	4	2	4 - 2	0.667	W4	369	371	-2
YELLOW	MARK KOLL	3	2	3 - 2	0.600	L2	334	296	38
WHITE	ROB KNAPCZYK	2	3	2 - 3	0.400	L2	305	331	-26
BLUE	LUKE A	2	4	2 - 4	0.333	L3	338	356	-18
GREEN	DAVE TROY	1	4	1 - 4	0.200	W1	304	378	-74
PINK	MATT KOLL	1	5	1 - 5	0.167	L3	396	407	-11