I disagree. Watching it on tv, I thought the effort was there. The problem was that it was a sloppy effort at times, some in fairly long stretches.
For those who thought we run the weave too much, Les did a good job of game planning in that we got the ball inside far more often tonight. But in the first half, SS and TW missed easy layups and got rattled due to Drake's stingy defense.
In the second half, our offense was better as the inside game looked crisper which in turn led to some more three point attempts, but then our defense looked like rubbish. Great defense leads to better offense, but tonight it seemed like our offense opened up in the second half, but at the expense of our defense. Go figure!
Of course Collins playing poorly and TW's foul trouble did not help either. We just can't seem to get the entire team play on the same page in any given game, and we look very average.
Speaking of average, I can sum up our recent stretch against the Valley elite in a nutshell. Great teams win those games, bad teams get blown out. Average teams, whether slightly above or slightly below, usually lose games to the elite, but play very close. I think that sums up our team right now. We are an average to slightly above average team that plays with great effort and are very competitive, which bodes well for next season. We also have talent. Unfortunately we don't have depth, we have several very young players and we don't play with smarts all of the time. So while the lack of effort is not the problem, I think nerves and poor in-game decisions are the problem.
I don't know as a coaching staff how you address those problems, but something is "lost in translation" from the practices to the actual games. Either it's experience, chemistry, a little of both or maybe players who are athletically talented but lack fundamentals. Let's hope for the sake of the remainder of this season and particularly next season it's more from lack of experience and chemistry than from anything else.
