1/15 Of A Team

Hey,
Since this is the last couple of weeks of the season, I will write a post or two about basketball and how I see it.

This post isn't exactly about me being a gay basketball player, but just being a basketball player.

On every successful team, or at least most of them, there is a big "war" for playing minutes, you can see it anywhere you look, Pro's, college, overseas. Everyone knows that each team has one goal, and that's to win, but each team carries a lot of ego with it, and it's not simple.

On this matter everything starts with the coach, GM and the whole coaching staff, they have to set the rotation, decide in the summer who to sign and what they expect him to do and to give to the team.

Basically once training camp starts and the first camps gets underway everything changes, since not every team has five guys like Lebron James or five guys like Kobe Bryant, a key for a good team is having a couple of leading players and some more position players or rotation players as we are used to call them.

The first stage of each team is to try and get everyone on the same page, get people to realize that they have to share the ball, share the glory and share everything around it.

As I said before, the "war" is for minutes, but not just that, it's about much more. Most players, want to be the stars and the leaders of the team, just like I enjoy it, most players enjoy it and want it.

And as I wrote before, not everyone can be the star, a lot of times it leads to fights, bad teamwork and loses, it's hard for people to control their ego and once you are on the court everything is very emotional.

I can honestly say some things that you won't usually hear from players, not every player wants his team to win when he isn't on the floor, sometimes players rather score 20 and have 5 assists and have the team lose, rather then playing bad or seeing the team win from the bench.

Another example is players who are in a bad period in the season and don't get minutes, for the most part they would rather see the team lose and then maybe the coaches will see that them not getting minutes hurts the team and they will get back into the rotation.

All those things are things no one will say, but I know that a lot feel like it, another example is having two good shooting guards on the team, not always does the one starting on the bench want the starter to succeed.

A lot of time he wants him to fail, to get his spot and his minutes, basically it's like real life, we look on ourselves first of all and just after that do we look on the others and what they do.

The Irony of things is that if a team wants to succeed, it isn't any different then from the marketing world, the high tech world or the sports world.

The key is getting players to play for each other and to play as a team, just like getting people who work together to help each other out.

Even though everyone wants and thinks of his success first of all, it's the staff's job to get them to understand or better yet accept the advantages of playing as a team, it doesn't always happen, and teams don't always succeed.

Like every player, I have been on teams that had a good team chemistry and game and other teams that had a lot of raw talent, but not really had a team game, luckily over the years I had some good teams that I can say that I enjoyed myself.

I try not to lie to myself in the sense that I know that not on every team I played everyone liked me, it's just a part of reality, because we will always meet people that we don't really appreciate.

It can be either in the professional sense or in the human relation sense, and it's not like we were given the chance to pick each other, so it's something that all of us just need to deal with.

I can also say that I have been around enough guys that I didn't really like and even though it never got to a fight or to something out of the ordinary.

I can't say that I wished them all the best in the world, but all of us need to play our part, and usually be quite, also support the one's we don't care for too much and just be a part of the show.

Just like I wrote in the title, each player always thinks he deserves more glory, but none of us will ever admit that sometimes and some days
we are only 1/15 of a basketball team...

I will finish up with a song that might have something to do with all this

I can't believe the news today
Oh, I can't close my eyes and make it go away
How long, how long must we sing this song?
How long? How long?
'Cause tonight we can be as one, tonight

Broken bottles under children's feet
Bodies strewn across the dead end streets
But I won't heed the battle call
It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall

Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday

And the battle's just begun
There's many lost but tell me who has won
The trench is dug within our hearts
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart