Column: Firebirds’ strategy bothered Lawrence

Kudos to Free State High coach Chuck Law for employing a turn-back-the-clock, clock-eating strategy, and especially to his players for having the discipline to execute their coach’s game plan remarkably well.

Shockingly, visiting Lawrence High had to come from behind to defeat underdog Free State, 39-33, Friday night in a packed, renovated gymnasium where with each tick of the only clock high school basketball uses, the game clock, the pressure mounted on the state’s No. 1 team.

No shot clock meant the Firebirds could take their time, protect the ball conservatively and frustrate the state’s top-ranked team into not doing what it loves to do, which is to play basketball at a fast pace.

The students won’t hear this in their U.S. history class, but a quick basketball-history lesson seems timely. Tennessee defeated Temple, 11-6, in a college basketball game in 1973. Not a football game, a basketball game. No shot clock. It wasn’t until the 1985-86 season that college basketball started to use one, initially a 45-second clock.

I like that high schools don’t use one, although I’m certainly glad college basketball started using it. The lack of a defined time to get a shot off in high school gives the little guys a slingshot of a chance to slay giants. And that’s what Friday night’s game was on paper, a colossal mismatch.

“Close to executing the game plan to a T,” Law said of his players.

And the game plan was?

“No. 1 was not allowing them any transition baskets, and I don’t believe they got any,” Law said. “Two was to try as much as we could to make other guys than the two studs — they’ve got a lot of good players, but they have two obvious studs — beat us.”

As long as the rules are the rules, why not play to them?

“Obviously, depends on the night, and it depends on the team,” Law said of whether he likes the rule. “I told our guys all week: ‘There is a shot clock. It’s eight minutes long. Use that to your advantage.’ The three-point line and no shot clock are the great equalizers of high school basketball. We used one of them very advantageously. We didn’t do the other.”

LHS coach Mike Lewis expressed no ambiguity as to his shot-clock stance: “The problem that we face in high school is that there’s no shot clock. It can be very repetitive and methodical like that, and play to their advantage.”

Slowing it down can only work if someone can eventually score and steal possessions, and the Firebirds’ most experienced player did plenty of both. Weston Hack, a 6-foot-3 senior, played a terrific game and finished with 18 points, nine rebounds and one turnover. He cut to the hoop purposefully, played strong defense on the ball and in the passing lanes, and handled the ball like a point guard. Not only that, he had a blast at least until the Lions pulled it out in the final minutes.

“We knew we could play with them,” Hack said. “We don’t really buy into the rankings or anything like that. We believed in ourselves. We just didn’t do enough down the stretch.”

Hack didn’t need any convincing from the coaching staff as to the right approach.

“If we get into a track meet with them, we’re not going to beat them,” Hack said. “It wouldn’t even have been a game. They have better athletes than us, better skill guys. I think we understood that was our chance to stay in the game, possibly get a win, so we just bought into what coach asked us to do.”

And put the heat on the more talented, experienced squad.

“All the pressure was on them tonight,” Law said. “I think a lot of people in the community expected them to come over here and put it to us. It seems like a logical conclusion to come to. But our kids believed. We talked about how the only people who believed we could be in this game were the 12 guys and the coaches in this locker room. And that’s all you need. You bunker in, you build around yourselves and that’s what we did tonight.”

The result was an entertaining game that kept the audience tuned in every possession, instead of a blowout that would have left many spectators resorting to gabbing the night away.