Matt Glatt: Man oh man, I hear that men’s basketball game was quite the thriller! Triple overtime, are you kidding me?
Wiley Spears: It was unbelievable. Talk about an absolute heartbreaker for the Polar Bears. Honestly I don’t think I have ever seen a more exciting basketball game.
Mikey Jarrell: It shouldn’t have been close.
WS: Huh? They were the fourth and fifth seeds in the NESCAC and played a really tight game back in January, of course it was going to be a good matchup.
MJ: Maybe so, but if Coach Gilbride had any idea what he was doing, I’m sure things would have turned out differently.
WS: Tim Gilbride is the most successful coach in Bowdoin men’s basketball history and he led the team to a 19-5 record this year. You can’t possibly tell me he’s a bad coach.
MJ: Gilbride didn’t lead them to anything, the players did. As my dad always says, “A coach is like a doctor: his job is to do no harm.” Gilbride cost his team two games this year on bone-headed decisions, and if I were one of his players, I would be absolutely livid.
MG: What do you think he did wrong?
MJ: Other than call timeouts––which, as we learned from the Middlebury game, Gilbride struggles with––the primary in-game responsibility of the head coach is to make the correct substitutions. Wiley, there is no way in hell you can convince me that Gilbride had the right players in at the right times.
WS: I thought he coached a really good game. The starters weren’t getting it done out there in the first half and Bowdoin was down by six at halftime. Trinity pushed the lead to 14 in the first six minutes of the second half, so Gilbride brought in the bench and they were able to close the game, send it to overtime, and almost pull off one of the most exciting comebacks in Bowdoin history. He changed his whole game plan and prevented a blowout.
MJ: Yeah, the bench played an unbelievable game, but they shouldn’t have been out there down the stretch. Grant White and Matt Mathias absolutely, unequivocally, without a doubt, have to be in at the end of the game. Grant played 16 minutes in the first half and first four minutes of the second, and then didn’t see the floor again until the end of the first overtime. Mathias, meanwhile, played 19 of the first 25 minutes of the game, and then played a total of 7 seconds the rest of the game.
WS: Gilbride was riding the hot hand. You can’t blame him for that.
MG: You dance with the girl you came with!
MJ: No, no, no, no, no. You can’t leave your starters on the bench. They’re the ones who beat Trinity the first time they played, they’re the ones who won 19 games, and they have to be the ones to close out this game.
WS: Then whom should Gilbride have taken out? Lucas Hausman played phenomenally and hit some clutch free throws and layups in huge moments, Bryan Hurley hit a ridiculous three-pointer to save us and send it to triple OT despite practically playing on one leg, and Matt “Bear” Palecki had ten rebounds, three blocks, and didn’t miss a shot.
MJ: I don’t care. Mathias is a senior, a captain, a 44 percent three-point shooter, 90 percent free throw shooter, and is in the top ten in the conference in assists and assist/turnover ratio, and has been the undisputed leader of the team. Grant, meanwhile, was shooting an absurd 48 percent from three heading into the game, good for second best in the NESCAC, and is quite possibly the best athlete at this school. Are you’re trying to tell me that these guys should be on the bench? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
WS: They had their chance in the first half and at the start of the second half. The starters created a fourteen-point deficit for the bench to overcome, and they did an amazing job erasing that gap.
MJ: Obviously I don’t mean to discredit the guys who came off the bench, and you need to bring them in to give the starters a rest, but after that the best players on the team need to be on the court. Palecki made a put-back with 7:41 to go in regulation to make it a two-point game, and right when that happened I turned to Dusty [Biron ’15] and said, “OK, where are the starters?”
MG: Hey, speaking of Dusty, it sounds to me like you’re just sticking up for your golf teammates. [Mathias is also on the golf team.] Don’t let your emotions compromise your objectivity!
MJ: You want to take emotions out of it? Fine, let’s take the statistical approach. We have a pretty large performance sample from the starters and the bench players over the course of the season. Mathias, White and Andrew Madlinger, the three seniors on the team, established themselves as some of the best three-point shooters in the NESCAC. Mathias, Madlinger, and Pieri all shot over 80 percent on free throws. White and Mathias had the two best assist-to-turnover ratios on the team, and Madlinger is the only player on the team with more steals than turnovers. There’s a reason these guys started every single game this year. The way I saw it, the starters were just cold. It happens. They were taking good shots that they normally make and they weren’t going in. If you’ve ever taken a statistics class or played fantasy baseball, you know about the concept of regression to the mean: there’s always going to be random variation, but over the long run a player is going to perform at his “mean”––in this case, his season averages should be a good approximation. And I firmly believe that you have to trust the statistics here, and the statistics say that a team is most likely to win if its best players on the court, regardless of how they have been playing recently.
WS: Right, nobody’s debating whether they’re good players. But they were absolutely ice cold all day. Excluding Swords, the starters shot terribly: 26 percent overall, including 22 percent on three-pointers. That’s why they sat on the bench the rest of the game. Meanwhile, you could point to a boatload of statistics to argue the merits of the guys coming off the bench. Hausman led the team on a per minute basis in points, free throw attempts and makes, and steals. Palecki led the team in rebounds per minute played. And although we have a smaller sample size for Hurley, he did end the year with the best three-point percentage on the team, and he led the NESCAC in assists last year by a mile. Coach Gilbride had weapons coming in off the bench and he used them to his advantage this game.
MG: Mikey, you have yet to come up with convincing argument here. Everything statistic you’ve cited, Wiley has matched it. You better come up with something good. It sounds to me like the classic conflict between two simple yet contradictory philosophies. Wiley believes that if a guy is hot he’s more likely to stay hot or if he’s cold he’s more likely to stay cold, a concept the media often refers to as “momentum.” Mikey believes that hot or cold streaks are just statistical noise, and that no matter the previous result, a player is still most likely to play at his mean performance level, much like a coin flip is still 50-50 even if you’ve hit 20 tails in a row. This is one of the most highly debated topics in the world of sports, and I doubt you two idiots are going to solve anything here.
MJ: Do I get one more chance to show you Gilbride screwed up?
MG: Ugh…I guess.
MJ: All right, let’s just look at the strengths and weaknesses of the players on the team. Hurley is solid from beyond the arc, but his real gift is distributing the ball. He does that best when he’s surrounded by spot-up shooters, like Madlinger. Swords is an absolute monster in the post, especially when he’s surrounded by good outside shooting and has more room to operate in the paint. That’s where Mathias and White come in. And Pieri takes advantage of slower, bigger power forwards by constantly knocking down the tough in-between jumpers. This starting lineup is perfectly designed to play together as a unit, exploiting their triangle offense, getting the ball into the posts, and forcing their opposing defense to decide between giving up an open three or letting Swords go to work one-on-one. Pick your poison.
As for the reserves, Hausman is a pure slasher who’s at his best when he’s making layups and free throws. Palecki is going to get tough rebounds and make hustle plays all day, but he doesn’t really create his own offense, as you can see by the fact that he took only two shots in 26 minutes on Saturday. Neil Fuller ’17 is in a similar boat as Palecki, and the two work excellently together on defense and fill the paint in Bowdoin’s 2-3 zone defense almost as well as Swords does. Hausman works really well in the bench unit because he’s not afraid to take on a double team and try to get to the rim, and he’s used to taking a lot of shots when he’s on the court. Hurley would rather pass than shoot, and last year he had almost as many assists as shot attempts.
So what went wrong towards the end of the game? Taking away minutes from White and, to a greater extent, Mathias, had several repercussions. The most apparent to those at the game was the effect it had on Swords. He played 10 minutes more than his season average, and he was clearly exhausted by the end of the game and was unable to play at his normal level. Palecki, though, played a whopping 20 minutes over his season average, and without him Swords would probably have passed out on the court. He played extremely well in his expanded role. But Palecki’s and Hausman’s extra minutes have a subtle domino effect that change the entire structure of the offense and is what I think was the biggest factor that contributed to their loss. With Palecki and tired Swords on the court together at most of the end of the game, Trinity’s post defenders were very quick to double or even triple team any Bowdoin player that ventured into the paint. So an extra body or two met Hausman every time he tried to get to the hoop. I think that’s a big reason why he finished the game 3-13 from the field, even though he averages six for 14. Madlinger played the most minutes of anyone, but during pretty much the entire second half and during the three OTs he was the only three-point threat on the court, meaning he got fewer open looks than he normally would when paired with Mathias and/or White. Madlinger is much more comfortable taking set shots, and Saturday he was forced into taking several shots off the dribble, which is not his forte. Pieri, meanwhile, had very little space to operate inside and never found his signature midrange jump shot. He took only three shots in 36 minutes.
So, with much of the offense essentially out of commission, the ball stuck to the hands of the point guard. Many possessions consisted almost entirely of Hurley prodding into the paint, looking for passing lanes, not finding anything, and being forced into a difficult shot. He finished the game with four assists and 17 shot attempts, whereas last year he averaged an incredible eight assists and only nine shots. Against Trinity, the offense as a whole went stagnant and as a result the guards who played the most minutes––Hausman, Hurley and Madlinger––combined to shoot 26 percent from the field, including 21 percent from three. How do you like them apples?
WS: Uh, what? My eyes glazed over 467 sentences ago.
MG: I don’t think anybody’s still reading at this point. Can we get a TL;DR?
WS: Essentially, Mikey has too much time on his hands.
MJ: Essentially, the bench did their job and provided a spark when the team desperately needed one, but their success on offense was largely unsustainable due to several players being forced into playing outside their comfort zones, a problem that Gilbride could easily been solved by putting the starters back in right when every other coach would have done so. And for that I think he owes his team an apology. I can’t possibly fathom what made Gilbride think it was a good idea to leave several of his starters on the bench for much of the end of the game, not to mention one of his senior captains.
MG: Well, I don’t know if I’m entirely convinced that it was the wrong basketball decision, but I guess Mikey makes a pretty strong case that Gilbride misallocated the minutes. Either way, it’s a shame that the college basketball careers of Madlinger, White and Mathias ended like this. Do we have any No-Fail Predictions this week?
MJ: Despite my beautifully crafted argument, Tim Gilbride will remain the head coach of our men’s basketball team.
WS: Mikey won’t be asked to speak at the Winter Athletics dinner.
MG: Dave Caputi will be fired as head coach of our football team and immediately re-hired as the basketball coach.