Season 19 Winding Down

I always love Golden Week. April & May are very busy for me in my real life but this week gives a nice break, and provides some time to post an update on the teams progress.

In my last post we had just beaten Prathet Thai by a big margin to start the second round. Since then things have gone downhill quite a bit. The competition has progressively gotten much more difficult and at the same time the team’s form is getting worse each week. We’ve had a rash of injuries and some key starters have had a string of low gameshape.

Our results for the last 3 games:
New Zealand 109 - Nippon 90
Taiwan 119 – Nippon 88
Iran 105 – Nippon 79

Of these games our best chance was against New Zealand but in reality they’re players were just too good for us. The other two teams are far better than us and play at a completely different level. It’s interesting though that despite 3 consecutive losses our ranking has improved 8 spots during that time.

At this point we’ve shown that we have enough quality to be a strong mid-level team but we don’t have enough to compete with the bigger nations. However, we have a number of interesting young players that give us hope that we can get better in a few seasons. There are a couple teams ahead of us still that we should target to try to surpass, New Zealand and Malaysia. I think getting ahead of them would be a huge accomplishment for a country our size.

Our final game is against Australia. We beat them early in the season, but most likely because they were looking past us. Since that loss they have been blowing through everyone. It’s likely them against China in the Asia Finals.

After our last game I will take a look through all of the young prospects to see where they are at. I don’t think any of them are quite ready for National team playing time but it would be nice to get a few of the most promising ones onto the roster. I’ll share updates as we progress on that.

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Season 19 Winding Down