I don't often come to the forum with specific strategy questions, but I need some outside perspective on this one. I've gone back and forth between Uptempo and Slowdown a half dozen times in the last 2 hours.

Hamline at Denison.

I can make arguments both ways, and I may depending on comments, but for now I'd like people to look at it without my influence. Thanks in advance!

Which team would be helped by an increased tempo, and which would benefit more from a slow tempo?

Everyone else is just as conflicted as I am?

im pretty sure running uptempo would be shooting yourself in the foot. dont see whats wrong with normal in this one!

Might consider slowdown;  you have a number of starters with a sub seventy stamina(Presuming you started your actual starters in your exhibition games) ...

Is it better to run uptempo with zone teams? I mean if I have a zone team with an AVG 80+ stamina, and great rebounding would I be limiting my team if I ran normal or slowdown consistently? I know this is situation dependent but taking a broad view of stamina, what would be the diagnosis here? 

Posted by ryandaniel on 6/2/2012 10:21:00 PM (view original):
Might consider slowdown;  you have a number of starters with a sub seventy stamina(Presuming you started your actual starters in your exhibition games) ...

Nah, my exhibition games went heavy with the freshmen to get them time. I'm gonna go ahead and play the good players in this game.

Posted by coach_billyg on 6/2/2012 10:01:00 PM (view original):
im pretty sure running uptempo would be shooting yourself in the foot. dont see whats wrong with normal in this one!

Well, the major benefit of uptempo would be increased possessions and fouls. His team isn't all that deep either, and I'm stubborn somewhat in that I probably think rebounding should matter more than it does. That said, he's already *very* weak rebounding and if I can get 1 of his 2 not-completely-****** rebounders on the bench, whoever I have at PF should be able to play volleyball until he scores, no?

gotta be slowdown

Posted by yanks250125 on 6/2/2012 10:57:00 PM (view original):
gotta be slowdown

Any particular reason? You don't think the rebounding advantage is worth trying to exploit?

i weight tempo by mainly depth and speed.  u have decent speed but a lot of it is your freshmen who won't get the big minutes.  if you win the rebounding battle 40-30 or 50-38, what's the difference?

I find usually unless you severely out-talent someone or out stamina them or out depth them the other reasons for running uptempo are usually inadequate.  You can leverage good rebounding just as well in a slowdown as a speed up.

On Williams, running a zone defense, so far I have run uptempo just twice, slowdown twelve times, and normal tempo nine times.   I have a 36 - 28 on average rebounding margin - I think that is a pretty good rebounding margin.



 

 

You should just play normal!

Posted by arssanguinus on 6/2/2012 11:17:00 PM (view original):
I find usually unless you severely out-talent someone or out stamina them or out depth them the other reasons for running uptempo are usually inadequate.  You can leverage good rebounding just as well in a slowdown as a speed up.

How do you "leverage" it in slow down?

With uptempo, the logic is that - the more possessions, the greater any clear advantage becomes. That should hold true for rebounding just as much as anything else, no?

That is to say, if we get 40 possessions running slow down and hit 50% of our shots, that leaves 20 potential offensive rebounds. If our rebounding advantage allows us to get offensive rebounds at a 20% clip, we get 4 extra possessions via offensive board. If we get 60 possessions running uptempo at the same numbers, we get 6 extra possessions exploiting that rebounding strength. Obviously those are just made up numbers, but they hopefully illustrate my rationale.

That's a totally irrelevant bit of analysis, since in your example you haven't changed relative rates at all.  You get an extra 2 possessions in your example (plus the general extra possessions from running uptempo), but you haven't changed anything to your advantage vs. the slowdown or normal tempo.  What you actually think is your advantage as I gathered from an earlier post is that in the extra possessions from uptempo your rate of grabbing offensive rebounds would actually increase.  I think the point being made (which I tend to agree with) is that in this game offensive rebounds are so rarely a significant advantage that this just isn't a good enough reason to run uptempo.  I don't think you have a depth advantage or sufficient talent advantage to justify uptempo at all.  I would probably go normal, but slowdown before uptempo for sure.