game planning, team setup, and team planning really go hand in hand. team planning is the way you craft your team through the players you recruit - eg. making sure you have enough offense to go around, enough perimeter shooting, enough rebounding, passing, etc, etc... its the synergies you build in, the strengths you really hope to push, and the weakness you hope to effectively manage. this goes hand in hand with how you set your team up, obviously - the way you plan to play these players should be a major factor when you pick them in the first place. and them you can tweak your team-to-team setup, but all im saying is people often view this game as recruiting talent, and then game planning, but that missing the biggest factor in success - effective team planning and the subsequent proper setup to take advantage of the synergies, and minimize the weaknesses involved.
i think your problem in your loss this season was not so much game planning (although i didnt look in depth - but the obvious problem that jumped out was NOT game planning). it was a team planning/team setup problem. you just don't take enough 3s - and when you think about it from the other teams' standpoint, it makes it EASY to gameplan AGAINST you. this is not good! so, they (unsurprisingly) went with a - setting slowdown to try to overcome your obvious talent advantage, and it worked. sure, you should have still won this game more than 50% of the time, but its really very common to lose a game you are 65 or 75% to win too (1 in 3 or 1 in 4 - you lose - and if you think about the fact that you have to win 6 in a row in the NT - you basically have to realize, if you are a 2/3 or 3/4 favorite in NT games, you are very very likely to wind up losing one). if you had the same talent advantage, with a more effective team plan and team setup, your chance of losing this game could have easily been cut in half.
ill just mention this because you are in tark. i used to run a fantastic mentoring program out of the GLV (the best non d1 conference in the long run, in the history of HD). part of the reason for the program was to bolster the conference - i love playing there, love the difficulty, and wanted to help build it into a power conference when i was afraid it would fall apart, after we lost the 2nd and 3rd best coaches in conf within a season of each other. the other part is, despite getting burnt out on HD after pulling off my great runs in d1 & d2 tark, i still love to talk about the game and interacting with members of this fine community (thats why im still playing). anyway, i am not as active nor aggressive in my approach there, but still, unlimited advice is offered to any coaches, and i have mentored a number of guys through that conference, from struggling to consistently make the NT to multiple national championships. i think you have the basics of the game down but could really benefit from some additional insight, and some guidance, and i think you could also develop into a coach the GLV could be proud of. so, if you are ever thinking of moving up in tark, you might want to take that into consideration (if you don't know who i am or why i am qualified to mentor coaches from rookies to those with a handful of titles, id be happy to try to convince you of the value of the mentoring program via sitemail).