I watched the Georgia game — they deserved to lose.
I understand the general concepts of clock management. With a small lead, near the end of the game it's useful to take the shot clock down before setting up a play. Let me set up last night's situation to see if others would handle it differently.
The game is tied at 66 apiece after you heard Joe at a nine point fourth-quarter lead slip away. LSU has the ball with 57 seconds left calls a timeout with 53 seconds left then runs our offense and turns it over with 37 seconds left.
Georgia timeout and the ball 37 seconds to go. (I thought it was 37.8, maybe ESPN just truncates).
I'll start by observing that this technically enough time to try a two-for-one opportunity but not realistically. You have to try to set up a plate to score in two or three seconds, then if LSU uses all 30 seconds and doesn't get an offensivef rebound, you've only got three seconds or so for final play which doesn't sound like a good plan. So I agree with the decision to bring the ball in take the shot clock down and try to get a lead or at least a tie and limited time for LSU to respond.
So I'm on board with the plan to take the shot clock down and set up a play near the end of the shot clock. They stand at the top of the key, wait till the shot clock is down to eight and start the offense. That appears to be standard thinking. I've always felt one should start at 10 seconds, that I've watched a lot of these plays and almost every team starts at eight second so that must be the conventional wisdom of the experts. But if you're going to start the play with eight seconds to go you better have a play that results in a shot. Georgia did not get off a shot, and the shot clock expired. Now obviously, because the game went to overtime LSU didn't take advantage of this gift, they brought the ball down but didn't get a shot off themselves.
However, I want to challenge the notion that you start the play with eight seconds left which seems to be designed to get as close to a buzzer beater is possible. I fully agree with this approach if the position started under 30 seconds. Then a buzzer beater means game over if the shot goes in over time if it doesn't, and if the shot goes up couple seconds earlier, the other team literally has a couple seconds for a desperation play. In this situation there are going to be at least seven seconds left for the other team. While you can point out that seven is better than nine or 10, it's not that much different and aiming to go for a buzzer beater means is a chance as in this case that you don't even put up a shot. I think you should be aiming to put a shot with four or five seconds left which gives you a chance for a rebound and a second shot if you miss, in the worst-case scenario is the other team gets an offense of rebound and has 11 seconds instead of seven.
In other words in this specific situation, I think you ought to start the offense at 12 or 13 seconds, giving you a chance to have to shed a pesky defender make a couple extra passes, or rebound a miss and take another shot. By starting the offense at eight seconds you basically saying you putting the game result onto getting free taking a single shot and making which didn't happen.
