Minnesota High School Playoff Game Features 10 Minutes of Stalling
Want to watch paint dry? It would have been more entertaining than a high school basketball playoff game in Minnesota on Tuesday night.
In the first round of the region 2AAA playoffs on Tuesday (February 27) night, 3rd ranked Waseca defeated Marshall 17-4 to advance forward to the semifinals. That score isn't incorrect. 17-4 was the final.
Minnesota doesn't use shot clocks outside of regular season tournaments and non-conference basketball games as outlined in their bylaws. I bet most people were wishing for a shot clock on Tuesday night.
Waseca was ahead of Marshall 9-2 at the start of the 2nd half. Marshall started with the ball in the 2nd half and held it for 10 straight minutes. No... for real. They did nothing for 10 minutes. The crowd started making their own fun by singing the Jeopardy theme while shining the flashlight on their phone.
That's just the final two minutes of the stalling. The most entertaining part is that they had to stop the students from shining their phone lights as it's against policy.
Maybe their updated policy should be to install shot clocks in Minnesota schools as soon as possible to avoid such situations.
Dan Paluch, who is a former shadow/intern for us, is now covering Marshall, Minnesota high school basketball. He had the unfortunate job of having to broadcast this representation of a basketball game.
He had a post game conversation with Marshall head coach Dan Westby in which the coach said that the game plan was to slow down the game and only take open layups and three points, while limiting the chances of Waseca.
They succeeded in limiting opportunities, but failed at scoring more than four points.
This is probably the most extreme case when it comes to bleeding out a clock. It's also enough to where Minnesota needs to immediately take action and enforce a shot clock.
We have it here in South Dakota in all three of our classes. It has improved the product around the state in each one also. Usually the narrative seems to be how South Dakota is behind Minnesota, but it's opposite in this situation.
Evolve with the time, or continue to see these type of appalling versions of basketball games.
Good luck. Hopefully the rest of the games don't go that direction.
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