Basketball: Delicate balancing act picking Athens squad

By DAVID LEGGATT

Tall Blacks coach Tab Baldwin admits he is still some way off finalising his Olympic Games squad.

But if he's tossing and turning at night over how he's going to shoehorn his present 15-strong party into 12 for Athens, he's hiding it well.

In fact, he sounds as if he's relishing the prospect. As he should be. After all, that's what his job is all about, making the tough calls and it's not as if he's travelling into uncharted selection territory.

The three-game series against the Australian Boomers starting tonight is the final chance, both for Baldwin and for his players, to sort out who gets a ticket to Athens and who heads for the beach.

"I'm a lot further off than I thought I would be," he said.

"And that just makes these games really important because they become the decision ground. We have to look at it as our final determination on whether it will be player A or player B."

The Tall Blacks have come out of a physically exhausting camp but are itching to square off against their fierce rivals.

For Baldwin and his assistant, Nelson Giants coach and former Tall Black Nenad Vucinic, it's not a simple matter of trimming the five weakest links - 10 spots are almost certainly on offer with American-based Sean Marks and Kirk Penney sure of inclusion when the Games squad is named after the Australian series.

All positions need cover. Baldwin draws a rugby analogy.

"It's easy with rugby because you know how many forwards and how many backs you need. But if you were going into a test you wouldn't have just one hooker.

"With basketball we say how many forwards, how many guards and how many point guards.

"We have to decide whether one of our generic guards can play at point guard well enough in the eventuality we lost a point guard to injury.

"So players will be put in an environment against Australia to test their capabilities."

And that raises the ticklish question: do Baldwin and Vucinic approach the series with victory the overriding priority, or mix and match to test permutations, perhaps weakening the team on court but with the longer-term aim in mind?

Baldwin is a firm advocate of winning. You don't hear him talk of a good loss, or a heartening defeat. A loss means coming second and that's not part of his vocabulary.

He talks of the Boomers series having a dual purpose - winning and moving a step closer to finalising the Olympic squad. So how do you blend the two to achieve both objectives?

"Certainly we play with the purpose of winning. That is absolutely the stated objective of our team.

"But the second objective, which is incredibly important, is the big picture.

"Are we preparing ourselves by playing this game to play better when we get to the big show [Athens]?

"To say this series isn't really that important is not correct.

"But to say we will do anything to win the game - like not playing a player that we're still trying to determine their worth to our team - that's not correct either."

It's a delicate balancing act, and Baldwin conceded on-court sacrifices may need to be made, and he suspects Australia will be in the same boat over this weekend.

Their Olympic squad is due to be named on Tuesday.

What Baldwin and Vucinic don't want to see is players, perhaps conscious they are on the cusp of the Olympic roster, trying to catch the management's eye by attempting too much individually at the expense of the team philosophy.

Although he admitted "you can never control what players think", he hopes the players realise that's not going to help their case.

"We try to create an understanding in our group that the best way to impress our coaching staff is to contribute to the welfare and development of the team.

"And we are clever enough that if we see a player out there who is working for and to their own ends, that's a mark against them.

"And if the players know that they'd avoid it like the plague."

Already Baldwin has had to do some trimmings.

It hasn't been easy.

Ten players have been given their Don't Come Monday card since the training camp in Whangarei at the start of this month, and more heartache lies ahead.

"Probably two, maybe three could easily have been kept in the 15, but we had to make a call.

"These 12 are all capable of contributing, but some are going to be left out.

"That's just the way it is," Baldwin added.