HOLLYWOOD — There is a kind of basketball that is not much fun to watch and a great deal of fun to win, and the Hollywood High Sheiks have spent the winter perfecting it. They do not have the tallest team, or the deepest, or the one that scores in bunches. What they have is a willingness to turn every game into a wrestling match, and it has carried them into the playoffs.
The Sheiks secured a postseason berth this month by doing what they have done all season: hounding the ball, packing the lane, and dragging opponents into the kind of low-scoring slog where talent matters a little less and stubbornness matters a lot more. They win in the forties. They are comfortable there. Teams built to run and gun leave the gym frustrated, having played thirty-two minutes of a game they did not want to play.
“We can’t outrun people and we can’t shoot over them, so we decided to make them miserable instead,” said Darnell Prewitt, the Sheiks’ coach, after a practice heavy on defensive rotations and light on anything resembling a fast break. “Ugly is not an accident with us. Ugly is the whole idea. If the other team scores fifty, we’re probably losing. If they score forty, we like our chances.”
The approach asks a lot of players who, at other schools, might be gunning for their own numbers. The Sheiks’ leading scorer averages figures that would embarrass a marquee program and does not seem to mind, taking as much visible pride in a drawn charge as in a bucket. Their point guard, a junior, spends most of the game applying full-court pressure that wears opponents down by the fourth quarter, when the Sheiks’ games tend to be decided.
“By the end they’re tired of us. You can see it,” said Marcus Vecchio, 16, the junior guard, who plays the sort of defense that does not fill a stat sheet and wins games anyway. “We’re not going to wow anybody. We’re going to be there the whole game, right on you, until you make a mistake. Somebody always makes a mistake.”
The reward for a season of grinding is a first-round playoff draw that will, by the seedings, be difficult. The Sheiks are not favored, a condition they have grown used to and, Prewitt suggested, mildly prefer. A team that expects to be outmanned prepares differently than one that expects to win on talent, and the Sheiks have prepared for a knife fight since November.
Prewitt was not making predictions. He said only that his team would do what it does, make the game small and slow and uncomfortable, and see whether that was enough for one more week. Then he sent his players back onto the floor to run the defensive drill again, because in his gym the offense can wait, and usually does.