Chapter Ninety: The Rabbit with the Sighted Aim

When Ma Dongmei sat on the sideline watching the game, she was anything but quiet. Every time a player on Wang Lei’s team scored a brilliant basket or made a fine defensive play, she would leap to her feet and cheer like a devoted supporter, paying no mind at all to the strange looks from the home fans behind her.

Although Wang Lei himself was not the one on the court, the feeling that the entire team was being directed by the man she loved and then overpowering their opponents until they were left dazed made Ma Dongmei utterly happy, because it convinced her that her judgment had been absolutely splendid.

Quite a few of the home fans in the Province of Northern Lia had noticed the tall beauty seated behind the visiting bench, and some even recognized her. After all, Ma Dongmei had considerable fame throughout the republic’s sporting circles, thanks to both her superb skill and even more striking looks.

Watching a beauty cheer for the visiting side’s brilliant play, the home crowd felt a sour sting in their hearts. Indeed, none of them had expected this game to unfold like this.

The style of the Frontier Youth Team could be called extremely extreme. On defense, they collapsed into a packed zone; if you could shoot them to death, so be it. On offense, they were even more extreme, running the entire team for the sake of one player. Such a tactic was nearly unimaginable in other teams. Even if that player was outstanding, coaching staffs would usually never arrange such a system, after all they had to consider the feelings of the other players, and in the end, basketball was still a team sport.

Yet Wang Lei did not actually think his arrangement lacked unity. He even believed such a tactic truly embodied harmony within the team. Allowing Turgon to shoot without restraint showed, first, that everyone on the team acknowledged Turgon’s ability; second, that the whole team was of one mind. What they were thinking about was how to win the game, not how many stats they themselves should collect.

Wang Lei’s unconventional tactics left the Northern Lia Province Youth Team at a loss from the opening tip.

At first, the Northern Lia Province Youth Team did indeed defend the Frontier Youth Team’s core players tightly, just as planned before the game. Their head coach had studied the footage from the previous match, and in his view the most threatening players on the Frontier Youth Team were of course Turgon and Cai Aihong. Both young men possessed excellent shooting skill; their style might have been somewhat soft, but they were undeniably dangerous, so the Northern Lia Province Youth Team doubled them from the outset.

But things changed. The two players who had originally floated on the perimeter altered their style. Turgon was manageable; he simply used his teammates’ screens to circle along the baseline and the three-point line. Cai Aihong, however, relied on his speed and stamina to keep cutting back and searching for openings. Although there were many times when the ball handler, Wang Zhaohui, did not pass to Cai Aihong, it still affected the overall movement of the Northern Lia Province Youth Team. When such a tall man with a fine shooting touch drove toward the basket, whether to stop him or not was a judgment every defender on the floor had to make.

Meanwhile, Habul, who had battled in the paint all last game with Lingbei’s core center Zhang Yongdong, kept drifting out to the perimeter in this one. His two great elbows were always held out, and anyone who came near had to collide with him head-on.

A center weighing a hundred kilograms could be held in place by him; it was easy to imagine how great Habul’s strength truly was. Though they were all young and hot-blooded, none of them was foolish enough to keep charging at such obvious elbows.

Still, when Habul set screens, he did not actually swing his elbows. He merely increased the amount of space he occupied.

The true core of the Frontier Province Youth Team was, in fact, still Turgon, who kept running without the ball. From the start of the game, he had barely stopped moving. On every possession, he simply kept relocating, then caught the pass and shot, never dribbling more than necessary.

Wang Lei’s style of play was absolutely unprecedented in this era. It was undeniable that the development of basketball in this world resembled that of Earth in many ways, with a three-point line and all kinds of tactics, yet in certain details it differed greatly.

In this world, the truly dominant teams of the past had all been built around the interior. Basketball here had produced countless star big men, and because of that, the prevailing style was basically one centered on the paint. Who could blame it? So many of those star players had gone on to become coaches. They were beneficiaries of the prevailing trend, and naturally they would defend it.

So the style Wang Lei had now led his team to display, one focused on shooting and especially on perimeter players taking the shots, left everyone completely dumbfounded.

Turgon possessed an exceptionally fine feel for the game. His illness had robbed him of a normal childhood and of friends, but it had also given him a heart stronger than that of most boys his age. He was not afraid of physical confrontation, and he delighted in every bit of joy basketball gave him.

His nickname, Little Rabbit, might not have sounded especially flattering, but it did suit Turgon’s appearance and behavior to some extent. Still, if the home fans knew that Turgon’s nickname was Little Rabbit, they would probably say that even if he were a rabbit, he was a rabbit with a sighting scope.

Throughout the entire first half, the Northern Lia Province Youth Team was played with by Wang Lei and his side as though in the palm of his hand. Turgon played fifteen of the twenty minutes, attempted fourteen shots from beyond the three-point line, and made eleven three-pointers, a figure that astonished everyone. Such accuracy was rare not only in youth games like this, but even in top-level competition.

Some might say that because the game was not intense enough, Turgon could achieve such a high shooting percentage. Yet youth games of this kind were usually full of turnovers and inexplicable giveaways; after all, these teams were thrown together temporarily. Even after two or three months of training camp, the results were not usually very great.

Wang Lei’s team, however, had started from the most basic level, and the players he chose were all like blank sheets of paper, with little game experience. That was a weakness, but also an advantage. Precisely because they were blank sheets, Wang Lei could fill them so quickly with a picture that was at least decent to look at.

The Northern Lia Province Youth Team, completely stunned by Turgon’s first-half barrage of three-pointers, tried to claw back in the second half. But Wang Lei promptly increased the intensity of the defense, slowed the tempo, and fought them on efficiency, reducing the number of possessions. As a result, the Northern Lia team had no way to close the gap quickly.

In the end, thanks to that little rabbit with a sighting scope, Wang Lei’s team won the game by eighty-eight to eighty-one.