Chapter 5__: District Qualifiers!
AN__: This is how we will see Koganei's progress in this novel. There are five skills we need to take into account: Shooting (including mid-range, three-pointer, and free throws), Ball-handling (including his ability to drive past defenders and his ability to retain possession of it), Finishing at the basket (including his layup, floaters, and dunking), Defense (including on-ball defense and help defense), and Passing. Each of these skills has ten levels going from one to ten. Those levels coincide with the various stages of basketball. Level one corresponds with the Youth league, then there is Junior High, High School, second-tier pro league (J-league, CBA, European leagues...), NBA bench player, NBA starter, NBA star, NBA all-star, NBA superstar, and NBA Legend will correspond to level ten, the highest level a player can reach in a specific skill.
To simplify it for the viewers, we will act as if a bar fills up whenever Koganei trains a certain skill. Then whenever the bar is 100% filled up, that skill will advance to the next level. Koganei himself will not be able to see it. However, in every other chapter, at the end of those chapters, I will tell you where his various skills stand. I might also do the same thing for important characters occasionally.
These are the levels of his skills currently:
Shooting (Junior High Level): 48%
Ball-handling (Junior High Level): 91%
Finishing at the basket (Junior High Level): 86%
Defense (Junior High Level): 86%
Passing (Junior High Level): 68%
Also, you have to keep something in account. When I say High School level, I'm talking about the average level worldwide. Let's use Japan as an example. An 80% in a skill is already what the best high school seniors in Japan have while the best seniors in the US can have multiple skills at the next level while still playing in High School. That's the case for the Generation of Miracles. Midorima, for example, already has a high-school-level shooting. Aomine and Murasakibara have high-school-level finishing at the rim and are still in their second year. That's why it looks like they're bullying people whenever they play basketball. Fortunately, there are multiple characters capable of rivaling them in this story.
That was long, but thanks for reading. Now, let's get to the story.
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For the rest of the month (October), Yuuki Junior High did nothing but play warm-up games. Since they were one of the best teams in the country, all the teams they played against came to their home stadium. However, aside from Tatsumo, no national-level team accepted Kimura's offer for a warm-up game. They are enemies that might face each other, after all. They didn't want to risk letting a strong enemy like Yuuki Junior High know what they were working on.
So, while Koganei and Hideki were running through these teams averaging 22.8 points with 4.4 assists and 18.3 points with 9.6 assists per game, Kimura and Takeshi struggled to find a challenge for these two players. Having played basketball at an extremely high level, they understood the principle of getting stronger by playing against competitive opponents. The more you play against people above or at your level, the more you'll improve.
That's how all five games they played during that period ended up being blowouts by over thirty points (they played a game every three days). That didn't improve the team's overall level as the players didn't even need to try their hardest to win those games. So, Kimura and Takeshi scratched the rest of their schedule and prepared a new one.
Since the Winter Cup preliminaries start on the 18th of November, they had two weeks to make something happen. So, the two of them used their connections and managed to get four special games against High School teams for their kids, one of those opponents being a proven top 8 program in the prefecture.
Without a doubt, Koganei and his teammates lost all those games and even got blown out by 38 points against the top 8 high school program (the first game they played). The difference in level was too glaring. Although Yuuki players could rival their opponents heightwise, we're talking about a group of 17 and 18-year-olds who have been immersed in basketball almost all their lives playing against 14 and 15-year-olds. Of course, the younger ones would get bullied.
Even Koganei, who usually plays well no matter the game's result, struggled during that first game. He made 3 of the 16 shots he took and had a team-high 15 points. Aside from the one mid-range shot and two layups he made, all his other points came from free throws. This was the worst game he had played in his entire basketball career.
Still, his tenacity and unwillingness to give up even while being down 50 at a point in time impressed everybody, including his opponents. However, that still didn't change the fact that they failed miserably and their confidence took a massive hit.
Fortunately, Kimura and Takeshi were there to encourage them and after a few words, managed to get them to focus on the subsequent games, unwilling to lose that badly anymore. The defeat also pushed Koganei to increase his morning and night practice sessions from 30-minute-long workouts to a full hour. Fortunately, he had great vitality and would always wake up fine the following morning.
The increase in his training time, training intensity, and the level of his opponents made him improve at an alarming level, especially his ball-handling and scoring ability as he had to shoulder the heavy responsibility of scoring since nobody else could do so on his team.
Aside from that, his rhythm and pace control also improved a lot as he couldn't just blitz through High School level defense by using his speed. Although nobody was close to being as fast as him on those teams, they all had an amazing and well-coordinated defensive system, allowing them to trap and force impatient players to take bad shots almost every time they drove to the basket. Plus, their defensive intensity was on another level compared to Junior High teams.
That forced Koganei to slow down and figure out how to play at his own pace while not allowing his opponents to dictate what he does on the offensive end. So, with his speed, improved ball-handling, and somehow controlled pace, the remaining four teams could barely stop him from getting to the basket. In addition, his mid-range shooting ability was improving fast, increasing his offensive options and making him harder to guard.
That's how he averaged 23.5 for the subsequent four games, attracting the attention of the whole Tokyo high school basketball scene. It helped that those games were filmed by his sister (she was there to support him every time), edited, and posted on his personal YouTube channel, earning him a new wave of young fans although Yuuki Junior High lost all those games.
After the end of the Inter-High, Shinji Koganei received multiple offers from High School programs around the Tokyo area, the strongest among them being a declining Shenshinkan. However, after his performance during this training camp, more teams at the national level recognized his talents and flooded his email with invitations to join their programs, giving him and his parents happy headaches. Still, his idea of going to Seirin would never change even if Rakuzan made an offer to him.
Aside from Koganei, everybody else in Yuuki Junior High improved, especially Hideki and Damien who are both considered as talented as Koganei.
Hideki's ability to control the pace of the game and his ability to break a full-court press and make good passed decisions under stressful moments improved significantly. If you add his stable mid-range shooting skill, few point guards at the Junior High level could measure up to him.
On the other end, Damien mostly improved in experience and his ability to play in the mid-post. He already has the physical tools to dominate the country (GoM-level physical talent). So, those little improvements in technique and experience made him take a huge leap.
Also, Mitobe and Asuma improved their board protection a lot, especially Mitobe who had a special talent for it. At the same time, Tomori's defensive awareness improved a lot since their various opponents used a lot of pick-and-rolls to easily get past him. His man-to-man defensive ability is amazing. However, he is not in his element and gets lost whenever he has to chase around somebody while evading screens.
In the end, the players gained a lot from these games and prepared themselves for the start of the preliminaries. They were all ready to dominate the nation like they did two years ago.
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______________Shinji Koganei_______________
Ball Handling (High School): 3%
Shooting (Junior High Level): 48%
Finishing at the basket (Junior High Level): 86%
Defense (Junior High Level): 86%
Passing (Junior High Level): 68%