According to coach David Breitenbucher, the boys’ basketball team started off playing well, but began to fall apart early in the game and were unable to keep the ball in their possession for long. Breitenbucher said it was hard on team morale to lose after winning nine games in a row.

“It’s a little disappointing because we had a nice run. I thought we played a pretty good first ten minutes of the game, but then we really struggled with working together on offense. I think we had a lot of uncharacteristic turnovers and I think that really hurt us tonight,” Breitenbucher said.

Senior Adam Bauer said the game against Chanhassen was one of the hardest of the season and the team struggled to score as many points as usual.

“It was probably our worst game of the season, by far actually,” Bauer said. “Our offense was really bad, we had about 22 turnovers and we weren’t shooting well either. It’s a bad game but I think all the stuff we did bad is pretty fixable.”

According to Breitenbucher, Park had some successful plays throughout the game, but due to the turnovers to Chanhassen, they were unable to score enough points to win, leading to a 46-66 loss.

“I thought there were moments when they were playing in transition well, but we’ve done that all year. It’s the turnovers, I think we had ten turnovers in the first half. We try to have ten turnovers in the whole game,” Breitenbucher said.

Senior Anthony Odens said the team’s biggest problem was the large number of turnovers, most of which led to Chanhassen scoring points.

“Obviously it was bad for us. We turned it over way too much, that was the main issue. Our defense wasn’t horrible, our half-court defense. Most of their points came off turnovers and they had numbers (of turnovers) on us,” Odens said.

According to Breitenbucher, the team needs to focus on their offensive playing and working together to get the ball down the court and score.

“For sure (we need to work on) taking care of the ball. We’ve got to run our offense sharper and I feel like there were some times when we just weren’t on the same page,” Breitenbucher said. “I think getting on the same page and taking care of the ball are two big things.”

Bauer said that shooting is a skill the team has room to improve on and working on it consistently in practice will help them in future games.

“I think we’re going to shoot a little more because usually in practice, we work on defense the most and we’re just going to try to be sharper in practice so we can translate that to the game,” Bauer said.

According to Breitenbucher, the team will watch film of the game against Chanhassen so they can see what they did wrong and understand how to fix it for the rest of the season.

“Looking at this game, we’re going to watch film for sure and see what we did, all the little mistakes we made and make it a learning experience and take it from there. I think film will be big, watching film in this game,” Breitenbucher said.

Park boys’ basketball’s next game is against Bloomington Jefferson at 7 p.m. Feb. 12 at Bloomington Jefferson High School.