bluejayfan00 wrote:Chicagojayfan wrote:bluejayfan00 wrote:...
Sure. But we were #2 in the preseason BE poll. We were supposed to contend for the regular season title. We're 4-5 against teams who aren't DePaul or Georgetown. That's not good enough.
Outside of our top 4 players, the rest of the roster would struggle to see the floor anywhere else in the BE. And it doesn't help when your 7'1 center can't shut down his counterpart who is 4 inches and 30lbs smaller. We've wasted two really good shooting performances in a row, two really good games from Ashworth (and also Trey&Baylor) because we can't get stops. Not only is the security blanket we have on defense not erasing other bigs, we don't have individual defenders anywhere else on the perimeter.
But we were like that last year for much of the time as well:
- Kalk got ripped up by Dixon a couple of times last year, and by Walker last year - not every big guy can defend every other type of big guy. He did great against Oduro in the first game, but struggled last night - it happens. He's struggled with the quick guys before, and as I pointed out a 50% shooting percentage didn't hurt us as much as Carter did by going 5/8 from 3 PT range
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2 really good shooting performances in a row? I give you Butler 4th best offensive game rating of the year, but last night was pretty average as it was the 9th worst -- so at best middle of the pack, but below par for what we can do - last year we had some similar problems, Nova blew us up on the road, and then Xavier did something similar in the BE tourney - pretty much equal in poor defensive performances to last night. Did it indicate that we had a fundamental flaw with our defensive strategy or that people had figured out our drop coverage? Well, it didn't
I assume I could be wrong this year, but I doubt it. We'll see
I'm sorry- what? In what universe is shooting 14-29 from 3 NOT a good shooting performance? And 51% overall? Far below par what can we do? What other games this year have we shot that well from 3? It's certainly not "average", middle of the pack, or below par for what we can do. It's actually well above par from what we usually do. If you told someone before a game we are going to shoot that way, you'd assume we won and not by a close margin. Is there some meaningless super advanced analytic you use to spin shooting percentages? We are actually worse against Butler, from 3 at least. 9/25. But still, that's 36% which is around average for the year.
At a high level sports-reference gives us a 114.5 offensive game score for last night's game, versus 128.9 against Butler. Why the difference when we shot so well from 3 vs. Providence?
We shot a LOT better overall against Butler - 54.8% vs 50.8% and while we hit those 3's @Providence, we missed 2 PT shots we hit against Butler and against other teams this year. Our Total Shooting% (taking into account both 3 and 2 pt shots was good) .632, but not as good as Butler .668, and then if you add in the turnovers on a lot of possessions (not even getting a shot, but having a possession), the offensive performance drops
Bottom line is we shot pretty well - Our Total Shooting% was 9th on the season versus Providence but hurt by the fact that we turned it over for empty possessions with no shots (even worse many of those became points for Providence)
some comparisons:
Butler vs. Providence:
2PT shots: 25/37 vs. 19/36 (really not that great for us last night)
at the rim: 18/25 vs. Butler, 8/14 last night
Those 11 additional shots at the rim vs. Butler were probably the biggest reason the offense wasn't as good as it was vs. Butler - not as many shots at the rim, and a much lower conversion on 2 pt shots, outweighing how much better we shot from 3
Add in the turnovers, and we have an OK offensive night but not great