The SU Brand...

[newmexicuse]

Well, all the comments about bad shooting, bad O sets, lack of bench, etc are correct, but have been made ad nauseum, perhaps, especially by myself as much as by anybody else.

What was missing this season in the end was the key to the SU brand of basketball, and that is the ability to create TOs in bunches and to run-out off of those TOs. When we are playing well our games are characterized by those 15 to 2 types of spurts that put it away and those spurts are triggered by the D generating easy hoops. Best example of that this season was probably the Nova game, but we did see a lot of it early and none of that late.

So, the question is why did that change, probably a combination of factors:

1. Obviously, if players are tired they lose a bit of the jump on the ball to create the TO. Our guards had a three player rotation, so the tired factor is less applicable in the backcourt. The frontcourt had CJ & Jerami getting too many minutes, so maybe they lost an edge in getting to the ball to breakup passes & trigger the break.

2. Compared to previous seasons, Trevor and Tyler had less length in the backcourt. G had the length and he is athletic, but I think his athleticism is mostly in a straight line fashion. He doesn't seem to turn on a dime and he is not as "quick" as is Tyler (faster, but not quicker). Cooney is not particularly athletic for his position, and it shows on both ends of the court ( I am not intending this as a knock on Trevor, either you are athletic or you aren't). Also, when we did get a TO last year it seemed like MCW and Brandon were flying down the court, this year it seems like Ennis was coming back for the ball. Was that by design or just that the two of them had different instincts ??? Also, last year Brandon was a bull in the open court, Trevor only seemed to be able to finish on a run-out the few times he was clearly ahead of the pack.

3. It also seemed to me that fewer passes were broken up by the centers. X had an expanded roll, and I think he played back a bit more and tried to jump the ball a bit less, but maybe there were fewer opportunities to jump the ball (shorter guards give the opposing team better entry angles). BMK just didn't seem to play quite as well this season as last.

4. Bottom line - as the schedule toughened, this team was able to generate fewer TOs for various reasons, maybe also for some that I have missed.

It just seems to me that even if last year's team had as putrid a shooting game as we did against Dayton, that we would have had ten more points on run-outs and still have won easily.

 

[MartyMcFly]

you hit the nail on the head for me. I had posted something similar in a previous post. I really think the missing ingredient in this years squad was lack of transition scoring. Where was the spurtability most SU teams could generate from their D? We almost never got easy buckets late in the year. It's really really hard to win games in a purely half court game, but especially when we are in our usual funk offensively. Getting an extra 2-4 buckets on run-outs help buoy the offense and possibly get a team like Dayton rattled. However, when all we do is make a concerted effort not to run (on most occasions) it has the opposite effect. It seemed even when we did get the occasional steal we hardly ever ran in transition. I think shooting woes aside, this was as big a factor as anything to why we aren't prepping for Stanford. I like that our Stifling D is our m.o., and turning that D into quick points is the hallmark of SU, but it just wasn't there this year for the most part. Let's hope next year we get back to that!