Alcorn St Game Thread
- Thread starter cmullinsTU
- Start date
His alley-oop, Igbanu's one-handed slam, and Jackson stealing the Alcorn attempt to save under the basket for an easy layup were my plays of the game.
Obviously, DMFJ's oop was my favorite.
Areas that cause me great concern thus far are... rebounding, free throws, and 3 point shooting. If we don't improve in these areas any average team has a better than 50/50 chance against us. A good team will exploit these areas and we will be eating their dust... A 6'7" Ibanu is going to have a hard time going against a good 6'10" man. Right now we don't have the size to battle a good inside game.
That’s why I’m hoping Hewitt can develop in practice to where he can get minutes. At 6’10” he could help against teams with more than one big. Igbanu does pretty good for his size, he’s handled Tacko very well the last two seasons.
Tacko is a stick for his height though. Easy to leverage. I'd be more worried about Igbanu against bigs around 7" who have significant weight.
This sounds familiar.... Oh yeah with KJ. Really the secret here for this team isn't size increase but rather exactly what they are trying to do, a pace increase.
Bigs tend to wear out getting up and down the floor. Particularly if they are grind post players.
Increasing the speed of the game forces more up and down empty trips, meaning wasted energy.
With more open court play the smaller offensive player can take advantage of quickness and skill to over come the physical size advantage.
In the open court fouls are more likely to be called then interior half court play. Particularly if you can match up a skilled ball handler and the big in a scramble.
Increased pace also can contribute with an active defense to more forced turn overs, negating some of the rebounding advantage.
Going faster also allows your guards to be likely rebounders as the positions under the basket tend to be empty or through speed of play the bigs are not in optimal rebounding positions.
Higher rates of easy baskets on the intial break or a secondary one lead to higher fg % lessening poor outside shootings effect.
The easy buckets lead to a higher offensive efficiency rate.
The break can be used to create kick out or stop and pop open 3s which tend to be higher percentage makes.
We do need to improve free throws. Those will cost you no matter what style you play.
I would love to see us play fast, but I don't think it's gonna happen under this coaching staff. 149th is the highest we've ever finished in pace and the 67 possessions last night made it one of the slowest games of the day.
We'll see. Haith was stressing it in his post games. I'm pretty sure it's his #1 reason for starting Jackson. I may be wrong but his Missouri teams played decently fast didnt they?
I would also assume Jeffries foul trouble and Taplins illness slowed us down some.
His teams at Missouri all sat right around 150th for adjusted tempo. Our TU teams under Manning, while Haith was at Mizzou, played faster. However, Haith's teams at Mizzou were all good shooting and efficient scoring teams, so their PPG were higher than TU under Manning.
Maybe I was fooled by casual score watching as 150 is basically dead middle for pace. We don't need 40mins of hell though. Just a quick enough pace to take advantage.
150 seems to be speed limit for Haith. We'll see if that stays about the same
Worth mentioning that our defensive scheme plays a pretty big role in that. We sit back in zone and teams tend to just pass the ball around the perimeter. If we just look at average possession length on offense, then Haith has gotten as high as 35th.
