This is one of the reasons I dislike our defense. It puts our guards on the other team's bigs & puts our bigs on the other team's guards. I've seen this configuration get burned time & time again. That strategy seems to be counterintuitive, but a good set of eyes looking at the TV will validate the results.
We lost a road conference game
- Thread starter spiderman
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Agree this has been discussed ad infinitum in one form or another - usually why a certain player(s) don't get much time - usually JP or PF. JJ has been getting in more lately. Interesting that our opponents have similar patterns - is it that 7, 8, or 9 players are that much better than the bench warmers? Perhaps I am looking at it from too much of my age perspective of thinking of getting worn out whereas the players are so young that should not be as much of a factor. Noticed the tiredness factor quite a bit in the Broad Street OT loss and have also wondered if TA is getting worn down by the end of games although part of that is the amount of defensive pressure other teams direct his way.
I do think TA in particular looks tired. Not a knock on him, he plays a lot of minutes and has to play hard on both ends I think.
There has to be some fatigue with a rotation of 7 guys or 7 plus an occasional 8th. But we're not too dissimilar from everyone else I gather.
Our 8th guy right now is JJ, he is getting maybe 5-10 mpg recently, typically spelling TD. If we got a bit more of productivity out of JJ, I think we're pretty much where a lot of other teams are depthwise.
There has to be some fatigue with a rotation of 7 guys or 7 plus an occasional 8th. But we're not too dissimilar from everyone else I gather.
Our 8th guy right now is JJ, he is getting maybe 5-10 mpg recently, typically spelling TD. If we got a bit more of productivity out of JJ, I think we're pretty much where a lot of other teams are depthwise.
We are different in that two of our 7/8 man rotation are not considered offensive capable. So we really have a five man offensive rotation and a seven man defensive rotation. And at least one of our seven man defensive rotation has had very little floor time......so really six.
Trey and Deion are options 6 and 7 on offense. Together they average 9.7 points per game (11th lowest in the A10). In the A10, the 6th and 7th options average anywhere from 8ppg (Saint Bonaventure) to 13.5 ppg (George Mason) and the average output of is 10.9 ppg. Our 6th and 7th options are not appreciably worse than the rest of the A10's in terms of scoring output. They are top in terms of shooting percentage though (62% from 2, 33% from 3, 59% eFG).
Well, they may be our 6th and 7th lowest-scorers, if that's what you mean, but I don't think you can call them our 6th and 7th options, because they average starters' minutes. So more often than not, they are scoring options #4 and #5, simply by virtue of the fact that only 5 guys can be on the court at one time. That's part of the problem.
Got it. I still think it's a little tricky to really accurately categorize it because if they are averaging 30 minutes apiece (no clue, just using that as an example), then for 60 of 200 minutes each night they are at worst scoring options 4 and 5, and during those 60 minutes you could argue that it's more difficult for the other three guys on the court to get open looks, because defenses know TD and DT are not shooters.
I think in theory you are right, having two players on the court who don't need to be guarded should make an offense worse. However, we are 7th in the country in the nation in 2FG%, 94th in 3FG%, and 12th in overall shooting efficiency. It doesn't seem like having these two on the court is detrimental to our offense.
Also good points. To play devil's advocate, I might argue that if we had given 10-15 minutes to a better offensive option, perhaps we are even a bit higher in 3-pt efficiency and perhaps we win the VCU and St. Joe's games. All we needed was one more 3-pointer in each game and we would have won. Our defense sucks either way.
Now conversely, you could also argue that subbing one or both of them out for that duration would have resulted in us allowing more points than we did. We'll never know either way.
Now conversely, you could also argue that subbing one or both of them out for that duration would have resulted in us allowing more points than we did. We'll never know either way.
True. It is hard to say. The only knock I have on Trey and Deion in our offense is their free throw shooting. However, Deion has not taken a free throw in 2016 and the only losses where Trey's free throw shooting would have made a difference were @Davidson (he went 1-4) and vs VCU (6-11), but there were plenty of other reasons we lost those games.
Fan2011, I still think the poor free throw shooting effects the game in other ways. At the end of the game you can't pass to the 45% FT shooters and the 45% FT shooters won't go to the basket for fear of having to go to the line again reinforcing the opposing 5 on 3 defense.
As bad as the free throws have been, they aren't the reason we have lost 11 games. Richmond has shot like 540 free throws this year. The difference between shooting 65% (our current percentage), and 70% (what most consider to be decent); amounts to one point a game.
No doubt there, it's defense and rebounding that suck. The missed free throws just deflate the crowd like missed extra points in football, you know it will bite you in the ....
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Free throw shooting hasn't really affected any individual game except VCU and maybe SJU or GMU, although we were around 69% in those latter two games.
I think SpiderK has a point which is that it does translate to how we close out games, or don't. TA and SDJ are perfectly respectable ft shooters, TJ is off this year compared to last. The rest of the team leaves something to be desired.
I think SpiderK has a point which is that it does translate to how we close out games, or don't. TA and SDJ are perfectly respectable ft shooters, TJ is off this year compared to last. The rest of the team leaves something to be desired.
I wonder if there is a stat kept anywhere that shows a team's performance in 1-and-1 FTs over the course of a season. I feel like we leave a lot of potential points on the board by missing the front end of 1-and-1s. That can make the difference in a close game. Make the front end, you at least have the chance to make another one. Miss it and the possession is pretty much over. I think that would be a useful analytics question, but I don't know if there's an easy way to extrapolate that. I'd be curious to see where we rank in the nation in percentage of front-ends converted. I would guess somewhere in the lower third or lower half.
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