MBB stuns Charleston 82-78

[Tiger93 299]

2 hours ago, Chris Datres said:

Yesterday after seeing our team over/under posted at 63 1/2, it sent me down a rabbit hole of our history against Charleston.  Starting last night, here's our last totals against CoC -- 82, 72, 75, 74 (OT), 80, 74, 53, 88 (2OT), 70, 69.  That goes back to the 2019-20 season.  So even though we struggle with offense at times and winning vs Charleston in particular, there's something about playing them that brings out our offense.  We're certainly not going to throw in a 10-19 effort from 3 every game but finding an ounce of that consistency from the outside is gonna go a long way in these last 6 weeks of the season.

I think a lot of that is pace of play. We have played four teams that are in the top 100 of KenPom's Pace of Play (Bryant No. 4, UMBC No. 5, College of Charleston No. 33, UMass No. 83). We shot over 50% against UMBC (35-67 and 11-23 (42.3%) from three) and College of Charleston (30-58 and 10-19 (.526) from three). Against UMass, we shot 48.1% (26-54, only 6-16 from three). We didn't shoot great against Bryant, but part of that was a 1-13 FG and 0-8 3ptFG performance in the second OT. My point isn't that we would play better with a faster pace, but that we seem to play better when teams to try to force us into a faster pace because it seems easier for us to slow them down then us speeding them up.

We had our most efficient game that I can tell last night scoring 1.281 points per possession on 64 possession. Charleston was very efficient at 1.200, but went down from their average of about 72 possessions to 65. The only other game I can find where we over 1.2 was against UMass at 1.209. I can't find the numbers against UMBC, but they we were either way up in possessions in that game or we were pretty efficient. I think we are now 8-0 when we score 1.1 points per possession or more. Our average is 1.045. Of course, that takes all sorts of things into account like turnovers, FG, 3pt and FT pct. I don't know if I have an overriding point, because I don't think this means if we speed it up we will better. It just shows that we seem to match up better against these types of teams. 

Great game all the way around for Tarke, who just brought up the aggressiveness and physicality to another level in this one. May also caught fired from three. Both of those guys got us off on the right foot and we were pretty comfortable for most of the game, because of what they opened up. I know we are critical of what Williamson did down the stretch free-throw wise, but don't forget that he also kept us in the game by catching fire at the end of the first half by scoring the final eight points for Towson in the last 2:05. If those are empty possession, we easily could have been trailing by 5 or 7 points after leading for most of the first half. 

We rip Skerry for substitution patterns and not letting guys get comfortable, but this game was a good example of what he is trying to do. I still don't love it, but when it works it is effective. By the way, Kelsey probably does it to more of a degree than Skerry. Only one player, played more than 30 minutes for either team and that was Tarke, who was imposing his will on the game singlehandedly at times.

The mixing and matching also produced some good sparks from Sulaiman, Jones and Paar. Sulaiman had five points and three steals, and was active as he always is rebounding and defensively. Paar was at his best in the 12 minutes he played, scoring six points and grabbing four rebounds in 12 minutes. He was a +11 during that time and hit both his free throws. Jones also seven points and five rebounds in 19 minute and was a +10 on the floor. These are great contributions from role players on the road where those tend to happen less in general. 

This was only the second time all year that Charleston was held under 40% shooting at home this year. I only watched the game once, but from a simple eye test I thought we played very solid defense. In handing Charleston their first home loss of the year, Towson and UNC-W are the only teams who haven't lost at home this year (knock on wood). Drexel, Charleston and Monmouth have all lost only one game at home so far. 

It is great that we have grabbed wins against UNC-W and Charleston in our first five games. My only worry is we shot over 50% from three in both those games, and they were both tight contests. I think the good news and bad news from last night is while we played well statistically the only outlier from what we usually was the three-point shooting. That is a big outlier thought, I hope we don't need 50+% 3pt FG nights to beat the top teams because those are hard to come by no matter who you are. Another piece of good news is for the first time in conference play we won the battle in the paint 34-30. 

This is a big three-game stretch coming up. We can't let Campbell be a letdown performance in any way. Next week home against Drexel and at Delaware could tell us what type of expectations we can really have for this team as we progress in the season. I expect 2-1 at least, and 3-0 would possible give us hope that we are a top 3-4 team in this year's conference.   

[sr16 161]

they are doing what we thought couldn't be done so far.