After yesterday’s nail-biting, panic-attack-inducing 75-71 victory over the California Golden Bears, the Cougars are 17-8 (7-6) with just five regular season games left. Before I go into the way I see the rest of the season playing out, there are a few big aspects to this team’s play that I observed from Section 26, Row T at Beasley Coliseum Saturday afternoon.
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1. This team will not be successful throwing up contested jumpers for the rest of the year. While this sounds like an obvious statement, it apparently hasn’t been drilled into our player’s heads. Yesterday against Cal’s relatively effective 2-3 zone, the Cougs were content to throw up contested three’s in the first half. The result was a 3-16 performance from beyond the arc in the game’s first 20 minutes.
We never made an effort to attack the high post or the short corner in the first half. Generally, those are the two most vulnerable places to exploit any traditional 2-3 defense. Instead, we tried to set a series of on-ball screens to free up Thompson and Aden. As a result, both players were largely ineffective.
It wasn’t until the second half that Casto and Motum became sufficiently involved in the offense. With Abe Lodwick’s pathetic moving screens absent from our hybrid motion-zone look, we were finally able to employ some high-low action that exposed Cal’s zone. With Casto and Motum playing to each other’s strengths while sharing the rock, our offense was nearly unstoppable. The result was 50 second half points and a victory that allowed Cougar Nation to exhale a collective sigh of relief.
2. Faisel Aden is a massive defensive liability. This kid would make Dick and Tony Bennett pull their hair out halfway through a season. For everything Aden does well offensively, he does equally poorly on the defensive end of the floor. Aden consistently loses sight of his man when he reaches in for steals. His help defense is non-existent, and he is consistently beat off the dribble. My only suggestion is for the Somalian-born sharpshooter to guard the opposing team’s worst offensive player EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. No Kenny Bone, that doesn’t mean he should ever be guarding Jorge Gutierrez when we are clinging to an 11 point lead with our season hanging in the balance.
3. Poor Abe. It just isn’t coming together for the native Oregonian. Lodwick cannot buy a bucket from beyond the arc, and he can’t get any calls from Pac-10 officials. He consistently sets moving screens, and if he plays more than 20 minutes a game he fouls out. On Saturday, he shot 0 for 5 from the field, turned the ball over multiple times and picked up a ridiculous number of fouls in a very short period of time. We have been patient, but it is time for Lodwick to play 4-6 minutes a game while we see what Motum can do as a feature part of the offense.
4. Short of the UW victory, yesterday’s win against Cal was the best performance in terms of pure effort that I have seen from our Cougs all season. We didn’t take possessions off defensively, and we made a series of effective halftime adjustments that helped us beat Cal’s 2-3 zone. We were far from perfect, but seeing DeAngelo Casto return from injury in the second half and throw down a thunderous fast break dunk to rally us back into the lead ranks as one of my favorite all-time moments at Beasley Coliseum. Casto brings an element of toughness that this team sorely needs. Seeing that on full display in person was nothing short of AWESOME.
Moving on…. we travel to Arizona this week to take on University of Arizona and Arizona State to begin a road trip that could very well define our season. Win two out of the next three games and our chances of making the NCAA Tournament become very realistic. As of today, Joe Lunardi has us ranked among the last four teams “Out” of the NCAA Tournament. Many around the conference have us left for dead….so then why do I think we are going to sweep the Arizona schools this week on the road?
I mean, after all, kenpom.com, a site that some fans are pegging as the ultimate authority in college basketball predictions, says with 82% certainty that we will get our asses handed to us. This is the same site, may I remind you, that predicted us to get thrashed by University of Washington and said we would throttle Stanford.
For all kenpom’s fancy statistics that us mere mortals could never comprehend,(we’re the guys who can judge how a team is playing without looking at eFG% by the way) what is so commonly overlooked in this age of advanced statistical analysis, is the huge role a team’s psychological make-up can play in determining a game’s outcome.
And when the Cougs travel to take on Arizona Thursday night in Tuscon, they will possess every psychological, and perhaps physical edge that they could ask for.
First, Arizona will be coming off a short week of practice, thanks to their game tonight in Tempe against the Sun Devils. Anyone who says having one less day to prepare for your opponent doesn’t matter is either ignorant or just plain stupid. It’s no coincidence that the Cougs and Huskies both underperformed against the Oregon schools after their emotionally draining Sunday rivalry game.
Tonight’s game in Tempe will be no cakewalk for the Wildcats. A well-rested Cougar team has more than enough talent to beat a potentially worn down Wildcats team on the road. Couple that with the fact that the game is much more meaningful to the Cougs, and you have all the ingredients for a mild upset, kenpom.com statistics be damned.
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