Point Blank – February 20, 2017
NCAA Big Monday – Issues and Answers…
The Monday board may be short on options, but not so for key handicapping issues, so it provides a proper setting for more of “The Game Inside the Game”, as we look at key focus points that go beyond the base power ratings in terms of how tonight’s scoreboards may play out.
Item: Are there Newtonian laws of basketball physics for the Miami offense?
Miami/Virginia does call for us to first re-visit a key talking point from the Friday edition, and those recent second-half woes for Tony Bennett’s Cavaliers. That pattern continued in the 65-41 drubbing at North Carolina, which capped an 0-3 SU and ATS week in which Virginia lost to the market expectations by 40 points.
How bad were things for the Cavaliers after intermission? If we take those minutes and adjust them for a regulation game, it was the equivalent of being out-scored 75-51. But might there have been a bit of a silver lining from Saturday night, the game so one-sided that no player was on the court more than 30 minutes? That makes the quick turnaround perhaps a bit easier, and this time it may be Miami that faces a tougher challenge in terms of fatigue, the Hurricane starters on the floor for 37 more minutes than their UVA counterparts.
Miami is short-handed again because of the suspension of veteran PG Ja’Quan Newton, this marking the last of what was billed a three-game banishment by Jim Larranaga, and while depth is an obvious issue, his rotation down to seven players, three of them freshmen, there is also a tactical component from the opening possession – just how difficult is it to prepare for Bennett’s pack-line defense with only one practice day, and four of the seven available players having no experience against it?
Newton was averaging 15.0 ppg, 3.8 rpg and 3.6 apg this season, a tribute to his abilities, but for tonight’s game there was also going to be his experience against Virginia that would matter, 68 floor minutes across last three meetings last season, all competitive affairs decided in single digits, which each team winning at home, before Virginia captured a 73-68 victory in the ACC tourney semi-finals.
The numbers from Saturday’s 71-65 win over Clemson show a Miami offense that ran smoothly, making 50 percent of all field goal attempts, with a terrific ratio of 19 assists vs. only seven turnovers. Freshmen Bruce Brown, who spent most of the game in Newton’s spot, had nine points and five of the assists. But that was vs. a defense that rates #13 of the 15 ACC teams, Brad Brownell’s Tigers struggling all season to find their way on that end of the court. Now the challenge shifts dramatically, and a prime handicapping factor will be just how ready Larranaga can have his team for those tactics given how little prep time is available. This is a complex defense that can wear on the patience level of the opposition, and it may particularly tax the young Hurricanes in the rotation.
Item: About those various rolls of the coaching dice by Bob Huggins
Depth is an issue so often in these “Big Monday” settings, but for West Virginia it would not appear to be that way on paper, Bob Huggins having one of the deepest rotations in the nation, which enables those aggressive Mountaineer presses to harass opponents for the full length of the floor, and the full 40 minutes. Except for perhaps tonight’s clash with Texas, because of a coaching gambit played out by Huggins following last Monday’s frustrating overtime loss at Kansas.
Huggins felt that his team did not get the best of the whistles that night in Lawrence, and there is a degree of truth to that. So he opted for several moves outside the box - first giving the team a couple of days off to be physically fresher for the home stretch, and then using the officiating as a bit of a motivation tool, before finally tweaking his rotation vs. Texas Tech on Saturday. All of that serves to add some unique elements to setting tonight’s power rating.
Let’s start with how Huggins began the build-up for when his team returned to practice - “I could say a whole lot on things that happened the other day. You can’t guard guys out of bounds. That’s illegal. There is a lot of stuff that went on that shouldn’t have went on. You can’t plan for that. It all happened boom, boom, boom. To think that it doesn’t affect our guys mentally, it does. Obviously, we made mistakes, but we weren’t the only ones who made mistakes. Losing a game is like losing a day, you can’t ever get it back. That’s what nobody ever understands. Nobody understands that when you lose a game, you never get it back.
“Officials are fond of saying, ‘Let it go, let it go.’ Well, yeah, you can let it go, because it doesn’t mean to you what it means to us. You can say, ‘Let it go,’ and they probably do. They go home, pet the dog, kiss their wife, go to bed and wake up and go do it the next day. We can’t do that. It stays with you.”
And then his Thursday, after his team had returned to the practice floor - “We’re going to play with an edge. We were really good in practice. It was one of the best practices we had in a long time. I think we can use it and play with an edge.”
Yet on the court vs. Texas Tech the Mountaineers were just OK. Some of that has to do with the competition, which I will get to in a moment, but also note how different the rotation was. Here is something completely unexpected from that box score, the minutes count of three of the starters –
Nathan Adrian 47
Jevon Carter 45
Tarik Phillip 41
Naturally all of those were season-highs, and who knows how long Esa Ahmad might have gone – he only played 20 minutes but it was not because of substitution patterns, but rather leg cramps, which limited him to only seven of the possible 30 minutes after halftime.
So now come both the short-term and long-term questions. For tonight, will that WVU starting cast be more leg-weary than usual? The Mountaineers have moved into the Top 10 more with effort than ball skills, the defense creating points via easy opportunities off of turnovers, which is necessary for an offense that does not always shoot straight – #116 in the nation in 3-point percentage and #256 at the FT line.
As for the long-term view, was this Huggins showing some intent for the tourney cycle ahead? Might there be more of an inclination to stay with his starters a bit more, especially after the bench players were not productive at Kansas, which led to that 14-point lead getting away (the reserves shot just 5-21, and did not have a steal across 8 floor minutes)? There is a lot to see here, including the fact that any reference to Saturday also has to include just how good Texas Tech has been recently. Talk about your power ratings challenges…
Item: Texas Tech was a Top 10 team last week, but what about going forward
Texas Tech did not receive a single vote in the current AP Poll, which is not surprising for a team that is 17-10 and played a particularly weak non-conference schedule. Ken Pomeroy only rates the Red Raiders #36, and Jeff Sagarin is almost identical at #37.
Yet consider what Chris Beard’s team did last week, taking on #3 Kansas (using the AP measure), #4 Baylor and #9 West Virginia over the span of eight days, and out-scoring those three by five points in regulation play. Two of the three games were at home, but the five-point margin is more than the court advantage would call for. The Red Raiders did finally gas out in the second overtime at West Virginia, but it is difficult to fault them much for that. But now comes a conundrum for the handicapper – does the focus go more on how well Tech played in those games in terms of elevating the power rating, or how much those games may have taken out of them going forward, in particular with little down time as Iowa State comes to Lubbock for tonight’s battle?
A prime notion that gets discussed often in this space is how teams perceive themselves, and how much that impacts performance. The shrewd handicapper certainly understands how difficult that schedule cycle was, and how impressively the Red Raiders played. Yet they take the court tonight only having gone 3-6 straight-up across their last nine games, and there can be a huge difference in terms of energy going forward between having won or lost on Saturday in Morgantown. Instead of the exhilaration that would have come from a victory, and the kind of energy that might have been built off of it, there is the despondency of the loss magnified by three key cogs, Keenan Evans (45), Zach Smith (43) and Niem Stevension (41) all logging more than the regulation 40 minutes.
Texas Tech was really good last week. That brings a magnifying lens tonight to carefully scrutinize the body language – is this a team ready to elevate to a higher level, or one that may have just played at a peak, and is subject to regression?
In the Sights, NCAA Monday…
Time to get in play now, and it comes right out of the Texas Tech notions, the markets choosing to believe what they saw from the Red Raiders over this past week, as -1.5 turns into -3.5 in the Monday trading. That will put #715 Iowa State (9:00 Eastern) in pocket.
First consider the gap in freshness. While Tech was playing three Top 10 teams in games that went right to the final minute, and vs. WVU even longer, what did the Cyclones face in the same cycle? They beat Oklahoma, Kansas State and TCU by 37 points, leading by 35 at halftime in those games and largely coasting.
Second consider the unique Iowa State make-up – with four senior starters, including the unshakeable Monte Morris running the show, the Cyclones bring a special level of poise in terms of handling the pressures of the road, and it has played out that way – they already own four outright underdog wins as a Big 12 traveler, including ending that long Kansas win streak, and they also lost by just two points at Baylor and Texas. That poise puts them in the hunt for the outright win here, and the markets are offering a more than fair cushion that only needs them to be in the hunt to the final possession.
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