mobrien
Masters Student
Posts: 403
Loc: New York
Reg: 04-18-17
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01-21-24 12:25 AM - Post#361932
In response to HARVARDDADGRAD
Let's start with the good: we won a game we absolutely needed to in a place where we've only won once in the previous eight years.
The bad is just as obvious: we yet again couldn't come close to putting anywhere close to 40 minutes of good basketball together. The second half today wasn't quite as bad as the first half was against Brown, but it was still horrendous. Beyond our inability to beat a simple press—we need to use our forwards more to advance it further up the court, and go deep from time to time, like we finally did at the end—the offense just totally died.
The things that stood out to me were that we stopped trying to attack in transition, and, after 10 seconds of directionless dribble weaves, ended up in late shot clock situations that Mack wasn't able to bail us out of today. We tried taking the air out of the ball for a whole half, and our offense went with it.
The other big thing was we didn't get the ball to Okpara at all in the second half. He turned it over in the post against an aggressive double team the one time we did, and it was like we stopped trying to get him the ball after that. We can't do that. He's our second-best creator. We need him to be involved.
I liked that we had Lesmond setting more ball screens for Mack when Penn started doubling or hedging hard. That's the easiest way to get a look we want off of that defense. The other thing I'd like to see is maybe stealing one of Penn's sets and using more of a two-man game with Mack and Okpara. The simple set that they used all the time with Brodeur was having the big man do a dribble hand-off at the three-point line for a shooter; either the defense trails and concedes the three or switches and gives up a mismatch in the post to the big. We could run that with Mack and Okpara and kill people. It's the kind of look we could go to when the offense hits a lull and we need to engineer a good look.
As frustrating as that second half was, today was still a step in the right direction. We just have to put it together for both halves. That means attacking the whole time, and maybe calling a few more plays for Mack and Okpara when the offense in general is in a rut.
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