Well, that was less than ideal. The starters combined for 28 points and 3-19 shooting from 3. Only Harper scored in double figures. Harper, Brown, and Samir combined for 13 turnovers. Brown had 6! Mac's stat line is atrocious. His impact on games hasn't been nearly the same so far this year as it was last year. Dunbar, Wiley, and McCormick were great off the bench. Any quality at all from our starters and we probably win this game.
Not sure what's up with Bryce. He comes off of a career-high 34 point game against Dayton and follows that up with two of his worst performances at Auburn. I thought it last week, and
@Gran_Polla said it earlier in this game thread. He looks exhausted. Looked that way at the start of the UAB game. Looked that way all night last night. Not making excuses for him because he has to play better, but something just seems off. And it feels like something more off-court than his actual game. He's not shown up in the last two games with anything close to the same fire and intensity and demeanor that he had the first 9 games of the season.
And offensively, something has to give. Our offensive sets in the halfcourt against extended defensive pressure are still terrible. They've been terrible for a while now under Bruce. I don't know if that's an area he needs to self-evaluate, but extended guard pressure disrupts us significantly. It takes us forever to get into a play and run it, and frankly, I'm not sure we run all that many plays or sets. We need better off-ball action and movement to help facilitate the ball moving around and in and out. Don't know if that's a Bruce thing or a players not running what's called thing. But it needs to be addressed immediately. Just watching other teams against us and the designed plays they run, we just don't run much stuff like that or we have the ability and just don't call it.
We shot 67% inside the perimeter last night. Yet, when we have guys like Wiley or Horace or Chuma with good inside position, we don't work the ball inside as much as we should. On the play where Bryce dribbles out the shot clock, he had a couple of chances to get the ball inside and just stared at the guy while dribbling. I don't know if there's hesitation from the guards because the ball tends to stick inside when it's passed down low (our bigs don't do a great job of kicking back out) or if they're worried about turnovers or what, but we need to work the ball inside more.
Last night is ultimately a good thing for this team IMO. We need to get exposed, to reveal our flaws, and figure out ways to work on them and improve them. And we need to be working towards peaking at the beginning of March. So, in that sense, I'm not worried about that loss. The poor shooting away from the Clam, the lack of offensive success and planning against pressure defenses like NC State, and the lack of awareness of our individual games and how to check them are all concerns for me. All of those can be addressed and managed, but it's going to take some examination from coaches and players to figure out what we're best at doing and trying to avoid those pitfalls that get us into situations like these last two games.
TL/DR: Starters doo doo; bench ballin'. Bryce strugglin'. Bruce needs new OC. We aight, but we got plenty of work to do.
