random thoughts from last night's game

Posted on: December 3, 2020 at 11:30:17 CT

That was a quality win and a good overall performance. Altman is a good coach, it was away from Mizzou Arena, and they are a ranked team. First win away from home against a ranked opponent since Dec 22, 2012. Just think about how long that is.

There were certainly points where the outcome came into doubt (more on that in a bit) but overall MU dominated and controlled the game almost end to end. Again that is a generally well coached program with high level athleticism and size and quality recruits. This MU team is good. We were clearly the better team by a decent margin.

MU is now 6-0 all time against Oregon. Jon Sundvold scored 32 against them in a win his senior yr, and MU blew them out in 2009-10 scoring 106 points to win by 37. However Cuonzo was 1-5 against them coming in (all at Cal).

Tilmon has been a force so far. Defensively he has really picked it up and he has a very good shot at setting a new post-1990 rebounding mark at MU. We are just scratching the surface of utilizing him as a scorer too.

Other than playing Mitchell Smith too much, I like the rotation thus far which has always been one of Cuonzo’s weaknesses. That said I’m kind of underwhelmed by Buggs through 2 games, I expected/hoped him to be more of a contributor.

Despite clearly being the better team, we very nearly at numerous points almost shot ourselves out of the game. We still take an absurd amount of 3 pters and many of them are simply bad shots by the wrong shooters. MU went from the 4:35 mark in the first half to 15:16 remaining in the second without making a non-3pt field goal. That is way too many possessions to waste when you are the better team and have a comfortable lead. A better coach would have called a timeout (probably multiple times) in that stretch and designed something that got a quality look and re-enforced what is not a good shot attempt. That part was a bit discouraging even in a good win. 31 three point attempts is likely not going to cut it game in and game out, that is way too much settling for poor shots.

Pace of play was much better, particularly with 24 points off turnovers and we did a great job of generating live ball turnovers that turned into easy buckets.

I’m going to create a new stat to track this season: 3 pt turnovers. We only had 7 turnovers which is awesome, particularly at our faster pace. However Pickett/Mitchell/Buggs/Braun/Brown combined for 13 three point attempts. Effectively those guys shooting from there is akin to a turnover, so for this game I’m tallying thirteen 3 pt turnovers committed. There should never be a game where that combination totals more than 5 and ideally less than 3 combined attempts behind the arc.

Its worth noting that Omoruyi scores 31 points, and on many possessions we seemed to have no answer to him. Thankfully we had a big enough cushion that it wasn’t an issue but it doesn’t bode well that we didn’t seem to have a way to slow him down or at least prevent him possessions.

Pinson really found his grove in the second half and looked much more comfortable about when to attack and when to slow things down. The announcers were right that it wasn’t simply his scoring, it was his ability to control the game entirely that was most impressive. Very good composure too in the face of consistent full court and three quarter court pressure.

Great overall win though, if this season is allowed to play out I’m confident this is a good MU team and not just the beneficiaries of early season victories. They also look like they have fun playing together and have bigger things in mind.