(Photo: Marlee Smith/WCSN)
Pac-12 Conference play in college basketball has barely begun. Some teams have faced their first conference opponent. Others haven’t. But there is one thing all the conference’s squads do share thus far: growing pains.
For Arizona State Men’s Basketball (2-6, Pac-12 0-1) and Oregon (5-3, Pac-12 0-0) in particular, the early stages of each’s 2021-2022 campaigns have not been kind.
Following an offseason that brought massive roster turnover and talent along with it to Tempe, ASU’s Pac-12 opener against Washington State on Wednesday marked their fifth consecutive defeat.
After receiving top-15 votes in both preseason national polls and a No. 2 ranking in the Pac-12’s preseason media poll, Oregon’s narrow six-point victory over UC Riverside marked just its fifth such result in eight games.
With the Sun Devils off to their worst start in over five decades and the Ducks playing far below its lofty expectations, head coaches Bobby Hurley and Dana Altman find themselves in similar predicaments.
What can’t be ignored, however, is the strength of schedule their players have been forced to endure in the early going.
Starting on a wire-to-wire finish against a solid San Diego State squad, ASU’s losing streak was furthered by three high-quality teams at the annual Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament. In the Bahamas, Hurley and company fell to Baylor, Syracuse and Loyola-Chicago, whom together have acquired a national championship and two Sweet Sixteen berths in the last year. Each team also possesses plausible paths back to the NCAA Tournament this coming March.
Washington State, ASU’s most recent victor, boasts a 6-2 record to show for its efforts early this year, with its second loss coming at the hands of No. 20 USC by an impressive two-point margin.
Oregon’s losses are made up of No. 15 Houston – who is off to a strong 7-1 start so far following a Final Four appearance in last year’s NCAA Tournament – BYU – who is also 7-1 – and St. Marys, who is 8-2.
No one likes to lose, but underlying this immense adversity is a positive. For Hurley and Altman, this positive encompasses a sharp awareness of their teams’ negatives.
And there are many.
As the Ducks prepare for Sunday night, one of many keys will involve stimulating consistent ball movement on the offensive end.
Against inferior competition, Oregon has shown their individual talent can overcome a lack of chemistry and flow offensively. In their wins, Oregon averages a solid 15 assists.
When the talent of the opposition offsets that of their own, however, the stat sheet mirrors the true nature of their stagnant attack.
“Bad ball movement on the offensive end,” Altman said of his team after their loss to Saint Mary’s. “We just didn’t make plays for each other. The ball is getting stuck. We are really having a difficult time getting it moving.”
The Ducks’ ridiculously low six assists in that contest justified Altman’s frustration. Unfortunately for him, such play was not an isolated instance. Across all three of its defeats, Oregon recorded 23 total assists, which measures out to a pedestrian 7.6 average per game in the category.
Needless to say, when the ball is sticking from player to player, a defense has ample time to rotate from pass to pass, making clean looks harder to come by. It is this domino effect that helps contextualize Oregon’s poor shooting numbers against quality defenses.
The Ducks’ losses have come off porous 36.6% shooting from the field and a 24.4% clip from three-point land, drawing stark contrast with their 50-38 shooting splits in wins.
Another point of concern tied to the aforementioned link is “bad turnovers,” according to Altman.
In similar fashion to its assist totals, Oregon’s level of ball security has been intensely dependent on the caliber of opposition. In wins, they average a solid 10 turnovers. In losses, they give up over 14.5 possessions on average. Again, talent has the capacity to trump these kinds of faults when disproportionate, and Oregon is a very talented team.
Senior guard Will Richardson is a big reason why. For a second-straight time, Richardson was named to the Pac-12 Preseason All-Conference First-Team. Also earning consideration on the preseason watch lists for the Wooden Award and Naismith Trophy, such preliminary recognition speaks to Richardson’s reliable contributions to Altman’s past two seasons at the helm in Eugene. Shooting 46.9% from the field and 40.3% in his sophomore and junior seasons respectively, the 6-foot-5 marksman was on a short list of Pac-12 players to achieve such a feat.
Alongside Richardson stand a bevy of other scoring threats. One is another Ducks returnee in senior forward Eric Williams Jr. At 6-foot-7, Williams Jr. has excellent versatility at his size to score at all three levels. Shooting a ridiculous 47.8% from three-point land, Williams Jr. is Altman’s leading scorer, slightly edging Richardson’s 11.4 points per game average with his 11.6.
After these two, transfer players enter the discussion. From Oklahoma, there’s junior guard De’vion Harmon. Though not a true pass-first point guard, Harmon’s another dangerous shooter on the perimeter – he currently sits at 40% from deep on the year. Adding even greater depth to Oregon’s backcourt is senior guard Jacob Young, who finds himself at his third college following stints at Texas and Rutgers. Young isn’t as efficient a three-point shooter as Richardson, Williams Jr, and Harmon, but he scores the ball in bunches. With his quickness, Young often takes advantage of slower defenders, which is especially deadly when he does connect from three.
The underlying problem with Oregon could be that a handful of transfer players need to be significant contributors.
Outside of Harmon and Young, junior forward Quincy Guerrier from Syracuse and junior guard Rivaldo Soares from South Plains College are two other transfers who are responsible for big minutes. An expectation for these newcomers to mesh within a new system alongside new teammates right away may be unrealistic.
Managing various setbacks and shortcomings as his team learns to play together is part of Altman’s reality this year.
And yet, the Ducks are still the favorite heading into Sunday night because Hurley has similar issues with the Sun Devils on a much larger scale.
Like Oregon, ASU struggles mightily with moving the ball around.
With an offense that relies heavily on three-point shooting and perimeter play overall, a scoring opportunity within the key isn’t as common as it probably should be for ASU.
Across their losing streak, the only game for which an asserted effort was made to attack the cup and work into high-percentage looks in the paint came against Loyola-Chicago – the Sun Devils’ final game in Nassau. They attempted a season-low 11 threes and a season-high 19 attempts from the free throw line.
In one respect, a move away from settling at the three-point line was a plus. But the adjustment was incomplete – it merely replaced contested threes with contested twos. Ball movement was still not a consistent staple of the offense, allowing the Ramblers defense to remain in prime on-ball and off-ball position for the majority of their defensive possessions. In the 77-59 loss, ASU unsurprisingly finished with five assists.
Reducing the team’s three-point volume didn’t seem to be the answer, because it didn’t address the root mechanism of what stagnates ASU on the offensive end. The true issue may be two-fold.
For one, ASU’s guards look to size-up their defender at an excessive rate. Whenever a size-up takes place, it’s typically a disruption of the Sun Devils’ offensive flow more often than it is action meant to take advantage of a scrambling defense. When facing the Ducks’ man-to-man defense, it may be in Hurley’s best interest to regulate the frequency at which its guards engage in perimeter size-ups and to minimize the amount of time taken when the right opportunity arises. The quicker the size-up, the less time Oregon’s help defenders will be given to recover and rotate.
For another, ASU’s front-court is not getting consistent touches in the high- and low-post area. Entering the ball into players like senior forward Kimani Lawrence, Hurley’s second-leading scorer, could help put pressure on the defense to respect the inside threat, making skip passes and kick-outs an effective way to either immediately open a lane to the hoop, jumpstart a sequence of extra passes to set up a perimeter player for an open shot or a take to the bucket.
“The ball needs to go inside more,” admitted Hurley at media availability on Tuesday. “We’ve got to get the ball to [junior forward] Jalen Graham some if we can and even Kimani [Lawrence] in the mid-post. And [freshman center] Enoch [Boakye]. Give those guys a chance to get some more high percentage shots in our offense and maybe play a touch more inside out.”
The aforementioned dynamics have been crutches throughout ASU’s five-game losing streak, but it was no more present than this past Wednesday night when it put up just 10 points in the first half and a record-low 29 for the entire 40 minutes of play against the Cougars.
Its 29 total points was the lowest in program history since the 1945-1946 season and it provided a resounding confirmation of the banes restricting the individual talent on Hurley’s roster from prospering as one unit. The Sun Devils finished the night with just 12 field goals, six of which were assisted on, and a horrid 21.2% shooting percentage from the field and an 11.5% clip on 26 attempted threes.
“It was disappointing for us on offense,” Hurley said in the postgame press conference on Wednesday. “You know, I’ve had a lot of teams here that could put some points on the board and tonight this was as ineffective an offensive performance as I’ve been a part of maybe ever as a player and a coach.”
Logically, it may take a greater chunk of time for ASU to get on the same page than it will Oregon.
Hurley has more relevant newcomers filling roles in his rotation than Altman, not to mention the line of players that have already missed time through ASU’s eight games.
Graham and sophomore guard Jay Heath missed a couple of contests due to COVID-19 protocols. Starting junior guard Luther Muhammad missed one due to a violation of team rules, and arguably one of the Sun Devils’ most impactful players, starting forward Marcus Bagley, is still not set to return from a knee injury that has sidelined him for every one of the Sun Devils’ five latest defeats.
Additionally, ASU’s losses in the past five outings have seen a subsequent string of losses in the rebound battle. A potential refutation of this may say the Sun Devils don’t grab as many boards as its opponent because its opponent doesn’t miss as many shots as the Sun Devils do. While potentially reasonable, this sentiment may hold more weight if ASU were winning the fight on the offensive glass. But its not. The Sun Devils have been out-rebounded on the offensive glass in four out of their five games over the losing streak.
Considering Oregon is slotted as second-to-last in the Pac-12 for rebounds per game, this may be the Sun Devils’ opportunity to take a small victory.
The conference showdown between ASU and Oregon is at 5:00 p.m. MST on Sunday evening, airing on Pac-12 Network.
