Santa Clara Men's Basketball - "The Best Laid Plans"

 

       

It was a tough week and a half for the Broncos losing two of three games.  Our perceived momentum from the great BYU home win quickly disappeared with a blowout loss at St. Mary's and a lackluster loss at home to Pacific. 

The plan it seemed for 2022-2023, was success in the preseason with a more difficult schedule that could propel us to third or fourth place in the WCC.  Overall, notch 21 or 22 wins and be in the conversation for another NIT invite.  Looked perfect on paper until last Saturday's loss to # 222 ranked Pacific.  

As they say, "The Best Laid Plans....."  will now be put to a much harder test the last eight games.  IMHO it's not the planning that's at issue, it's consistency executing the plan.  Here's an example from our St. Mary's loss.  St. Mary's has the lowest total scoring average in the WCC but has the best record 12-0.  What?  How?  Execution.  They are ranked near the top in the NCAA in both offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency (4th).  While most would say the way they play is boring, winning and NCAA berths are never boring.  Witness the recent St. Mary's front page newspaper ink that a national ranking brings.  We barely can get our game time announcements in print.  

Our style tries to be the polar opposite.  Go fast, not slow, and we never seem to see a shot we don't like.  At 16-7 we've done pretty well, but in key games we go off script for long stretches.  A number of those games we've won due to shear will power, hustle and streaky hot shooting.  In our seven losses, only three of those teams have better athlete's.  St. Mary's is not one of those three.  

For those Broncos able to attend the Bronco Bistro pre game, a coach comes in and draws up the game plan on a whiteboard.  The Pacific game plan called for; control the boards, make sure we defend against their elite top 3 point shooters particularly # 20 Boone and # 21 Avdalovic, and get out in transition to get easy baskets.  Also in the Pacific game plan, we wanted to pound it down low to our bigs since Pacific has smaller post players.  

The Pacific game recap shows our bigs scored 16 of our 89 points, we had 5 more rebounds,  just 5 fast break points, but gave up 17 three pointers.  That's not a typo.  Boone and Avdalovic made 11 of those three's.  I believe, that's the most we've given up in the Coach Sendek tenure.  OK, these are college kids and mistakes always happen, but we weren't able to "reset" our game plan and execute.

In the WCC, we now rank last in 2pt FG % and 9th in 3pt FG%.  A testament to out grit in overcoming execution lapses.

January and February have not been kind to the Broncos over time.  In our past two 20 win seasons about half our losses are in late January and February, including six straight losses in 2019-2020, four of which were not against the top three in the WCC.  

This February is key, if our aspirations for post season are to be met.  There's no easy answer.  Some say we play our starters too many minutes and as we get into the heart of the WCC season, we're playing with tired bodies.  Season to date in conference our starters have logged 76% of the minutes and for the entire season 77%.  Add in Knapper as the sixth man, it's 84%.  I Have no idea of the correlation, but in our loss to San Jose State at home it was our third game in 7 days.  The first loss to St. Mary's at home was on 1 1/2 days rest after just playing USF.  Our second loss to St. Mary's again 1 1/2 days rest after the BYU victory.  Anyway, I'm not buying the minutes argument.

Others think it's that our opponents have figured us out and game plan to have anyone other than Keshawn, Carlos, or Podz beat us.  It's a lot easier to guard 3 vs 5.  On offense our opponents are more successful at fighting through our perimeter screens or doubling our guards off the screen.  They're not too worried about our bigs making a three when we shoot it at 16% or handling the ball while rolling to the rim.  Consequently, they play our guards tough resulting in late in the clock looks that are hard to make.  Might be one reason our WCC shooting percentages are low. 

When we are on defense our opponents strategy is to catch our guards in a top of the key ball screen and force our bigs to switch, resulting in two mismatches.  A quick guard on our big and a small guard on their big rolling into the paint.  Evidence Mahaney of St. Mary's and Boone of Pacific lighting us up in those situations.  

Expect more of same opponent game plan the next eight games.  All have a good balance of scoring guards and bigs.  It will take our best effort to win these games with five on the road and three at Leavey.  

It all starts tonight at Gonzaga then a quick turnaround at USF.  The Zags had their 75 game home winning streak snapped by LMU recently an let's hope the Broncos can pull it off as well.

Hopefully our "Best Laid Plans" and execution are with us the next eight!