Welcome back! After a brief hiatus to start the season (there’s a newly minted Mrs. Buckets in the picture now) I’ll be back here with lots of thoughts and numbers on Mason basketball each week. If you dig the data, check out KenPom, hoop-math.com, and Basketball Reference, all invaluable resources for stat geeks. Now, onto Mason.
We ignored a lot of red flags coming into the season. We knew exactly what they were, but we explained them away. They were better than last year’s KenPom ranking. Don’t worry about all the close games – they were good in those because they’re disciplined and well-coached. They finished fifth in the A10 last year! Sure, they benefitted tremendously from an unbalanced schedule, playing each of the top three teams only once. But they only had eight scholarship players. Four of those players were freshmen. They battled injuries. They add an impact transfer. Otis won’t have to carry so much weight on his shoulders this year. Dave finally has a complete roster to work with.
The GiantKiller team, myself included, is very guilty of hyping this team beyond more reasonable expectations. Maybe the fourth-place preseason A10 ranking was accurate. But even that’s looking ambitious, with two wins coming against projected bottom-100 teams, and five losses all varying degrees of uninspiring. The season Mason fans have been anticipating for years is all but dead on arrival, and the only hope that remains is for this team to get it together in conference play and storm through the A10 tournament.
Nothing is working very well and there are a million ways to slice it up. Because I’m a stats guy, we’ll start with the numbers – the most damning first.
The layup line defense
Mason is allowing opponents to shoot 72.4% at the rim, the 13th worst mark in all of NCAA basketball. Opponents are taking 37.5% of their shots at the rim, 239th in the NCAA. In other words, opponents are getting to the rim a lot, and they’re making everything. More than anything, these two numbers sum up the season – there are issues all over the court, but they all matter less when you can’t stop the opponent from getting layup after layup.
A tragic lack of shooting
In one of the more tilting losses of the season, Mason shot 14 of 23 from deep against Georgia Southern. That shooting performance is looking more and more like a massive outlier – the next best performance by volume and percentage for Mason is 7 of 23, 30.4%. Subtract the Georgia Southern game and Mason is 27 of 106 from deep in the other six, including performances of 2 for 8 against Penn, 4 of 20 against Southern, and 2 for 14 against Baylor. It’s hard to overstate how difficult it is to stay competitive in today’s game without a deep threat, and how good shooting can mask a lot of roster deficiencies.
Squeezing the orange
Mason is 299th in the NCAA in turnover percentage, giving it away on 18.8% of possessions. We don’t need to spend a lot of time here since you’ve all seen it and everyone is culpable. This might be the most surprising and disappointing, given all the experience returning at the guard position.
Also, the rebounding
Mason is 229th in the NCAA in total rebounding percentage at just a shade under 50%. Grabbing only 27.2% of offensive rebounds (233rd) helps sink that number. In the offseason, most of us projected rebounding to be a strength, given that Mason would be able to play much bigger in the frontcourt with the addition of Jarred Reuter. That hasn’t been the case.
There are other things we could dive into, but for now it will suffice to explain Mason’s struggles through the lens of a lack of interior defense, lack of outside shooting, a mind-boggling turnover issue, and the inability to mask any of those through strong rebounding.
Is anything working?
The three-point defense – kind of. Mason allows the third lowest percentage of shots from deep of any team in the country and opponents are only shooting 33.3%. That’s good under most circumstances – however, I wouldn’t read too much into it for this team, given how easily teams get into the paint. Perimeter defense might turn out to be a strength, but I don’t expect the top-three opponent three-point rate to hold up over the course of the season.
Transition defense is also working – Mason is top 60 in the country in fewest opponent shots taken in transition. Paulsen’s system is designed to slow the pace, and this part is working. It doesn’t matter because the halfcourt defense is so bad, but it’s working. We’re reaching here.
Transition offense – Mason does not run in transition much at all, but they have an effective field goal percentage of 64.8% when they do. That’s 42nd in the country. Compare that to the non-transition eFG% of 49.1%, good for 211th in the country, and there’s a compelling case that this team should look to run more.
Finally, there aren’t a lot of bright spots, but AJ Wilson has been very good this season. He leads the team in offensive rebound rate (11.6%), total rebound rate (18.5%), block rate (13.8%), and defensive rating (at 93.6, he’s the only player under 100). If you prefer defensive box plus/minus as a summary statistic, he also leads the team with a 4.4. He’s second in true shooting percentage (62%) and third in steal rate (2.1%). The dude makes plays, and I think he’s made a compelling case for starter’s minutes.
The way forward
This is where I put on my coaching hat, with the obligatory disclaimer that the current staff knows more about basketball than I ever will. But I’d like to see a few things:
- More minutes for the Greg Calixte/AJ Wilson frontcourt
- AJ leads the team with a 4.4 defensive box plus/minus (DBPM). Calixte is second with a 3.2. They also lead the team in rebounding percentage. Preventing easy buckets needs to be the first order of priority, and grabbing rebounds falls somewhere shortly after that. Playing these two at the same time can potentially help with both. It’s not really a scoring frontcourt, but it doesn’t have to be. Fix the defense first, figure out the rest later.
- Push the tempo
- As stated earlier, there’s a wide discrepancy between the team’s halfcourt sets (not good) and the rate of scoring in transition (actually pretty good!). It also makes sense if you think about the guys getting a majority of minutes – Javon Greene, Justin Kier, and Ian Boyd haven’t been knockdown shooters over their careers, but making plays is in their DNA. Otis Livingston is also wonderful in transition, and running a little bit more could help get him going. Alas, this is less likely to happen – Dave Paulsen has eschewed the transition game his entire coaching career.
- Continue experimenting with lineups
- I’d like to see Jason Douglas-Stanley get some run to see if he can shoot. Mason’s spacing on offense is bad in a way that happens when defenses don’t have to respect shooters. Working JDS onto the court with Jaire Grayer and Livingston might have issues defensively, but it could also put three knock-down shooters on the floor at the same time, which Mason doesn’t do in any current lineup.
- Playing Goanar Mar at the wing (potentially in an AJ Wilson – Greg Calixte frontcourt!) is also worth trying. Go has always been a little bit out of position at the 4, so getting him matched up consistently against opposing wings might be what he needs.
- While we’re talking about things that definitely aren’t going to happen, how about a small lineup of Otis, Kier, Javon, Boyd, and AJ that does nothing but press, trap, and play for steals and transition buckets? It will never happen, but that won’t prevent me from daydreaming about it.
Finally, I’ll preach patience. This team is a few bounces away from being merely underwhelming at 4-3. Under Dave Paulsen, the team has gotten significantly better over the course of each of the past two seasons. The turnover issue won’t last forever. Otis and Goanar will get going in the same game at some point. Mason didn’t storm out of the gates like we all hoped, but there’s still plenty of time to right the ship before conference play. If things don’t turn around we’ll have a different conversation in here, but for now I choose to remain optimistic – we haven’t seen this team come close to its A game and that can’t last forever.
