Mason Drops Their Third Game in a Row

By
Joseph Szymanski
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2881

By Palmer Johnson

Your George Mason Patriots dropped to the Loyola Chicago Rambler by a score of 85-79, as Mason now drops to 15-8 overall and 4-6 in the conference.

I said this game would be a rock fight. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Skinn can’t let this hole get any deeper. 4-6 is rough, but Mason is only favored in one of their next four games. They would be lucky to go 2-2 in them, and being 6-8 means Mason would have to win their next four games, all of which they are currently favored in, to be above .500. It’s so hard to win four conference games, especially with two on the road.

Mason is going to need to win a game they have no business winning. The best candidate to me is Loyola Chicago on the road, maybe Skinn can learn heavily from this game and cook up a crazy gameplan. You have to learn from losses.

The back-breaking three happened when Amari Kelly was defending Dame Adelekun one-on-one and needed help, so a Mason defender helped right off of 43.7% shooter Braden Norris. Now, I’m not a coach, but there had to be a better way to handle that. Not only was he the best shooter on the floor, but he was also the easiest pass. That’s an awful combination for Mason.

Kelly needing help in the post wasn’t a one-time thing. He is a fantastic team defender but leaves a lot to be desired in the one-on-one post defense. If this is a problem with Adelekun and Loyola Chicago, it won’t be any better against DaRon Holmes and Dayton, who will probably have Holmes and four shooters on the floor for nearly the entire game.

Defense overall was a problem, with Loyola scoring 1.29 points per possession. This was the worst defensive performance of the season. This wasn’t even a full strength Ramblers squad, with Jayden Dawson coming back from his ankle injury and playing only seven minutes.

The horrible defense wasted an amazing shooting performance. The team overall had an eFG% of 71.6, which means they averaged 1.432 points every time they shot it. Defense was this team’s calling card up until the Richmond game, and it seems like it hasn’t been the same since. Mason has the ninth ranked defense in conference play, and that just won’t work.

I don’t mean to harp on Kelly, but he couldn’t handle the double teams on the offensive end, ending up with four turnovers. That isn’t completely his fault, as they kept going to him even though he clearly wasn’t equipped for it. The grad student hit two threes that kept Mason in it, but other than that, he felt like a non-factor.

The rest of the offense isn’t safe from that. Although everyone was pretty efficient shooting the ball, the problem was they weren’t getting too many chances, as Mason had 17 turnovers. The limit is supposed to be ten.

Not to be too negative, but Mason had a 12-point lead near the end of the first half. I believe this is the largest lead they have blown this season.

Let’s get to the positives, with the biggest being another Baraka Okojie game. This man went 2-2 from the field and 10-14 from the line. 14 free throws compared to two shots is just crazy. It also brings his free throw rate over 100, meaning he has shot more free throws than shots this season. If he can continue to grow and add an above average three-point shot and free throw to his game, I don’t really see how you could stop him.

It’s kinda funny, Okojie shot 14 free throws and wasn’t even the most fouled guy on the team. The freshman drew seven fouls, meaning all of his fouls drawn were either shooting or in the bonus/double bonus, while Keyshawn Hall sneakily drew eight, going 5-7 from the field and 10-11 from three while also grabbing eight boards. Some of his shots seemed like it was him just throwing it at the backboard, but they went in. Hall wasn’t immune to the turnover bug though, giving it away four times.

The biggest standout performer on offense was Darius Maddox, scoring 18 and shooting 4-7 from three. For some reason, it seemed like the ball wasn’t in his hands often in the second half, when they needed it the most.

I really thought the game was in the bag when he hit that.

With this loss, it seems like the double-bye contention is now a dream, and the goal should be to get a top seven seed. At the beginning of the season, we would be fine with that, but not based on what it looked like in early January. This season was a very important one to get a double bye, as a lot of the middling teams are very volatile and there are seven-plus teams who could reasonably win the conference tournament. I don’t want to see teams like Duquesne or GW in a 7-10 game.

Even if Mason gets a lower seed in the tournament than we’d like, we’ve seen what this Mason team can do when everyone is firing on all cylinders. You could easily convince me this team got hot for a weekend in Brooklyn and they’re playing in the conference title game.

Next up, a road game against Davidson. This game was a must-win, I guess Davidson is too. In order to be competitive, they have to win every 50-50 game for the rest of the season.

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