Your George Mason Patriots opened the season by beating North Carolina Central to the tune of 75 to 58. Mason somewhat dominated their opponent, with the Patriots scoring 1.1 points per possession, and the Eagles scoring .85.
Mason played a little faster than they had last season, with the game having 68 possessions for each team. The tempo numbers are always weird early on, with KenPom saying they play at the 340th fastest pace in the country. If you look at 68 possessions per game last season, that’s around the 150th-mark.
This game felt very long, since there were so many breaks for free throws. Mason drew 30 fouls, with three NC Central players fouling out, and two having four fouls.
This coincides with Jalen Haynes and Gio Emejuru each drawing five fouls, along with Darius Maddox and Woody Newton drawing four each.
Mason shot decent as a team from the line, with them shooting 31-41, 75.6%. The one problem is that Haynes and Emejuru each shot 3-7 from the line. You can take that one of two ways, either the people taking the highest volume are missing the most free throws, or Mason only missed two free throws outside of those two.
Speaking of Haynes and Emejuru, they both were efficient when with their shooting. Haynes scored 11 on 4-5, but the main problem was his 4 turnovers. Let’s hope that can get cut down as he plays more and more.
Emejuru also scored 11, this time on 4-6 shooting, but he only had two turnovers. That is a more acceptable number.
Jared Billups earned KenPom MVP, and I cannot really disagree too much. Billups only scored 8 on 2-4 from the field and 4-4 from the line, but played awesome defense, grabbed ten boards, five of them being offensive, and added two steals and a block. That block he had early on was awesome; probably the moment of the game that made you realize the season started. Plus/minus is a stat that needs context, but Jared did end up with the highest, at +24.
If you do the math, he used up six possessions to get eight points, but if you add his five offensive rebounds, that gives you an extra five shots. Mason averaged .86 points per shot, so my pseudo-math says Billups produced about 12.3 points while only taking up six possessions.
Woody Newton grabbed 8 boards, and defended well, but had a rough going once the ball touched his hands, with him going 0-4 from three, and having three turnovers; at least two of them coming from driving into a crowd and losing it.
Mason’s defense was pretty stifling, with NC Central going on a 13:17 long drought without a field goal in the first half. That is when the Patriots built their lead, and they weren’t even really scoring at an impressive clip. Over the entire course of the game, the Eagles had an eFG% of 32.5, which actually gives Mason the 9th best spot in that stat. That is somewhat misleading, since KenPom doesn’t count games against non D-1 opponents, which many teams play, but it is still very good.
A big part of that defense was KD Johnson, who did not start, but played 17 minutes, some of which coming at point guard. He only scored 2 points on 1-1 from the field, but added a lot in other ways, like having four assists and playing some fun defense. The KD-Billups-Woody trio is not good for spacing, but man is it fun to watch on the defensive end.
If I mention KD, I have to mention Jeremiah Quigley as well, who only played nine minutes, but looked pretty good in that limited time. It is possible that the limited minutes for Johnson and Quigley are related to them being suspended for the exhibition.
The two biggest causes of concern were that nobody in green and gold made a three besides Darius Maddox, with the team shooting 2-17 from deep. The other is that they had a 25% turnover rate, which is pretty high, and a partial result from not being able to handle the press.
If you have the volume of players who can play the one, if we are counting O’Connor as the fourth, going against the press really shouldn’t be a problem, since you can have two point guards in any lineup.
Speaking of O’Connor, he opened up the game as the starting point guard. I had mentioned during my commitment article that Brayden played some point at UMass Lowell, although none of the metric sites picked it up. I thought that just meant he would play a lot of two in games with press-heavy opponents; I never thought that the Canadian wing would ever start at point guard, especially not on opening night.
The UMass Lowell transfer scored 11 points on 3-8 shooting and 5-6 from the line, and got some good looks from three. Only one turnover when playing 27 minutes, with a decent amount of them at point guard, is really good.
Also speaking of Maddox, he was the team’s leading scorer, shooting 4-11, which doesn’t sound too good, but the returning starter shot 7-7 from the line and ended up being a volume scorer, which is something Mason needed in a game like this. Darius also sneakily grabbed five boards, with three of them being offensive.
Besides the defense, another big positive is that Mason grabbed 18 offensive boards, which gave them a 52.9% offensive rebound rate. Of course, this won’t stand, but it does show that they can take advantage of being much bigger than their opponent. The effort rebounds from Billups and having an NBA-level athlete 6’9 wing playing the four will add up.
Overall, there were some positives and negatives, but the team still won by 17, which beat the KenPom spread by 4. It did guess the possession count exactly, so that’s cool.
Next up, a road game against AP #18 ranked Marquette.
