George Mason Basketball Weekly Rundown, Volume 2: Is Mason Getting Better?

Last week we were tilting a 2-5 start; this week we’ll go more in depth on close wins against Morgan State and William and Mary. Per usual, we’ll dive into the numbers to see how things are improving. Welcome back to the collection of stats and random thoughts better known as the weekly rundown.

Defense, Shooting, Rebounding, and Turnovers

In last week’s column I ran down a bunch of stats that explained Mason’s slow start. Let’s check in on them.

Defense at the rim

Last week: opponents shooting 72.4% at the rim, and taking 37.5% of their attempts at the rim

This week: opponents shooting 71.2% at the rim, and taking 35.2% of their attempts at the rim

Fewer shots at the rim and a lower percentage. This is progress, kind of. These numbers have the entire season baked in so incremental gains from last week mean the Morgan State and William and Mary games had an impact. Most of the gain came from the Morgan State game, as W+M was 16-26 from 2, which is awful. Fortunately for Mason, they took 30 threes. Mason opponents are shooting 54.5% from 2 on the entire season, 317^th in the country.

Shooting

Last week: 41 of 129 from deep, 31.2% (and only 25.2% minus the Georgia Southern game, a massive outlier)

This week: 18 of 43 from deep, 41.9%

Let’s talk about this one for a minute. Two of Mason’s three best shooting from deep performances came this week, and both of those were without sharpshooter Jaire Grayer. If you’re holding out hope the team can turn a corner, there were a few positive signs this week. This was the single best one. Javon Greene hit a few threes that had a nice high arc and hit nothing but the bottom of the net. He might be finding his shot. Justin Kier still needs to be pretty open to shoot, but we’ll take that if he can keep up the 4 for 9 clip. We’ve talked in this space about how the spacing on offense breaks down when opponents don’t respect a threat from distance. There’s a synergy to these things. When a guard (usually Otis) drives into the paint, too much of the defense will collapse if there’s no shooting threat. When this happens consistently, possession after possession, the team has real trouble scoring, as we’ve seen in stretches of the year. If the team can hit open threes, the defense won’t be able to collapse as much, and the guards will have more room to work in the paint. A rising tide lifts all ships.

Three-point percentages by player this week:

Javon Greene: 5-9, 55.5%

Ian Boyd: 2-4, 50%

Jamal Hartwell: 1-2, 50%

Justin Kier: 4-9, 44.4%

Otis Livingston: 4-11, 36.3%

Goanar Mar: 2-7, 28.5%

Turnovers

Last week: 18.8%, 299^th in the NCAA

This week: Turnovers on 17.4% and 17.6% of possessions, which improves Mason’s ranking to 272^nd in the NCAA.

Once again it’s not great, but it’s progress. The most encouraging sign here was Otis Livingston’s 10 assist, 1 turnover effort against William and Mary. Mason still turns the ball over too much (particularly on all those “lifted his plant foot before he started dribbling” calls) but the senior point guard had 17 assists to 3 turnovers this week.

Rebounding

This one didn’t get any better. 231^st in the NCAA, right about where it was last week. This is a work in progress – and man, the guards doing all the rebounding is such a strange quirk of the Dave Paulsen era. Javon Greene again led all Patriots with 14 rebounds this week, followed by Justin Kier with 10, then Greg Calixte with 9. Jarred Reuter’s 3 rebounds in 34 minutes is something to watch – if that doesn’t improve quick he’ll continue ceding minutes to Calixte.

That one stat we didn’t talk about last week

In last week’s column I called out Mason’s defense at the rim, rebounding, turnover problem, and three point shooting as reasons for the slow start. We’ll check back in on all of those, but first there was one thing that was missing – Goanar Mar’s sophomore slump. After a promising freshman year where he averaged 11 points per game on 57.4% true shooting, Goanar has been almost invisible on the offensive end. Here’s his KenPom Offensive Rating by game:

Penn – 30

American – 0

Georgia Southern – 28

Southern – 69

NC Central – 136

Cincinnati – 48

Baylor – NA

Morgan State – 21

William and Mary – 137

Offensive Rating is a generalized estimate of the points you help your team score over 100 possessions, so an ORating of 100 is about average, and the ratings of 30, 0, 28, 48, and 21 that he’s posted this year are really, really low. I’m bringing this up only because A) it helps explain how Mason won a tough road game against a favored William and Mary team, and B) it felt like a bad omission in last week’s column that attempted to explain the slow start. Goanar’s true shooting is 37.7% this season, and “Good” Goanar has really only showed up for NC Central and William and Mary. If he gets back to last year’s averages (57.4% TS, 107.5 ORating) that’ll be a major factor in whether Mason turns the corner.

Other thoughts

A couple more things that don’t fit into anything we talked about:

• Otis Livingston is averaging a career low 3.0 free throw attempts per game. His lowest full season was 3.5 per game his freshman year, and he was at 4.2 last season. After shooting only ten free throws in the first six games, he’s taken 17 in the last three. Look for him to continue getting to the line.
• He’s also averaging a career low in three-point attempts per game – 3.6 is his lowest mark since he shot 3.9 his sophomore year. He had a bizarre start to the season where he only took one three in the first three games, and he’s taken 31 in the six games since. Hopefully we’re seeing him rediscover the style of play that led him to be such a force last season.
• Last week I argued for AJ Wilson to get starter’s minutes, and this week he played a solid game against Morgan State but hardly saw any time against William and Mary. The frontcourt is probably going to be a matchup-based rotation for the season. AJ’s speed was a better matchup against the ultra-small lineup Morgan State was playing, whereas Reuter and Calixte were a better matchup against WM’s Nathan Knight, a traditional big man. I think that pattern will continue all season. I also think stretch 5s are going to have a field day when playing Mason – despite seeing Calixte most of the game, Nathan Knight had 22 and hit 2-3 from deep. Mason’s frontcourt simply isn’t equipped to hang with legitimate bigs who have to be guarded out to the perimeter.

Finally, Morgan State and WM are ranked 324 and 173 in KenPom, respectively. Is Mason turning it around? It’s tough to say yes to that at the moment. The defense, though improving ever so slightly, is still porous. We’ll learn a lot about this team tonight when they take on a hot-shooting Vermont team that will be favored by Vegas. See you back here next week, and go Mason.