Your George Mason Patriots beat St. Mary’s of Maryland to the tune of 91-62. The score doesn’t really matter too much, but we did get to see how some of the players played inside the structure of the offense and defense.
KD Johnson and Jeremiah Quigley were suspended for the game due to violating minor team rules, per Matt Moderno. This stinks because of course you don’t want to have guys get suspended, but you also wanted to see what the point guard situation was like.
Besides the two suspended players, we got to see everyone check into the game. Every scholarship player, along with Chase Tucker, scored at least one point.
Jared Billups couldn’t do much on the offensive end, but the jump-shot looked better than it did last season.
Woody Newton was pretty active on both ends, with him scoring seven points on 2-5 shooting and 3-3 from the line.
One of the most important things we saw was Brayden O’Connor start the game as the starting point guard. I had mentioned a couple times in the past the BOC could probably be an emergency point guard, as he occasionally ran point for UMass Lowell. It more felt like a point guard committee when O’Connor was at the one, but the offense did not look horrible. Brayden ended up with 12 points on 3-5 from the field and 5-5 from the line. Along with that, he added four rebounds, drew four fouls, had an assist, and no turnovers.
The backup point guard was freshman Justin Begg, who actually ended up playing more than BOC. Begg looked like a natural offensive dynamo, which is what some expected, scoring 10 on 4-10 from the field and 2-6 from three, six assists on top of that, and adding three steals . O’Connor may be the better all-around player, but the offense did look a bit better with Justin running the show.
Darius Maddox was Darius Maddox, scoring 12 on 3-8 from the field and 4-4 from the line, adding two steals, and somehow seven rebounds.
The two hardest players to evaluate were Jalen Haynes and Gio Emejuru, as the difference between a D1 and D3 big man is a lot more than a guard. They were the two most dominant players of the game, with Emejuru scoring 19 points in 19 minutes, shooting 9-12 from the field and grabbing 8 boards.
Haynes scored 11 points on 2-5 shooting, but got fouled six times and went 7-11 from the line, although it felt like 10. Something that is kind of concerning is that he only got two rebounds in 17 minutes. If that is Mason’s starting center’s true rebounding production, that would be a problem.
We did get to see a little bit of what the game looked like with both Haynes and Emejuru out there, but it did kind of look clunky. I think that they will never be put out there normally, only against other lineups with two bigs, like Loyola Chicago might run.
Stas Sivka got some run out there, and he moved as well as the Slovenian looked during games in his home country. The foreign big is certainly a project to monitor.
While using the KenPom method instead of manually counting, I found that Mason had 69 possessions, which is about five higher than the 63.8 possessions per game they had last season. KenPom has Mason projected at 68.3 possessions per game, but their prediction system might be off, since 68.3 is 345th and Mason was 344th at 63.8 last season.
(Field goal attempts – offensive rebounds) + turnovers + (.44 * free throw attempts)
The team overall shot 7 for 22 from three, which is 31.8%. That isn’t crazily low, but you would like it to be higher; at least 33%.
Based on the playing time we saw, I would guess the main rotation includes KD Johnson, Jeremiah Quigley, and Justin Begg at the 1, Jared Billups, Brayden O’Connor, and Darius Maddox at the two and three, Zach Anderson and Woody Newton at the four, and Jalen Haynes and Gio Emejuru at the five. A decent amount of those guys have +/- 1 positional flexibility, but you get the idea.
That’s 10 guys. You can pretty much do whatever you want stamina-wise with that.
I think Austin Ball has potential to get spot minutes if they want to go big and have him at the three, but it is just so tough to crack this lineup.
Overall, we did not really get a very good gauge on how good this team will be, since two big wildcards didn’t end up playing, but we at least got some possible clues as to who will be in the rotation.
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