PODCAST: Mizzou Basketball sinks against Notre Dame & Kansas

Rock M Radio is back with a live broadcast of Dive Cuts as Sam Snelling and Matt Harris hop on to talk all things Missouri Basketball after a bad week of results. Mizzou travelled to Notre Dame and lost a close game late, and then headed to Kansas City for the Border War and forgot to show up in the second half. We’ll dissect what went wrong in each game, and what Missouri needs to do the rest of non-conference play if they want to get any kind of result for the NCAA Touranment. Join us at 8pm CT tonight

READ THE REST

Reply Like

Appreciate the sanity here. I hope it spreads. I really wonder how much of this mindset started when they looked at the injuries and said, "we're doing to have to play differently." I don't agree with that assessment, but I do wonder if any of these conversations would be taking place with a healthy Pierce to start the year. It's tantalizing to think about what could have been with a lineup like Ant/Stone/Crews/Pierce/Mitchell. You're telling me that lineup could be stopped? They might leak, but they'd outscore you 10 times out of 10. I hope the narrative changes from "what could have been" to the "team that found its identity."

Reply 1 like

They played the jumbos against Kansas State when Annor was still healthy, and part of me thinks that performance affirmed the idea. We don't know -- and probably won't until spring -- if they used it against Marquette.

This is completely speculative on my part, but if the idea had taken hold enough to experiment with in October, then it was probably their original intention. If so, that's...interesting. Jevon was originally brought in to push Mark at the hybrid/boss spot, and the hope was they could avoid using Mark as a small-ball five at all. Even if it worked with Pierce as a four last year.

Again, this is theoretical, but the jumbos let them slide Mark to the wing, where he probably envisions himself playing at the next level, let's you get Jevon on the floor as a skilled four, and use Shawn as your anchor. But I think there are several problems with that rationale:

1. Mark's never been a consistent shooter at volume
2. Jevon's streaky, too; he's a 31.7 percent shooter off the catch for his career
3. Shawn's developmental jump alreadyhappened

So, you've got two non-shooters and a big who is mediocre to average at best offensively. The floor was going to be compacted from the jump. And we've already highlighted how Shawn can be scattershot defensively, and it puts Mark and Jevon in mismatches on the perimeter.

This is where Pierce's absence hurts: They can't swap him in for Jevon. Getting any shooting on the floor means using Crews and sliding Mark back to his natural spot.

Point is, they don't have the personnel to make the jumbos work. Mark's not replicating Kobe's jump as a shooter. They didn't unlock gains with Jevon. And they misevaluated Phillips.

Reply 1 like