When Missouri wants to get Mark Mitchell going, coach Dennis Gates can dust off a few familiar play calls.
One of them is a horns set with a guard stationed at an elbow and a big at the other. A wing is stationed in a corner, while Mitchell is in the opposite one. The big man at the elbow screens for the guard, who curls out to the opposite slot and receives a ball reversal. Meanwhile, Mitchell cuts along the baseline and buries his defender for a post-pin in the lane.
Ideally, a guard tosses a lob entry and – without backside help – Mitchell notches an easy bucket.
On Saturday night, though, Gates added a wrinkle to that template. With MU struggling to get traction in the lane against Florida, his staff noticed Jacob Crews drawing smaller guards in crossmatches. But how to exploit it? Easy. Just have Mitchell and Crews swap roles.
Punishing the mismatch isn’t a revolutionary idea, but it underpinned the kind of in-game adjustments that helped the Tigers notch a 76-74 victory over the No. 22 Gators. It was at the core of the Tigers’ tactics when running pick-and-rolls with Anthony Robinson II and rolling out a zone that forced the poor-shooting Gators to hoist up three-balls.
It’s also a timely reminder of how the start of SEC play shifts game-planning from the macro to the micro. Styles aren’t a mystery. And if there’s healthy retention – as is the case for Mizzou and Florida – you’re just wiping dust off scouting reports on personnel.
Look closely enough, and those inflection points pop up during a review of MU’s substitution pattern.
Hunting duck-ins for Crews started about the time Luke Northweather checked in at the 11:00 mark in the first half. The spacing Northweather provided also made it easier to run ball screens, allowing Mitchell to attack with his left hand on the empty side of the floor. When Florida opted for a ball-handling duo of Xaivian Lee and Urban Klavzar, the Tigers hunted the latter mercilessly in middle ball screens.
At the start of the second half, those high PNRs came with some more window dressing as delay sets, but functionally, the goal was Shawn Phillips plowing a path for Robinson in the middle gap. That’s made easier when Crews and a healthy Jayden Stone bring enough shooting gravity that off-ball defenders can’t cheat toward the lane.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t kinks left to sort out. MU still runs into shaky combinations between the under-16 and under-12 media timeouts when Gates tries to give his headliners a break. Often, those lineups pair up Sebastian Mack with Phillips. Meanwhile, T.O. Barrett’s not quite ready to lead a second unit as point guard.
But when we assess how lineups fared, the results are heartening. Most groups that logged 2 minutes or more wound up on the right side of the margin, and collectively, the highest-usage groups posted a plus-19 scoring margin across approximately 31 minutes. And those that didn’t include a small-ball group that was just barely (-1) underwater in 2:22 of action.
Again, any hope of reviving Mack means keeping him in lineups with stretch fives. Do that, and I think the minus-8 margin he racked up in three minutes with Phillips ebbs away. Meanwhile, the nine remaining lineups were populated by youngsters like Nicholas Randall or Trent Burns. They also experimented with Trent Pierce at the four, and against a brawny opponent like Florida, it’s little surprise that the returns were paltry.
Unsurprisingly, the position performance (mostly) aligns with the trifecta from Study Hall. It’s also helpful to see the split in Pierce’s floor time between the wing and running at the four, where a 93-second spell saw MU give up a 6-2 run in the middle of the second half. In the 13 minutes he backstopped Crews, the outcome (+2) ticked off what you wanted to see in his debut.
Meanwhile, I feel a bit for Phillips. Yes, he had some lapses defensively in the opening 10 minutes. But he also set quality screens, rolled hard and sealed off seams for Robinson. He did the grunt work of hitting Florida bigs on box outs and allowed guards like Stone, Pierce and Robinson to fly in and collect rebounds. It’s the big-man equivalent of a solid floor game, and his allocation of minutes made complete sense in this matchup.
Otherwise, we’ve already detailed why the likes of Mack at combo guard, Pierce at the four, and Barrett at lead guard find themselves in the black. Resolving those issues, however, is vital. As Sam Snelling astutely noted, MU’s transfers didn’t gin up much production. Barrett saw his minutes sanded down. Annor Boateng didn’t sniff the floor.
When Jevon Porter returns from a quad injury, the Tigers should have a workable core of seven players: Robinson, Mitchell, Crews, Stone, Pierce, Porter, and Northweather. Or at least that’s what individual Bayesian Performance Ratings imply. However, MU’s system is premised on rolling 10 players through each night. That requires resuscitating Mack, calibrating Phillips’ minutes, and hoping one of Barrett, Boateng or Burns emerges as SEC play goes along.
Against Florida, though, smart adjustments helped the Tigers get what they needed from key cogs and exploited the Gators’ vulnerabilities just enough to get a result.
But as we said on Dive Cuts, one result doesn’t salvage a season. This win was triage. Fortunately, the immediate schedule offers a pair of matchups against teams going through the same process. Sort out the glitches we saw on Saturday, and it’s not outlandish to envision MU sitting at 3-0 in the SEC standings.