With a little more than 10 minutes left in the first half, Anthony Robinson II drove into the middle gap, came to a jump stop, and fired a boomerang pass to the left wing.
Nobody was there.
Instead, Missouri’s point guard watched his pass almost float into the hands of a seated Ole Miss assistant coach on the opposing bench. In real time, the turnover didn’t seem noteworthy. The junior assumed that Jayden Stone, who’d been running that channel, would be there for a catch-and-shoot three.
Hindsight, however, offers a less charitable view.
That gaffe ushered in an eight-minute stretch in which the Tigers’ slipshod handling fumbled momentum, allowing them to coast to an early 10-point lead. From then on, MU’s inability to value the ball or guard consistently undermined a comeback – including three second-half chances – in a 76-69 loss inside the Sandy and Johns Black Pavilion.
Squandering a win in Oxford served as a frustrating contrast to the tenacity MU showed just three days earlier in Lexington. Down the line, we might see it as a road trip where the Tigers prematurely cut off a path to contending in a wide-open SEC. Yet reaching that ceiling demands quality and consistent depth — a notion further undermined by this sample of lineup data.
Early on, though, it was hard to have a pessimistic outlook.
As the substitution pattern shows, coach Dennis Gates was pleased enough that he let his starting five log seven minutes of run time early. The momentum even carried through to inserting Trent Pierce and Nicholas Randall just before the under-12 timeout. Credit Mark Mitchell for getting the Tigers into that early flow state.
Over the Tigers’ past three outings, opponents have obviously gotten wise to where the senior wants to operate. There’s more congestion around the elbows, and game plans now call for rolling multiple defenders toward him when he attacks from empty-side isolations or putbacks. At different points on Saturday, three Rebels might converge on him during a rim attack.
Sometimes, Mitchell can play with blinders or hunt fouls. But against Ole Miss, he masterfully exploited the gravity he created to set up fellow Tigers. When drives drew a help defender around the restricted area, he easily dropped the ball off. More impressively, Mitchell made several savvy skip passes and kickouts, once he saw a weak-side defender rotate to the mid-line.
That momentum, however, petered out once MU started coughing the ball up. More frustrating was that it began with two giveaways in early-clock situations, typically the Tigers’ bailiwick. Soon enough, the issue metastasized throughout the rotation, including Robinson having the ball easily poked away on an in-bounds play and Jacob Crews committing a silly offensive foul.
MU’s bigs weren’t immune, either. Two prolonged Shawn Phillips Jr. post-ups ended with him losing a handle out of bounds and an elbow catching a defender. Midway through the second half, Gates inserted the little-used Trent Burns, who almost instantly gave the ball up running a dribble-handoff. Even Mitchell had some foibles, including a poor entry pass on a post-pin to Pierce.
Still, Ole Miss needed more than seven minutes to creep toward a lead, pulling ahead 27-24 on a pull-up three-ball by AJ Storr with 4:08 until halftime. The Tigers did enough defensively over that span to stay in control, but lineups pockmarked with reserves like Pierce, T.O. Barrett, and Annor Boateng bled out possessions.
By contrast, Storr, who had been underwhelming for long stretches this year, found the form that once made him so potent for Wisconsin. It also coincided with Barrett, who entered with solid defensive metrics, tracking him.
The sophomore crowded Storr on a pull-up, resulting in a foul when he landed. His poor closeout gave Storr an angle to attack for the one-dribble jumper that pushed the Rebels in front for the first time. And finally, overhelping to the midline – a recurring issue for Barrett – gifted Storr another open three in the final minute before the break.
Ultimately, MU’s sloppy streak transcended lineup combinations.
It’s easy to pillory Shawn Phillips Jr. as the chief source of woe, but going back through the film from Saturday reveals he might have seen his plus-minus mark weighted down by the Tigers in front of him on the defensive end.
Against Kentucky, MU’s pick-and-roll coverages proved to be on point. That was not the case in Oxford. Now, it would be easy to assume that Phillips didn’t do his job in calling out and communicating the direction of those screens. Yet the Tigers appeared to be using the same approach – a guard pushing a handler into drop coverage – from a couple of nights earlier in Lexington. Instead of guards getting skinny and fighting over, it was routine to see them hung up, notably Robinson.
None of the Tigers’ perimeter defenders are blindsided, either. They simply don’t show the same effort that was apparent a couple of days earlier.
Over the past week, it’s also been easy to laud the shifts Pierce puts in defensively and how he shores up the Tigers in the rebounding column. That said, it was a rough day for the junior. In the second half, MU had three high-leverage defensive possessions after eking to a lead or drawing level. In each of them, Pierce slipped up.
With MU leading 48-46, he overhelped on a slot drive and lost track of Malik Dia relocating for a corner three. Following the Tigers taking a 55-53 lead, Pierce should have tagged a rolling Augusto Cassia. Instead, the Rebs forward breezed past him for a dunk. Then, with MU trying to rally from four points down, Pierce failed to slide over into drop coverage as Storr curled off a screen. That whiff forced Phillips to help up the lane, creating a lob dunk that also resulted in Cassia being fouled.
And as Sam Snelling astutely noted in Study Hall, the rest of MU’s rotation – outside of Mitchell – struggled to pull its weight. It’s also hard to offset rampant turnovers when you only shoot 29.2 percent from beyond the arc and 50 percent at the charity stripe.
What’s becoming clear when we look over lineups and how players perform positionally is that the depth at Gates’ disposal is shallower than expected. Notice in the graphic below how well MU’s top-five lineups performed, mustering a plus-9 scoring margin in roughly 26 minutes. And how sharply backup-heavy groups slumped, finishing minus-16 in almost 14 minutes.
Gates has also drastically shortened his rotation. A struggling Sebastian Mack took back-to-back DNPs. Luke Northweather, who helps some lineups as a spacing five, didn’t see a second of action. Instead, Gates is rolling with Barrett, Boateng and Randall.
In a vacuum, it’s heartening to see MU use players sourced from the high school ranks in these roles. The reality reflected in position performance data renders a harsher verdict. Barrett posted a minus-14 margin in barely nine minutes of play. Boateng went minus-8 in nearly 11 minutes. In some of these reserve groups, Pierce slides down to the hybrid role. He went minus-10 in roughly 10 minutes doing that job.
Victories against Florida and Kentucky hinted at the headroom MU still has this season, but, in some ways, this loss underscores just how perilous the margins can be when execution isn’t buttoned up.
But more broadly, it’s wearisome proof that the returns from Pierce and Stone haven’t resolved the persistent flaws we’ve seen in how MU manages its rotation. Phillips still occupies too significant a role. It appears Mack has been set adrift. And, perhaps most worrisome of all, neither Barrett nor Boateng has developed enough to be a steady contributor each night in the SEC.
As for the implications, there’s still time for them to tilt either way.
Maybe this was simply a case of MU being burned by a lack of focus in the afterglow of two quality wins. Or it could be the first sign that those results were the actual outliers. It’s also early January, and MU still has a hint of wiggle room to adjust.
Making tweaks, though, assumes that MU’s staff doesn’t see the loss on Saturday as a one-off. If that’s the case, you can envision Gates sticking with the status quo – and venturing past a point of no return along the way.