On Wednesday, Missouri’s 84-74 victory over Auburn hinged on a modest tweak: floppy action.
It’s not complex.
A guard starts under the hoop and sprints off single or double screens to pop out on the wing. If a coach is feeling saucy, he’ll have two guards sprint off pindowns on either side of the floor. Ray Allen probably owes most of his career earnings to this play.
Yet seemingly modest floppy action has more subtle layers.
If a defender goes over the top off a screen, the guard can flare to the corner or veer back into the mid-range. They can catch on the wing, receive a screen from the big man for an empty-side pick-and-roll, or the big man can seal his defender for a post-up.
For coach Dennis Gates, the time-worn action served as a pry bar. Over the opening eight minutes, Auburn hunkered down in gaps and loaded up heavily toward the strong side of the floor. Steven Pearl was content to let MU run any variation of a ball screen it pleased.
Why pivot to floppy? Because, as the clips below demonstrate, it helped clear out a side of the floor.
Once the guard emerges on the wing, there’s no help defender and ample room to operate. T.O. Barrett used it to kiss a floater off the glass. Mark Mitchell rolled into a post-pin. Later, he set a ball screen for Barrett, which let him knife to the cup. And even if the ball swung to the second side, Mitchell could still receive a lob entry from Trent Pierce and not worry about backside help.
Then, Gates added a wrinkle by having a guard sprint off staggered screens on the wing to catch at the top of the key. Then, another guard curled off floppy action behind them. It teed up two of Pierce’s open three-balls and, early in the second half, isolated Mark Mitchell against Tahaad Pettiford for a post-up.
Boring as it seems, that’s all it took to leave Auburn’s scouting report in tatters and help MU to a relatively straightforward win. The night’s substitution pattern makes it easy to isolate the stretches where Auburn had a modicum of control: a 7-0 spurt where it attacked Luke Northweather and a two-minute span in the closing stretch where MU buckled against the press.
Strip out those four minutes of gametime, and Mizzou is left with a cushy plus-21 scoring margin. The Study Hall from this affair underscores just how comfortably MU notched this result. What saved Auburn from a wipeout? MU’s recent cold spell from the charity stripe and not wiping the glass cleanly.
Lineup performance reinforces these obvious conclusions as well.
You can pinpoint Northweather’s struggles in the group that went minus-7 in 98 seconds, and the group that sweated against the press was minus-6 in four minutes. Beyond that, almost every iteration Gates rolled out did a bang-up job.
That’s possible when your supporting cast fulfills its obligations.
Struggles by Barrett, Pierce, and Annor Boateng were a prominent feature of MU’s loss at Ole Miss, and rotation data for the season has underscored that Gates needs more from the sophomores in that trio. Well, Barrett and Pierce delivered offensively against Auburn. It was another rough night for Boateng on that end, but he did important – and subtle – work defensively against Keyshawn Hall.
Collectively, those three finished with a plus-21 margin in a little more than 64 minutes of action. That’s how you keep Robinson’s workload to a manageable 26 minutes of run time. Moreover, shifting Pierce to the hybrid spot (+4) allowed MU flexibility to play small-ball with Mitchell at the five – a configuration that was fruitful for long stretches last season.
Crucially, MU looked far more engaged than it did for long stretches in Oxford, especially on the defensive end. Any route to a win meant tamping down Hall and Pettiford, and that duo finished the night with 19 points on 5 of 21 shooting floor and with nearly as many turnovers as assists.
Against Hall, the Tigers’ off-ball defenders rotated to the mid-line just enough to recover or rotate when Auburn tried to find their jumbo wing for spot-ups on the weak-side of the floor. Meanwhile, Boateng and Mitchell sat down and stayed solid when Hall tried to hunt for buckets on his preferred drives from the elbow.
As for Pettiford, limiting his air space is what turns him into a high-volume, low-efficiency shooter off the bounce. Sure enough, MU managed to cut down his operating room in ball screens, handoffs, and isolations.
What’s notable, too, is that MU’s come out of a non-conference with a more conservative stylistic approach. Gates has shortened up his bench, slowed the tempo, focused on gap integrity and beefing up rebounding. It’s an approach that would receive Cuonzo Martin’s stamp of approval.
Wednesday underscored – again – that MU’s pathway isn’t flashy. Gates didn’t devise a new set or stumble into a schematic edge. He saw how Auburn wanted to compact the floor. He wrenched it open with a common action. And then he trusted his players to execute it.
Organization, ball security and competence from reserves can be enough for Mizzou to separate itself from good squads.
The next step? Expanding its margin for error and sustaining what works when conditions aren’t optimal. Finding a way to make Sebastian Mack functional and getting Jevon Porter back from a quad contusion would certainly help, widening the buffer on nights where Barrett and Pierce are merely average.
Do that, and MU will have a brand of basketball that travels.