Just throwing this out there, but if everybody is doing it, then it isn’t cutting edge any more. I would say when Morris was on the court, running sets which utilized his talents would have helped him and our team a lot. Being locked in to a certain style means forcing everyone into the same mold and I don’t think that is effective coaching or cutting edge. He was both our best rebounder and our best defender and he pretty much took only high percentage shots. You have to figure out a way to utilize that.
If I’m interpreting the data correctly, Mabrey and Morris were not only our worst offensive players, but also our worst defensive players. The only thing Morris brought was offensive rebounding. And Dean is a better all-around player than Mabrey.
My hope this offseason is to retain the 5 true freshmen, Dean and of course Skaljac and Byers coming in. That leaves 4 or 5 open scholarships to fill with the portal. A couple big men and a couple wings…we can win the MAC next year.
As a former U.S. Treasury Bank Examiner, I often used statistical analysis to evaluate various aspects of financial institutions, including accounting for statistical outliers using standard deviation, and complex multipage Excel spreadsheets with Pivot Tables.
However, you need to consider what data you are using and whether the outcome is influenced by other factors. For instance, a particular basketball player may have a bad +/- factor but it could be due to usually being on the floor with the 2nd string squad.
I will confess that I am somewhat enamored with the 3 point shot ; however, sometimes you need to use the “Eye Test” or “The Leroy Jethro Gibbs Gut Test”.
In these situations, I think of the famous quote attributed to Mark Twain and/or British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli:
“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics"
The reason his opponent offensive rebounding numbers are so bad is because most of his minutes came early in the season when he was being played as a lone big man with Bultman at the 4. There were so many times where he’d contest a shot at the rim and force a miss, but there’d be nobody there for the defensive rebound and the opponent would get an easy put back. It would be interesting to see it split into conference vs nonconference because I thought he went to a different level defensively once he started playing alongside Mirambeaux or Potter and he had the freedom to be a true rim protector without having to worry about being helpless on the rebound afterwards. He was 7th in the conference in blocks despite only playing limited minutes.
You’re correct that most teams don’t play with a 4 who can’t shoot, but most college teams do still play with a 5 who can’t shoot. There’s no reason you can’t play someone like that at the 4 if you pair them with a stretch 5 like Potter or Mirambeaux so you still have 4 shooters on the court.
But Mirambeaux played a lot with Bultman at the 4 and Anderson’s rebounding stats are much better than Morris’s. So I’m not sure that really holds weight tbh. My eyes saw Jaquel leave his feet A LOT to go for blocks, often leaving a man unmarked around the basket.
Mirambeaux played very little with Bultman at the 4. Once he came back and we went into conference play, we mostly played with either Elmer at the 4 or with two big men so that we’d always have two rebounders out there.
Jivehawk posted the shooting charts showing that teams have gone all in on layups and three pointers. Teams aggressively going for shots at the rim makes rim protectors more valuable than ever. Morris averaged 3.0 blocks per 40, compared to 1.1 for Mirambeaux. Part of utilizing a rim protector is making sure that they aren’t left on an island on the glass so that they can contest shots.
Here are the top 9 lineups used during conference play. Mirambeaux had Bultman at the 4 with almost every lineup (players are ordered by position, then height, Bultman is in the system as a G so shows up at the 3 when Elmer, listed as F, is in). I typically saw Bultman defending the 4 and Mirambeaux defending the 5, allowing Elmer to use his length and athleticism against the other team’s 3.
Mirambeaux played 425 minutes in conference play. The chart you posted shows 102 minutes he played with Bultman at the 4 and 114 minutes he played with someone else at the 4.
You’re misinterpreting what it’s showing. Mirambeaux is in for 7 of the top 9 linupes. Bultman is in there for 6 of those 7. He’s showing up at the 3 because he’s misregistered as a guard in the software, so Elmer, listed as a forward, and Mabrey, listed as the same height but later alphabetically, show up after him. With Ipsaro, Hunter, Bultman, Mabrey, and Mirambeaux, Mabrey did not play the 4. He played the 2, Hunter played the 3, and Bultman played the 4. It’s a software limitation. So this is 198 minutes of him playing with Bultman and 18 minutes of Elmer at the 4 (which should be noted was an awful combination). I can pull each lineup, but it’s almost always Bultman at the 4, except when Elmer played it. And other than that, the next most common 4 for Mirambeaux was Morris.
This is a semantic argument over who’s playing the 3 and who’s playing the 4 when Bultman and Elmer were on the court together.
My point is that a lineup with 3 guards, Bultman, and a big man has only one guy who can get contested rebounds against opposing big men. A lineup with 3 guards, Elmer, and a big man or with 2 guards, Bultman, Elmer, and a big man has two guys who can get contested rebounds against opposing big men.
We played against good competition the last three games. We lost by 59 points combined and were outrebounded by 29 combined.
The argument seems to be that we have this future-leaning, modern style of hoops that’s too complex for us simpletons to understand. We ranked #332 in the country in rebounding with the lineups we played. That’s a problem.
Is rebounding the only thing that matters? Of course not. But of the bottom 30 teams in rebounding (which includes us) 28 of the teams have losing records and 2 have winning records.
