RE: 2014-15 Basketball Stats
For the sake of this discussion, here is part of what I wrote back in the TULSA thread. This includes the part about the bench scoring:
My opinion was that at the end of the season, our biggest problem (other than a lack of defense) was that our bench just flat out disappeared. That disappearance led to a lot of the other problems we encountered. The production we had gotten earlier just dried up when the bright lights came on (end of the season, playoffs, tourney).
The shooters, coming off the bench, lost that touch of earlier in the season and the defenders did not defend as well as was needed. That was never more evident than in the Hofstra game, when we got only 36 minutes of bench help and the entire group went a total of 1 for 1, 2 points, from the field for the whole game. That was mostly because no one, who played coming off the bench, ever looked like they were really comfortable out there. That put more pressure on the starters to play extended minutes, especially critical in a tournament situation. The results were evident the next night.
In the last four contests of the year, the Tribe bench supplied a total of 170 minutes of game time out of a possible 850 minutes (10 minutes of OT). In that time they scored 29 total points. To make matters worse, 15 of those points were by Tom Schalk (in 65 minutes of playing time), so the youngsters scored 14 points over 4 games, or 3.5 points per game (or .13 points per minute played). Your bench accumulating 3.5 ppg (0.13 ppm) won't cut it very often.
You can chalk a lot of the end of the season bench slump up to youth, inexperience and hitting the proverbial "freshman wall", but it is still a concern.
The youth and inexperience thing may be our biggest concern again next season. We are still going to be very young.
Again, in my opinion, Tot and Schlotman have to get better at running the offense and seeing the floor, Malinowski and Burchfield have to get better on D and Whitman has got to get some confidence...and about 15 more pounds.
I have added the points per minute that TiTB mentioned to the above. It is still not pretty, anyway you look at it.
The silver lining here is that Freshmen Do become Sophomores and tend to have more confidence than they did in year one, but to continue our upward trek, that really does need to happen.
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