Used to have an account here and have lurked for 10 or so years now. My thoughts...
Ayo was clearly not himself and had no energy. He got beat backdoor on the same play twice in the first half. He will have to put in more effort to stay in the game at the next level, maybe he can if he’s not shouldering as much of an offensive load. Perhaps his lack of intensity was contagious, although I thought our gameplan on defense was the real issue with no ball pressure. Thanks to Ayo for bringing us back to relevancy.
To me, this one is on the coaches. Poor game plan defensively and poor (zero) adjustments throughout the game. On the other hand, Loyola’s coaches had a perfect gameplan and clearly scouted us for weaknesses and exposed them. The games that Ayo has struggled this year have all been when teams jump the ball screen and trap. Ayo then seems to pick up the dribble and has a hard time finding the open man. They also studied our defense and realized that Kofi never comes out of the paint or applies any pressure on the ball. Obviously, having him in the paint to defend the basket is ideal, but Loyola took full advantage by using the area around the free throw line and top of the key to set up Krutwig and run cutters off of him. Because of the scheme of sitting Kofi in the paint, we always chase the ball handler over the top of the screen, to try to prevent the three and funnel the ball to the basket. Loyola’s strategy was to run the guy that would eventually get the ball off of and off ball screen and then Krutwig, which meant we would consistently lose contact and the guy would be getting the handoff and needing only one dribble to get to the hoop. Kofi then has a 2 on 1 to defend way too often.
This should be a good lesson to develop a zone defense and play it every once in a while so you can go to it if you need, because this offense certainly wouldn’t work against a zone.
My issue with Underwood and staff has always been that they are slow to adjust. 5 B1G games into Underwood’s first season, it was obvious that the over-aggressive style of defense was not going to work and we were just allowing backdoors and resulting layups or open threes way too consistently. It took a full two seasons before the change was finally made. Underwood now gets all sorts of credit for changing defensive schemes, but it never should have taken so long. Another example is being very set in his ways with rotations and matchups. Although we are limited somewhat at the PF position and he did make Grandison the starter (good move), we still play small vs teams more often than I would like. Maybe it’s roster construction, but it’s something I hope we don’t continue if we have serviceable and non undersized PFs. Finally, BU seems to have decided that Ayo-TF-Curbelo-DMW-Kofi is his closing lineup, rather than going with who’s playing well. Miller scored a couple buckets to keep us close and then gets taken out of the game (as usual) with 4 minutes to go to put in Trent. Miller was impacting the game more and should have been kept in, although it probably doesn’t change the outcome.
So, I hope that this is a lesson for the staff to have counters to the game plan. If the other team is trapping the pick and roll and we are struggling with it, let a player of Ayo’s caliber go one on one. Or, something that would have worked that we never tried was to drive towards the wing defender and cut backdoor with the guy the wing was defending. Every time that we did drive the wing defender would stop the penetration, but the separation to the shooter that would get the ball was not much and they could close out. If we would have cut when they came up to stop penetration, we get some easy backdoor layups. Or just run straight post ups Kofi more and teach him how to pass to the open man when he’s doubled.
Defensively I already stated that we should have tried zone, but we also should have adjusted to the screens and not followed shooters but instead ran underneath (run underneath to give up a 2 point jump shot instead of a layup, whereas our standard scheme is to trail to prevent the 3 and force a 2 point jumper or a Kofi contest at the rim). Very disappointing when these things were very apparent to many of us in the first half and we are too set in our ways to change scheme in the second half at all on either end.
