COLUMBIA, Mo. — Where will Missouri men’s basketball’s lifeline come from?
The Tigers need one, sitting at 0-8 in Southeastern Conference play after losing to Arkansas at home Wednesday in a game that was much more lopsided than the final score suggested. A Saturday trip to Vanderbilt is winnable again, but no positive results are even remotely guaranteed for Mizzou these days.
“We have to be participants in our own rescue,†MU coach Dennis Gates said after the defeat to the Razorbacks, swapping his usual reserved optimism for something more urgent and critical.
The agency that the Tigers have when it comes to snagging an SEC win suggests some sort of change will be necessary. And against South Carolina last weekend, Mizzou and its coaching staff made an interesting one.
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Missouri shot only eight 3-pointers against the Gamecocks, by far the fewest attempted in a game this season. The previous team low had been 16 3-point attempts against Florida, and Gates entered the season wanting his team to be among the nation’s most prolific at letting shots fly from beyond the arc, so averaging one try from 3-point range every four minutes marked a significant departure from the status quo.
“It’s sometimes what the defense gives you,†Gates said, “and I thought our guys were able to capitalize on paint touches which is obviously a strength in terms of what we wanted to do in that game.â€
Paint touches. They’re an interesting metric in basketball — not the same as points in the paint, since a paint touch could lead to a basket, a foul, a kick out to the perimeter — and not publicly tracked.
Per Mizzou’s analytics staff, the team registered a paint touch on slightly more than 31 half-court possessions per SEC game entering Wednesday night’s loss to Arkansas, which was hardly competitive enough for long stretches to produce particularly meaningful analytics.
But against South Carolina, MU got the ball to the paint on 35 of its half-court possessions, increasing the flow of offense to that part of the floor while pumping the brakes on perimeter shots.
“That gives us opportunities to get foul calls and different things like that,†Gates said. “I thought we did increase, but not enough, that situation. I thought our guys were able to get 40 points in the paint which is really, really an indicator of how aggressive you are. But we still lost and missed some quick and easy shots in the paint in those last three, four minutes that I thought could have allowed us to win the game.â€
Those 35 possessions produce an interesting comparison with the 12 half-court possessions in which the Tigers did not get the ball into the paint. They scored 31 points on the paint possessions and nine on the others, which translated to 0.886 points per possession with a paint touch and 0.75 points per possession otherwise.
Both numbers are a bit below Mizzou’s typical half-court offensive production, which has sat at 0.893 points per possession in SEC games, regardless of whether there’s a paint touch, per Synergy. (Statistics services often differ slightly in what they consider to be half-court or transition possessions, so this number likely looks a bit different for various analysts.)
The slightly decreased efficiency across the board tracks for a game that saw MU score only 64 points and receive the ball less often — South Carolina’s style favors a slower-paced game.
In addition to creating more points, Mizzou’s possessions with a paint touch also led to fewer turnovers. Five giveaways on the paint touch possessions meant the Tigers turned over the ball 14 percent of the time when moving the ball through that part of the floor. Four of the 12 possessions without a paint touch led to turnovers, though, a 33 percent clip that may be inflated because of situations in which the Gamecocks stole the ball before MU had a chance to get it into the paint.
The Tigers have turned the ball over on 18.8 percent of half-court possessions in their last three games, with the South Carolina game representing their best run of ball security in that span, perhaps a sign of the paint touches’ impact.
The Gamecocks at times eviscerated Missouri with drive-and-kick offense, dribbling the ball into the paint and collapsing MU’s defense before passing back out to a freshly opened shooter on the perimeter. The Tigers didn’t adopt the same style, attempting only two 3-pointers on half-court possessions without a paint touch. Their only made 3s of the game, interestingly, came in transition. But getting paint touches is a tactical door that could open up for Mizzou moving forward through SEC play.
“You got to be able to read the right shots but also be able to spray out to open guys,†Gates said. “That’s going to be one of the things that we have to understand.â€