It’s been a few days (and a BYU victory) since the Cougars got pounded by St. Mary’s in their first WCC contest, 98-82. It still stings. It’s still embarrassing. I hoped I might be able to forget about that sorry excuse for a basketball game if I just didn’t think about it. Wrong-o.
I haven’t been able to shake it, so — in lieu of a traditional recap — here are the three main reasons BYU got run out of Moraga. There are certainly more than three reasons, but these are what I deem to be the biggest ones.
1. Perimeter Defense (Or A Lack Thereof)
Many fans are fond of saying that BYU often winds up having somebody on the opposing team “career” it on them, usually through a barrage of 3-pointers. I’m not saying this isn’t true — many guards have had unusually good games against the Cougars. I won’t dispute that.
My point is this: These performances aren’t all luck.
BYU’s complete inability to effectively guard the perimeter contributes heavily to this epidemic. If you leave a Division I guard wide open enough times, he’s eventually going to make you pay — even, as we learned against the Gaels, if he had previously been shooting a meager 19 percent from deep.
Bottom line? You can’t sit and wonder why teams are setting records from beyond the arc against you when you give them clean looks all night long.
Coach Dave Rose understands this, and he has already identified perimeter defense as a big problem area for his team. The Cougars’ rotations are either slow or completely nonexistent, and any type of ball movement seems to flummox them. Against a good point guard like Matthew Dellavedova, who can penetrate the defense and then make the best possible pass cross-court to an open shooter? Forget about it.
BYU needs to seriously reevaluate how they guard the perimeter. This is the third time they’ve been burned from out there this season — Wisconsin, Baylor, and now St. Mary’s — and there’s no indication that it will significantly improve by itself. It will take a lot of focus and even some big strategic changes, such as…
2. Zone Defense
There are a few good reasons to play a zone defense for an extended period of time — chief among them being when your team is significantly less athletic than the opponent or the opponent is a particularly poor outside-shooting team.
Against St. Mary’s, BYU was the more athletic squad and the other guys were (obviously) red hot from the perimeter. So why in Jimmer’s name were the Cougars in a zone for the vast majority of the game, even once it became clear that the Gaels were lighting it up?
Short answer: I have no earthly idea.
I know Rose likes the zone. I know he thinks it creates more turnovers, which lead to transition baskets. Don’t ask me how it does that, since it is not a particularly aggressive or trapping zone, but that’s the idea. However, that idea did not evidence itself in the real world on Thursday night.
St. Mary’s torched BYU’s 2-3 zone, using snappy ball movement to constantly shift the defense and then capitalized on the Cougars’ slow rotations by making the extra pass to an open shooter. The way Dellavedova and company sliced and diced the BYU zone defense was, in a word, masterful — which is why it’s even more mind-boggling that Rose never really switched out of it.
The Cougars should have been playing the Gaels man-to-man most of that game. They were bigger, stronger, and faster than the home team, giving them a clear advantage in one-on-one matchups. Would that have necessitated giving a few more minutes to a defensive stopper like Anson Winder on Dellavedova? Certainly — Matt Carlino has thus far proven himself to be a defensive liability, and Winder actually had a really good game in his 21 minutes. That’s certainly better than having St. Mary’s rain threes on you all night like fireballs from heaven.
It seems simple to me — if your team can’t rotate to cover shooters quickly enough and the other team is knocking down shots at a prodigious rate, you should probably change up your defensive strategy. Easy, right? For some reason that didn’t happen in Moraga.
I’m not quite sure what Rose’s reasoning was for sticking with the 2-3 as long as he did, but it’s ineffectiveness directly contributed to the Gaels’ 98-point output — and you’re not going to win too many games giving up 98 points. It’s just not a recipe for success.
3. Free Throws
I am not one to whine about referees. I think blaming the zebras is a cheap copout fans use to excuse poor play. And let’s be clear, I am not excusing the Cougars’ poor play, because they were awful.
However, they certainly didn’t get any help from the WCC refs in their maiden voyage.
While the foul disparity wasn’t completely heinous (24-20 in St. Mary’s favor), the Gaels did shoot 14 more free throws than the Cougars —a huge number. It didn’t feel like they pounded it inside any more than BYU did, and points in the paint were knotted at 32 apiece. For whatever reason, the home team just shot more freebies. A lot more. That makes a difference.
Yet, it would be unfair to exonerate BYU on this count. Even though they shot fewer free throws, the Cougars have to make the ones they get. They haven’t done that all year, and their mediocrity continued on Thursday. They shot only 56 percent from the line, leaving 7 free points on the floor.
Dave Rose’s teams have traditionally shot extremely well from the stripe, so this squad’s inability to convert has been puzzling. And while they probably didn’t lose to St. Mary’s because of missed free throws, they definitely could have helped the cause.
Future games will almost certainly turn on whether the Cougars can grab those one or two extra points at the line, and BYU's recent performances haven’t inspired me with great confidence that they will be able to convert when it really matters.
As I said before, there are myriad other reasons why BYU had their butts handed to them in their first conference game. Everybody not named Brandon Davies or Anson Winder played pretty terribly, and it was a depressingly bad performance overall. But despite all that, if the Cougars could have corrected (or even slightly improved) those three things, they still would have been right there at the end — with a chance to win a big road game in a tough environment.
But they didn’t. They failed to convert free throws into free points, they didn’t guard the three, and they stood around and watched their zone get slashed by Dellavedova the Ripper to the tune of 98 points. That’s not how you win ball games, whether it’s St. Mary’s or Gonzaga or the NAIA Scheduling Special of the Week. It’s not good basketball, and this team has too much talent and potential to let it happen again.
And as fans, let us all pray that we never have to watch it again.
Photo: Tod Fierner/St. Mary's
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