One of the cool things about the T-Mobile Center is that press row is courtside on one of the baselines. And, no surprise, sitting courtside for a basketball game is awesome.
Most venues keep the media as far away from the court as humanly possible. And I get it, those seats up close are valuable, whether they’re sold for an exorbitant amount of money or given to the students to torment the opposing team. This is not a knock on how any school arranges its seating chart. It’s more so an appreciation of the handful of times I’ve gotten to see the action from the front row (the ones I remember from last year: the Wichita State road game, the Braggin’ Rights game, the two SEC tournament games and the two NCAA tournament games). You pick up on a lot more when you’re within earshot of the players.
Case in point, during the second half of Mizzou’s game against Seton Hall on Sunday, Noah Carter checked back into the game at the 10:16 mark. The Tigers were trailing the Pirates, 65-49, but had just made a couple of shots to end a long cold spell. Carter was determined to keep the momentum going. As he took to the floor, he walked up to high-five each of his four other teammates, telling them something to the effect of “Right now, it starts right now.” It was the type of leadership you’d expect from a team captain.
Missouri came up with a stop and Sean East II knocked down a 3-pointer at the other end. Seton Hall missed its next shot and Carter came down with the rebound, leading to a layup by East on the next possession. There were still nine minutes on the clock, so a comeback from an 11-point deficit wasn’t incomprehensible.
And then … Pirates head coach Shaheen Holloway called a timeout, Seton Hall went on a 10-2 run to go back up by 19, its largest lead of the game. It could’ve been a really cool moment had the Tigers kept the rally going. But their defense prevented that from happening.
That was probably the biggest surprise of the loss. Through its first 10 games of the year, MU had been solid on that end of the court. It’s not difficult to put into words just how bad it was for the Tigers: it was their worst performance of the season, by far. Aside from the Pirates, the only other team that had scored more than 73 points against Mizzou was Arkansas-Pine Bluff, who lost 101-79 in a high-possession game.
The lack of resistance by the black and gold dropped them dozens of spots in the defensive analytics ratings. Before its game against Seton Hall, Missouri ranked 69th in the country in KenPom’s adjusted defensive efficiency metric. The team now ranks 115th. That seemed like too precipitous of a drop after one contest to believe, so I cross-referenced with another stats site. And sure enough, Bart Torvik had the Tigers 74th defensively before the game and 128th afterward.
The key to Mizzou’s defensive scheme in the games prior was to create chaos throughout the shot clock. D’Moi Hodge always said that his goal was to come up with as many deflections as he could, not steals. And that had been a calling card for the Tigers this year — whether they were blocked shots or tipped passes, they were getting their hands on a high number of balls and made it extremely difficult for their opponent to run a smooth offense.
But that wasn’t the case against the Pirates. MU totaled three blocks, all of them coming from freshmen forwards Jordan Butler and Trent Pierce. And while Seton Hall committed 15 turnovers, just three of them came off of steals by the black and gold, Pierce coming up with one and Jesus Carralero Martin coming up with another. All three players rank outside of the team’s top eight in minutes played this season (in other words, they’re not who you typically expect to lead the way in these specific categories).
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