Senior night at Chaifetz Arena, as the socially distanced crowd rings in March by bidding farewell to Jordan Goodwin, Hasahn French, Josh Hightower, and Javonte Perkins. Hold the phone…
Perkins is coming back for more. He and Hargrove should be a dynamic pair of scorers on the wings next year.
But still work to be done in this strange season. UMass handed SLU its last A-10 loss last season, and will look to play spoiler again as the Bills try to fight their way back to bubble contention. These Minutemen are young and box out well, and are yet another A-10 team that excels in defensive Free Throw % (#7 per Kenpom.com at 64.4%). The A-10 sports the 28th best (i.e. one of the worst) FT% overall so perhaps I should quell my surprise that all these teams are good at FT defense.
And in 6’9″ Tre Mitchell, the sixty-second men have another shot-blocking big man for French to wrestle in the low post. Wichita St transfer Noah Fernandes runs the point and Carl Pierre launches threes, not terribly effectively (31% on the year). Javohn Garcia seems to be their leader in perimeter defense, getting steals, blocking shots, and cleaning up the defensive boards. Last year’s hero Dibaji Walker is out for the rest of the season with a wrist injury.
Perk and Goodwin were particularly good the last times these teams met. French and JBJ….not so much. Maybe with Walker out of the way Linssen and French can make hay against Mitchell and Gasperini.
References
Data from Basketball Reference and Ken Pomeroy and the NCAA
Game Score metric created by John Hollinger detailed here: http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/glossary.html
Plot format by Aaron Baggett: https://baseballwithr.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/conceptualizing-the-mlb-strike-zone-using-pitchfx-data/
Inspiration from Ken Pomeroy: http://kenpom.com/
Inspiration from Rock M Nation: http://www.rockmnation.com/missouri-tigers-basketball
Team colors courtesy:
Benjamin S. Baumer and Gregory J. Matthews (2020). teamcolors: Color Palettes for Pro Sports Teams. R package version 0.0.4.