Pulse of the Team - Texas Tech Basketball :: Week of 12.21.09
by Seth C on Dec 26, 2009 8:00 AM CST
in Texas Tech Basketball
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The "Pulse of the Team" is a weekly or whenever-I-get-to-it post about the state of the team, what's going well and what isn't. The Pulse of the Team looks at the week that was, the week ahead, what's trending up, what's trending down and the current player impact, courtesy of StatSheet.
Last Week:
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Wichita St. Shockers: L : 83-85 : Box Score
This Week:
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Stanford Cardinal : W : 100-87 : Box Score
Shaking Off a Loss: There's always the fear that a loss can and will affect how a team will play in the subsequent game and I honestly had that fear going into the Stanford game. We haven't necessarily seen this team be tested this year, and I think the team responded nicely. Sure, the game against Stanford got a bit sloppy, especially on the defensive end towards the end of the game, but the team put forth good effort and the defensive effort to start the second half seemed to spur the team on both ends of the court. I think it's also nice to think that this team has already had a fairly significant break from basketball to take their finals and I'm hoping that this second break plays in Texas Tech's favor as they may be more able to adjust to the break and be ready to come back against New Mexico.
Losing Some Defense: Over the past two games, the Red Raiders have given up 85 and 87 points. According to KenPom, the Red Raiders are currently 69th in adjusted defensive efficiency, while it wasn't so long ago that Texas Tech was holding steady in the 40's. With better competition comes the challenge of playing each and every possession defensively and I'd still like for this to be the mark of this team, defense first and offense second. I think there will be a tendency for this team to creep back to relying on the offense, especially because the offense has been very good of late. With that being said, it's the defense that's allowed for this team to only have one loss thus far this year and I'd love it if PK really forced this team to get back to playing each and every possession defensively, especially against New Mexico.
Turnovers . . . Trying Not to Beat a Dead Horse: I'll do my best not to make a bigger deal of of this than I need to, but the turnovers against Wichita St., particularly Mike Singletary's nine turnovers for the game, were incredibly discerning. Singletary has always been a bit careless with the ball, evidenced by the fact that he's always on the negative side of assist to turnover ratio and he's always had a fairly high turnover ratio, but this year, it's the worse it's been sitting at 23.7% for the year (he also leads the team with 37 turnovers for the year). And as soon as Singletary has one of the worst turnover games of his career, he goes out against Stanford and dishes out three assists and zero turnovers, which probably frustrates me even more. What this team, at least to me, is that Singletary is more than capable of having a positive impact for the team in terms of turnovers to assists, but I tend to think that this may be a concentration issue with Singletary. Obviously, Singletary deserves a ton of praise for his effort against Stanford, but this should be the norm, rather than the exception.
Courtesy of StatSheet:
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Here is a perspective on TTU's Turnovers
Speaking to the continued focus on the 9 TO game by Singletary, one might consider that it is clearly a statisical anomaly. TO’s by game: 1, 5, 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 2, 2, 9, 0. The 2nd highest game is 5, the second game of the season, and this 9 TO game is the single game in which any ref has called him for walking on his jab step, that occured at least 3 times to my memory and maybe more. The simple average is 3.36.
When it is accepted that the occurrance is an anomaly a different picture can be realized. Rather than focus on the event, normalize it to an average had the game been played in view of a different ref…in other words give Singletary some benefit for wanting to improve his game. The ‘normalized’ list becomes: 1, 5, 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2.8, 0. The normalized number is the average before the 9 TO game. When the average is normalized, one can see that the trend for Singletary’s TO’s is an improving trend from 3.8 to 1.6 for the season.
These are TO’s by player per 40 minutes played:
Singletary: 4
Cohadarevic: 4
Okorie: 4
Roberston: 3
Turnovers are an important offensive stat. There are four guys who statistically show great opportunity to improve.
Both Cohadarevic and Roberson’s TO rates by game are trending up. The rate of increase for Roberson is alarming as it trends from 1.6 to 3.4 over this season.
As for the women
According to the Tech official sports site:
“Texas Tech (10-1) heads to New Orleans for the Tulane DoubleTree Classic Dec. 28-29. The Lady Raiders play North Dakota (3-8) in the second game on Mon., Dec. 28, at 8 p.m., at Fogelman Arena.”
As many of you recall, the football team played an inspired but overmaster team of Fighting Sioux at the start of this year. The Sioux fan base is one that is great to deal with as they have been friendly, with none that I know of who would trash another team. The NDSU fan base, however is not as nice. Some of us DTNers have been following the Sioux football team this year, cheering them on. However, as much as I do like their determination and friendliness, I want our Lady Red Raider basketballers to win big in the “Big Easy” this week, including against the Lady Fighting Sioux. GO TECH!
The men do need to regain their focus of playing good defensive basketball. As said above, the Singletary turnovers against WSU were very out of the ordinary. I agree that the ref was, for some reason, calling Singletary too tightly when he whistled Mike for traveling so many times, and therefore the game turnovers were nothing but an anomaly. Mike is careless sometimes, but the rest of his game can be awesome enough to discount those few turnovers. The person, I think, that needs to be more concerned about turning the ball over too much would have to be Roberson, although he does probably handle the ball the most of all Red Raiders. At any rate, they and the Ladies are playing well above where either was expected to be playing. I look forward to the Big-12 conference match-ups as Tech is beginning to play well together, which should translate into a winning record in the conference, thus an NCAA tourney bid.
TTpilk
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