Season Opener Survery

[youwouldno]

Most would be awful because their guys can’t do anything else. If they could, they would. We don’t want to be in that boat, do we? I don’t see what is controversial about suggesting a balanced offense like the top teams use if we want to be a top team. I’m confident Coach is moving in that direction.

Yeah, if only Coach Richey had thought to recruit Vernon Carey, the Paladins would have such a balanced offense. Quite the oversight on his part.

[Paul C]

gawd it's so nice to be arguing about something that matters for a change....

I heard Marcus Foster has a modest injury he's dealing with. Not sure if he's out tomorrow afternoon but if he doesn't play, that's why...(pre-empting any speculation)

[Furmanoid]

Most would be awful because their guys can’t do anything else. If they could, they would. We don’t want to be in that boat, do we? I don’t see what is controversial about suggesting a balanced offense like the top teams use if we want to be a top team. I’m confident Coach is moving in that direction.

Yeah, if only Coach Richey had thought to recruit Vernon Carey, the Paladins would have such a balanced offense. Quite the oversight on his part.

Oh, and by the way, of the teams on my list 12 of 25 crack the top 200 in offensive rebounds and only 4 crack the top 100. So improving the rebounding will be difficult.

[youwouldno]

Oh, and by the way, of the teams on my list 12 of 25 crack the top 200 in offensive rebounds and only 4 crack the top 100. So improving the rebounding will be difficult.

I actually (indirectly) asked Richey about this in the "Q&A" episode of the basketball podcast. He seems to think they can improve in that area despite the offensive scheme. We'll see.

[CharlieFU]

Lots easier to find players who fit our style of play than a more “balanced” offense. And the balance people talk about is definitely not the trend. I absolutely love the way we play. Every player has to be able to run the court. Even the “big” guys.

Would I like to see a big strong post player rebound the hell out of it? Sure. But we are having great success otherwise. With players like Acox and Rafferty we have done quite well.

Let the games begin!

[Fork457]

I’m curious to see if we still rely heavily on 3’s without any really good 3 point shooters. Hopefully we’ll either up our percentage or shoot fewer 3’s. For the last couple of years it seemed like every game I watched we were having an off night from 3 (which indicates they aren’t really off nights). That’s how you lose to people you shouldn’t lose to.

That's not how things work. For starters, as apaladin pointed out, the team's 3-point numbers were actually good last year, which was the case in 2019 also. But that's only part of the story. The Paladins' offense uses the *threat* of the 3-pointer to open up space for high-% 2-point shots. Here is Furman's national rank in 2-point FG% by year under Richey:

2018: 9th
2019: 7th
2020: 4th

That's out of around 350 teams. Furman's main offensive weakness was offensive rebounding, with mediocre free throw shooting and too many steals allowed being other drawbacks. Even so, the Paladins had one of the most potent offenses of any mid-major (and #78 among all programs).

We were #80 in percentage but #21 in attempts. Duke was #79 and #251. So Coach K said, “We aren’t great at 3’s so let’s not depend on them.” We used the opposite philosophy. We’ve had players in the past near the top 10 in attempts who were unranked in percentage. I assume it was because we had no option.So I still say if you have one of the most 3-dependent programs in D1, you need to shoot a lot better (unless just having a shot at the SoCon championship is the goal). I suspect that our 2 percentage is helped by having an usually high percentage of 2’s coming from break aways rather from the offense.

I admit I’m a stick in the mud and yearn for the Mayes- Leonard days when you could be ice cold and it didn’t matter.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics and analytics. I assume you could agree that it doesn’t matter if the points come from 2 or 3, we simply want to score as much as possible. The metric to look at that shows how well you shoot the ball is effective field goal percentage. This is the answer to what we’re talking about because it shows a teams field goal percentage adjusting for the fact that 3 is worth more than 2. Furman is 16th in the country in that stat so you’re simply wrong that we take too many threes. You also don’t understand that the more threes you attempt the more you would expect a teams percentage to dip so our 3 point percentage being so high while attempting that many is extremely impressive. It is also straight up incorrect that we “don’t really have any good shooters”, Clay Mounce and Noah Gurley both shot 40% from three last year and hunter and Bothwell were both in the upper 30s. Our philosophy of spreading the floor with 5 players that can shoot and looking for assisted threes or close twos makes us one of the best Shooting teams in the country. Your explanation for why our 2 point percentage is so high again shows you don’t understand statistics. We actually don’t get very many fast break points compared to most teams, we just take really smart shots and have an excellent offensive system. It’s not as simple as saying we shoot too many threes with no reasoning behind it and not understanding Furman’s system.

[The Jackal]

I’m curious to see if we still rely heavily on 3’s without any really good 3 point shooters. Hopefully we’ll either up our percentage or shoot fewer 3’s. For the last couple of years it seemed like every game I watched we were having an off night from 3 (which indicates they aren’t really off nights). That’s how you lose to people you shouldn’t lose to.

That's not how things work. For starters, as apaladin pointed out, the team's 3-point numbers were actually good last year, which was the case in 2019 also. But that's only part of the story. The Paladins' offense uses the *threat* of the 3-pointer to open up space for high-% 2-point shots. Here is Furman's national rank in 2-point FG% by year under Richey:

2018: 9th
2019: 7th
2020: 4th

That's out of around 350 teams. Furman's main offensive weakness was offensive rebounding, with mediocre free throw shooting and too many steals allowed being other drawbacks. Even so, the Paladins had one of the most potent offenses of any mid-major (and #78 among all programs).

We were #80 in percentage but #21 in attempts. Duke was #79 and #251. So Coach K said, “We aren’t great at 3’s so let’s not depend on them.” We used the opposite philosophy. We’ve had players in the past near the top 10 in attempts who were unranked in percentage. I assume it was because we had no option.So I still say if you have one of the most 3-dependent programs in D1, you need to shoot a lot better (unless just having a shot at the SoCon championship is the goal). I suspect that our 2 percentage is helped by having an usually high percentage of 2’s coming from break aways rather from the offense.

I admit I’m a stick in the mud and yearn for the Mayes- Leonard days when you could be ice cold and it didn’t matter.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics and analytics. I assume you could agree that it doesn’t matter if the points come from 2 or 3, we simply want to score as much as possible. The metric to look at that shows how well you shoot the ball is effective field goal percentage. This is the answer to what we’re talking about because it shows a teams field goal percentage adjusting for the fact that 3 is worth more than 2. Furman is 16th in the country in that stat so you’re simply wrong that we take too many threes. You also don’t understand that the more threes you attempt the more you would expect a teams percentage to dip so our 3 point percentage being so high while attempting that many is extremely impressive. It is also straight up incorrect that we “don’t really have any good shooters”, Clay Mounce and Noah Gurley both shot 40% from three last year and hunter and Bothwell were both in the upper 30s. Our philosophy of spreading the floor with 5 players that can shoot and looking for assisted threes or close twos makes us one of the best Shooting teams in the country. Your explanation for why our 2 point percentage is so high again shows you don’t understand statistics. We actually don’t get very many fast break points compared to most teams, we just take really smart shots and have an excellent offensive system. It’s not as simple as saying we shoot too many threes with no reasoning behind it and not understanding Furman’s system.

This would also explain why our "offensive weakness" is rebounding.

Modern basketball emphasizes more floor spacing. Many teams - like Furman - want their bigs to stretch defenses out on the perimeter. Of course, that puts your best rebounders further away from the basket.

Richey may have addressed this, but I think the ability to get back on defense and limit fast breaks is more valuable than trying to go for the offensive rebound. So, I don't know if it is that we are a bad offensive rebounding team so much as we don't emphasize it.

[Furmanoid]

I mistakenly relied on NCAA. Com stats thinking they might be correct. They rank 90 players for 3 point percentage going down Caleb Hunter of Miss. Valley State with 27.8%. They don’t show any FU players above that. All I can figure is that Mounce didn’t have enough attempts. Two FU players certainly did (one of them was 51 in attempts) and fell below 27.8%. I’m all for Mounce taking more threes. He isn’t the problem.

That effective fg% is an interesting stat. Lots of people use it to justify shooting bunches of threes but if you look at the leaders, they don’t necessarily do that. BYU and Creighton have top 50 three point shooters but they still only rank 62 and 64 in attempts. The best of the high efg% are Dayton (186 in 3 attempts) and Gonzaga (230 in 3 attempts).

It looks like Kentucky, FSU, UVA, Duke etc need to get with the program on effective field goal percentage since their numbers are lackluster.

[youwouldno]

This would also explain why our "offensive weakness" is rebounding.

Modern basketball emphasizes more floor spacing. Many teams - like Furman - want their bigs to stretch defenses out on the perimeter. Of course, that puts your best rebounders further away from the basket.

Richey may have addressed this, but I think the ability to get back on defense and limit fast breaks is more valuable than trying to go for the offensive rebound. So, I don't know if it is that we are a bad offensive rebounding team so much as we don't emphasize it.

That's what I had thought, but Richey pretty clearly said that wasn't the case . . . he wants to get more offensive rebounds within the existing scheme. Last year, the Paladins were slightly below average in defensive rebounding, so that tends to indicate that it's in part a personnel issue. Not really a surprise considering that the Paladins are undersized in the front court.

It does seem that size and physicality have been a point of emphasis in recruiting for several years now, so I would expect defensive and offensive rebounding to improve over time.

[Furmanoid]

I would imagine there are specific drills for O rebounding 3’s since it is an entirely different deal than rebounding soft midrange 2’s. You’re starting out 20+ ft from the hoop instead of right under it and the ball is bouncing way further out. There are only a few teams that seem to be good at it. But boy if you do get really good at it you get second chance 3’s which can be deadly. That might be what he’s thinking.

That Hien kid got 5 bounds and went 8-8 from the field. Hope he can keep that up.

[furpop16]

What three things are you most looking forward to in the new season?

I'll answer by adjusting the question a bit. Here are three areas of improvement I'm looking forward to:
1. Rebound Margin. Last year our margin was -3. Last in SoCon and 300th in the country.
2. Field Goal Defense. 2019-20 our opponents shot 43.7%. 6th in SoCon and 221st in the country.
3. Free-throw %age. Last season we shot 70.1%. 7th in SoCon and 207th in the country.

So with two games in, how're we doing so far?
1. Rebound Margin: +12
2. Field Goal Defense: 38.9%
3. Free-throw %age: 79.3%

So far, so good. Go Paladins!

[Furmanoid]

Free throws are massively important. Two key players have gone from the 60’s to 100% so far. I hope that means they did the work and fixed the problem. 6of 6 and 8 of 8 over 2 games looks good. Another guy is shooting 0% for another team.

[FurmAlum]

Free throws are massively important. Two key players have gone from the 60’s to 100% so far. I hope that means they did the work and fixed the problem. 6of 6 and 8 of 8 over 2 games looks good. Another guy is shooting 0% for another team.

Mounce looks like he has worked on his FT shooting. Has added a little more arc in his shot. Hunter,too. Bothwell looks automatic from the line. Hope they can keep it up.