Busting One Myth...

[bleedbluegold03]

Time after time after losses to better teams this year we have been told that it's hard to measure what Jake and Derrick bring defensively as the main defense to why they play so much. Let's look at the stat sheet for some of the losses:

Semaj Christon went off for 28 (13 over his average)

Cullen Neal busted us for 24 (16 over avg)

Xavier Thames posted 29 (13 above)

Jahii Carson dropped 23 (5 over)

Numbers don't lie...

[TheSultan]

So you are going to cherry pick four performances to come to the conclusion that MU's guards can't play defense? Are you just going to ignore the games where they held defenders under their average?

[Markedman]

Christian had 4 points in 7 minutes in the first half when Derrick went to the bench with the T(that counted for his 2nd foul)....he had 14 the rest of the half.

Those last 2 threes that Christian made were very well defended....sometimes a guy just makes a tough shot...doesn't mean the defender didn't do his job.

If you watched the New Mexico game you can't possibly blame Derrick or Jake for Neal going off......Buzz made the decision to double the post based on the scouting report(Neal had not been making his 3's up until that point in the season).....All of his shots were open looks.....he didn't beat either guy one on one as far as I can recall?

Thames and Carson are great players who had great games.....I believe Derrick sat for a good part of one of those games.

[Nukem2]

So you are going to cherry pick four performances to come to the conclusion that MU's guards can't play defense? Are you just going to ignore the games where they held defenders under their average?

I would not say "Bleed" is cherry-picking here.
Those are 4 of the seven losses. In the other 3, Craft shut Jake down totally while getting 10 points and 10 assists and generally keeping both Jake and Derrick back on their heels defensively. Against the BueJays, Manigat killed MU with 16 points and 6 rebounds ( double his season average ) helping to open things for CU's other trey shooters. Against Wisco, well......... Bottom line is that they have been below "average" against the better teams on the schedule.

[mutpm]

Christon played 35 minutes last night. He scored 13 points in the 14 minutes he was on the floor with Dawson and 15 points in the 21 minutes he was on the floor with Derrick. In the first 16 minutes Derrick played with Christon on the floor, he only had 8 points. The back to back 3's were the killers.

The point here is that it's hard to blame Christon's night on Derrick. Christon got the ball rolling after Derrick went out in the 1st half.

[TheSultan]

I would not say "Bleed" is cherry-picking here.
Those are 4 of the seven losses. In the other 3, Craft shut Jake down totally while getting 10 points and 10 assists and generally keeping both Jake and Derrick back on their heels defensively. Against the BueJays, Manigat killed MU with 16 points and 6 rebounds ( double his season average ) helping to open things for CU's other trey shooters. Against Wisco, well......... Bottom line is that they have been below "average" against the better teams on the schedule.

So what you are telling me is that they have played worse against better teams?

[Nukem2]

So what you are telling me is that they have played worse against better teams?

Don't know that they played worse, but were certainly outplayed...?

[TheSultan]

Don't know that they played worse, but were certainly outplayed...?

So the point of this is that we are outplayed by better teams? Isn't that rather obvious?

[MUBasketball]

I don't get the point of this post. MU is clearly struggling this year, we all know that. Do we have to keep bashing the guards? It's not like Diener and DJO are sitting on the bench in their warmups...what's Buzz supposed to do?

[bleedbluegold03]

I am stating this post to make the point that this backcourt is not strong offensively OR defensively