My take based on the play-by-play and stats.
It would be silly to project much from that game for a lot of obvious reasons. Many things went wrong that we know won’t be a nightly problem for this team. Kingsley isn’t going to foul out in 24 minutes or have the line that he did very often. Considering that he has crossed a gazillion time zones in the last week and a half, his performance was not that surprising. I’m pretty sure he and Hannahs won’t combine for 33% from the floor on a regular basis either.
Neither will Arkansas suffer a -20 in FTAs in many games. It happened once last year in that preposterously officiated game in Baton Rouge against the NBA #1-pick. I’m guessing that was some combination of eight guys learning our system, international refs, and home-cooking.
The first half seemed brutal at both ends as we fell behind by, I believe, as much as 16 points. We had only two players, Jones and Hannahs, make a non-layup in the entire half according to the play-by-play. The team settled down and played much better at both ends in the second half. ECC only shot 32% in the second half after being 50%+ for most of the first half. We shot 60%+ in the second half, but 11 TOs contributed to the comeback coming up just short after closing the gap to a single point. That and the FT disparity allowed ECC to hang on.
The biggest positive for me was how Thomas stuffed the stat sheet. For one night at least he looks like a solution at the #4. The frosh Bailey also put a lot of digits in the ledger for abbreviated minutes. Arlando Cook, already written off by some who probably dislocated a knee watching practice, scored 8 points in 13 minutes. Trey Thompson did his usual yeoman work on the boards but took a single shot in 21 minutes. He will probably need to be more of a scoring threat if he wants to start unless the backcourt is shouldering most of the scoring responsibility. In any case this game didn’t discourage the notion that we have options on the baseline this season.
For the guards Manny Watkins played lights out in the second half, which is bad news for the fans that want to relegate him to the end of the bench. He was arguably our top performer on the play-by-play. Macon and Barford seemed to put in some solid work in their debuts with mainly positive contributions. They seemed to be two of our five best, as advertised. I was especially encouraged by Barford’s 5 assists and 3 steals. CJ Jones also had a surprising 5 points and 3 steals in only 4 minutes. He’ll get more minutes if that production continues.
Beard had a bit of a disappointing night, at least on the stat sheet. He led us in minutes but scored only a deuce in 6 FGAs. Perhaps he provided some intangibles. His plus/minus was +8, but he and Thompson can’t start together, play 20+ minutes, and score a bucket between them.
On D we recovered to induce low FG percentages over the whole court and forced a decent 17 TOs. The rebounding was weak, and we fouled a ton. The D would have come out pretty good if the FTAs had looked more normal.
On O we almost managed 50% on deuces after the horrid start but only converted 25% on treys. The TOs were high for us, especially in the second half, but we managed a decent 70% at the line. As at the other end, the rebounding was poor.
Here’s hoping for more boards, fewer TOs, fewer fouls, and more string music in the next outing.
