A new Rauf Report looks at why two teams are surging, two teams are struggling and the impact of Liam McNeeley’s injury on UConn.
We’re getting to the fun part of the sports calendar where, with less football games on the calendar, college basketball is taking center stage during the week. Sure, playoff football at both the college and professional ranks reign supreme, but college hoops is next on the docket before its post-Super Bowl close up.
We’re also firmly into conference play and the first few weeks of that have been enlightening. Some teams are being exposed as “pretenders” following perhaps inflated non-conference slates, while others are rounding into form and look like surprise conference title contenders.
Duke doesn’t fall into either category. The Blue Devils looked great in non-conference play despite their two losses and have only continued to improve. A 76-47 victory over Pitt on Tuesday made it clear why Jon Scheyer’s squad is the odds-on favorite to win the ACC, as the Panthers are potentially the second-best team in that league.
It was the kind of win that made two significant statements to the rest of the ACC and to the country. First, Duke’s defense is legit. The Blue Devils lead the nation in adjusted defensive efficiency, per KenPom, thanks to their unique combination of size, length and athleticism. The numbers this group is putting up on that end of the floor are the best the sport has seen in three seasons and, as Scheyer said postgame, they don’t feel like they’ve hit their ceiling on that end of the court.
Star freshman Cooper Flagg is (obviously) such a big part of that. In that game against Pitt, he put together the greatest second-half performance I’ve ever seen – to the point I called him the best player I’ve ever seen live. He decided he wanted to take over after a pedestrian first half and took over after the break, recording 14 points, seven rebounds and five assists in the final 20 minutes.
He also put down perhaps the best dunk of the year.
Auburn is widely thought of as being the best team in the country, and I don’t disagree with that. But Duke – who beat the Tigers at Cameron Indoor earlier this season – very much belongs in that tier above everyone else.
Here’s what else we learned this week:
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Arizona’s turnaround is legitimate
Arizona’s 4-5 start was marred by several disappointing losses, one of which being to that Duke team in a game where the Wildcats simply didn’t look competitive. Tommy Lloyd’s squad has also lost starting big man Motiejus Krivas for the season with a foot injury, so no one will blame you if you wrote this team off.
Well, the Wildcats have really found themselves of late.
They’re on a five-game winning streak since falling to UCLA on Dec. 14, and that includes a perfect 3-0 start in Big 12 play. Convincing road victories over Cincinnati and West Virginia in the last week have both served as indicators that this turnaround is legitimate, too. The Wildcats have found their rhythm offensively and are playing much more like your typical Tommy Lloyd-coached team, and we’ve seen a slight uptick on the defensive end as well.
“Our defense is there, it’s right there,” Lloyd told reporters after the West Virginia win on Tuesday. “Against TCU we didn’t have a great stretch. We’re finding when we take care of the ball, and we don’t give up runouts, our defense is pretty good in the halfcourt. And then obviously rebound, we’re no different than any other team.”
The Wildcats return home for a game against UCF on Saturday with two real tests looming – home against Baylor on Tuesday and at Texas Tech next weekend. Victories in those games will announce that Arizona is back to being the team we thought they would be in the preseason.
These last five games have shown us that we should expect that from Arizona, too.
Troubling outlook for Cincinnati
The outlook for Cincinnati isn’t anywhere near as sunny. A 10-1 start for the Bearcats saw them ranked as high as No. 14 in the AP poll, and they were one of the top teams in the country from an analytical standpoint.
But then Big 12 play hit and Wes Miller’s squad has been an absolute mess.
Cincinnati is 0-3 in league play, the latest coming in a 20-point loss at a Baylor team some thought was on the same level/tier as the Bearcats. Turns out, that was not the case. It has left this team facing a crucial crossroads in its season with Kansas coming to town for a showdown on Saturday.
“I guess you do have two choices,” head coach Wes Miller told reporters. “You can either deal with it the right way, which is to pay it absolutely no mind and focus on what we got to do, or you can handle it the wrong way and let it affect you. I can tell you what we’re going to do. I’ll tell everybody. You can say as many bad things as you want about our team and our players and our coaches as you want on social media, I ain’t gonna listen to it. I got no time for it.
“We’re a good team. We’ve been a good team. We will be a good team. So we’re gonna get back to work on doing all the things we have to do to get back on track. We’re gonna handle that part the right way. We ain’t gonna pay any damn mind to it.”
However, it may behoove Miller to pay some mind to it. Cincinnati has been fine on the defensive end of the floor and currently sit 11th nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency, per KenPom. The offense, on the other hand, ranks 81st – and ranks outside the top 200 against top-50 opponents.
Those are the games where Cincinnati’s lack of dynamic perimeter playmakers has come back to bite them. Jizzle James hasn’t had the breakout that was expected and Simas Lukosius hasn’t been anywhere near as efficient against teams that have the athleticism to keep him in check. Those guys were two of the biggest drivers of success earlier in the season and both are no longer performing at that level.
If Miller is unable to get the offense back on track in the next few weeks, Cincinnati is in danger of missing the NCAA Tournament again.
Dayton’s recent slide is putting at-large NCAAT bid at risk
Dayton is in danger of facing the same fate, something that would’ve been outlandish to think just a few months ago. After all, the Flyers boast a stellar non-conference resume that includes victories over Northwestern, UConn and Marquette to go along with no bad losses.
But that third loss – to Cincinnati on a neutral court – may have been a tipping point in the wrong direction for this group.
Dayton has now lost three of its last four games, including two conference games this week to George Washington and UMass. Those were the first losses outside of Quad 1 that the Flyers had suffered this season, and the UMass loss is a potentially catastrophic Q4 defeat.
Anthony Grant’s squad has been worse across the board these last two weeks, but the offense has gone from being one of the nation’s best to being one of the worst. BartTorvik.com’s T-Rank has Dayton ranked outside the top 200 nationally for their play since Dec. 20 (when it lost to Cincinnati).
As good as the A10 is this season, there are limited opportunities for Dayton to really improve its resume. There are currently two Q1 opportunities remaining (at St. Bonaventure, at VCU) and 10 games classified as either Q3 or Q4 games. Some of those games are against quality opponents that are capable of beating the Flyers – and Dayton’s recent play means they have virtually no margin for error if it wants an at-large bid. That margin has already been used up.
Liam McNeeley’s impact for UConn
Dayton’s win over UConn came at the Maui Invitational, which was the only place the Huskies had lost a game this season until they fell to Villanova on Wednesday. That loss came without Liam McNeeley who suffered a high-ankle sprain in UConn’s win over DePaul on New Year’s day.
The star freshman also missed a comeback win over Providence on Sunday, and UConn’s performances in that game and the Villanova loss have showcased how much McNeeley means to this team. The Huskies have their net offensive rating cut in half when he’s off the court and their defense is significantly worse.
Take a look at McNeeley’s on/off splits, per Hoop Explorer:
I wrote in a Rauf Report last month about how UConn’s defensive improvement was fueling its turnaround after those Maui struggles, but that unit has regressed in the last two games without McNeeley. His replacements in the lineup – Aidan Mahaney, Jayden Ross, Jaylin Steward and more minutes for Solo Ball – are the four worst individual defenders in UConn’s rotation, per EvanMiya.com. McNeeley, on the other hand, is the team’s best defender.
Given that McNeeley is supposed to miss “weeks” with the sprain, it’s on the coaching staff to massage a way around these shortcomings until McNeeley returns. With Georgetown and Creighton on tap for the Huskies next two games, that will be no small feat.
Texas A&M is a true second half team
I’ll be honest – Texas A&M has always been a strange team to me under head coach Buzz Williams. It typically struggles to shoot and has turned it over at a high rate, yet its defense and rebounding prowess are more than enough to make up for it.
The Aggies are following the same formula this season and are doing it better than it ever has under Williams. They’re 13-2 with four Quad 1 victories and are on a nine-game win streak that has extended into conference play, where they’ve beaten both Texas and Oklahoma.
Those two SEC games have highlighted Texas A&M’s ability to dominate in the second half of games.
The Aggies were tied with Texas at halftime and ended up winning by 20 points as it limited the Longhorns to just six made baskets in the second half. They then trailed Oklahoma by as many as 18 points early in the second half only to come back and win in the final seconds.
“In many respects, they beat us from start to finish,” Williams said about Oklahoma following the game. “But I do think that the character of our guys and the relationships that they have with one another – they just hung around. I do not think that they ever dropped their heads. They were very accountable to one another and to what we were trying to do, and we were very fortunate to win.”
The second half outbursts have been a theme for the Aggies. They average 5.3 ppg more after the break than they do in the first half. Their scoring margin in the second half (+8.0 ppg) ranks in the top 20 in the country. That’s a testament to the adjustments made by Williams and his staff, the toughness of this group and their ability to wear down opponents.
It’s something that could be the difference for them in March, too, as Texas A&M is now 5-1 in games decided by five points or less. It needs to be careful to not fall behind as big early as it did against the Sooners, but very few leads are safe against these Aggies.
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