Texas

Tuesday, January 9th, 2024
7:00 PM
Fifth Third Arena
ESPN+

Three days after starting their Big 12 adventure against a conference newcomer in BYU, the Bearcats (12-2, 1-0 Big 12, NET #24, KenPom #27) welcome a Texas (11-3, 0-1 Big 12, NET #60, KenPom #39) team to town that is on a Big 12 farewell tour before joining the SEC in the Fall of 2024.

The Longhorns started their final league campaign on a disappointing note with a 78-67 loss to in-state rival Texas Tech this past Saturday. Despite limiting the Red Raiders to just two offensive rebounds, Texas allowed their opponents to shoot 53% from the field and 47% from 3 on their home court.

Texas is led by 2nd-year head coach Rodney Terry, who took over for Chris Beard early last season after Beard was arrested on domestic violence charges that would later be dropped. Terry would go on to lead the Longhorns to their first Elite Eight appearance since 2008 as a 5 seed in the 2023 NCAA tournament.

This year's team is led by 6'1 5th-year guard Max Abmas (17.2 ppg, 4.4 apg), who scored 2,561 points at Oral Roberts before grad transferring to Texas last offseason. He's supported in the backcourt by 6'0 3rd-year guard Tyrese Hunter (13.2 ppg, 4.4 apg) and gets frontcourt help from 6'8 2nd-year forward Dillon Mitchell (11.4 ppg, 9.4 rpg) who was a top 10 recruit in the 2022 class.

The Longhorns played one of the weaker non-conference schedules in the Big 12 (where 9 of their 11 wins are considered Q4), (ranked #319 on KenPom) but in doing so, established themselves as one of the league's better defensive teams inside the arch where they block nearly 6 shots/game and hold opponents to 43.6% shooting on 2-point FGs.

They are a solid 3-point shooting team (36.7%) but have shot just 30% from beyond the arch in their three losses and also shot 2-17 from deep in a 1-point win over Louisville (at MSG).

Tuesday night calls for a Stripe Out at Fifth Third Arena where individual sections are asked to wear either red or black.

Texas dropped 5 spots to #25 in the AP poll.

Bearcats received 79 votes and are #29 as of today.

Texas's offense has been consistently good this year. The only time they scored less than 0.98 points per possession was at Marquette. Although Max Abmas leads the way, they have four starters who are very efficient scorers with true shooting percentages of 58 or higher, plus another two that come off the bench. They're also pretty good on the offensive glass given their undersized guards. Their main weakness is a low free throw rate. Abmas doesn't get to the line or the rim much - he's looking for his jumpshot off the dribble.

Texas runs into trouble with inconsistent defense, which has failed them against every decent opponent they've faced. Top 100 teams (and Louisville) have scored at least 1.14 points per possession, everyone else has been held to 0.96 or less. They are elite inside the arc, including a top 15 block rate, but have struggled to defend the three point line and rebound opponent misses.

On defense, the key to this game is to stay on the shooting hip of Abmas. He's a Quincy Olivari type of player, and we did not have a good gameplan against him. We should be hedging screens and staying even with Abmas when he gets a step rather than trying to recover and get back in front. He will hit us with crossovers and step backs if we try to do that. I'm not confident we learned anything from the Xavier game, but we'll see.

On offense, I think we should exploit our perimeter size advantage. Texas runs out two 6'0 guards and their wings aren't great on the defensive glass. I'd like to see if we can get Newman, Simas, or Skillings some post up looks, and run inside-out sets to get three point looks and crash the glass.

-5.5

Aziz is really struggling on both ends. Not sure why it has taken so long for Jamille to see the floor.

Free throws killed us again.

sedziobs said:

Free throws killed us again.

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Would you have done anything differently on Disu?

Seems like Reynolds was our best option but we ultimately failed the assignment on him.

As I said before the game, Texas has six efficient scorers. One of them was likely to have a good game, and tonight it was Disu. We played Abmas pretty well, though he hit us with his stepback on the final possession. I was happy with the defense in general. Disu was scoring from all three levels. It's hard to stop that without doubling, and Wes has shown that he prefers to guard the three point line rather than double and scramble.

On offense I would have liked to see more threes. We were selective shooting over 41% on 17 attempts. I think we should have put up closer to 25 attempts and had more opportunities for offensive boards. We did get Simas some back to the basket looks against smaller defenders and Jamille finally showed his touch. But too many turnovers and terrible free throw shooting doomed us. We were 8 of 15 from the stripe, and at least two of those were front ends so more like 8 of 17. Texas was 9 of 10. That's about a 6 point swing and fully accounts for the result compared to the spread.

We've showed we can compete in the Big12 through two games. We haven't been overmatched. This was a tough one to lose. Texas hit a couple of contested midrange shots at the end (as did Simas), we just couldn't put the game away at the line when we had the chance.

Texas was picked to finish 3rd in the league. Their talent was very evident.

Can't fault the 40-minute effort. Just hurts to blow such a golden chance at a quality win.

Queens_NYC said:

Would you have done anything differently on Disu?

Seems like Reynolds was our best option but we ultimately failed the assignment on him.

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A lot of coaches would have double teamed him for sure. Wes has a different philosophy and I'm ok with that. Wes doesn't give up a lot of open three point set shots. Disu and Abmas were the only Longhorns to make a three, and Abmas almost exclusively shoots off the dribble. Combined they scored 46 from the field on 36 shots. We forced them into contested looks and mostly shut down the rest of the team in the halfcourt. That philosophy sometimes doesn't work out when a player goes off like this, but there will be games where we shut down good teams if the opponent isn't hitting everything in iso.

I would have at least tried to double a few possessions to see how Texas would respond. Sometimes teams don't have an answer when faced with a different scheme.

Queens_NYC said:

Texas was picked to finish 3rd in the league. Their talent was very evident.

Can't fault the 40-minute effort. Just hurts to blow such a golden chance at a quality win.

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Yep. The good thing is every game from here on out has a chance to be a quality win until the last game of the season when we play West Virginia at home. Hopefully we get some close ones like this to break our way.