There's an old adage that teams that like to press don't like to be pressed. Yesterday afternoon we observed a more fundamental truism: teams that turn the ball over too much don't like to be pressed. It was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that Clemson was almost certain to lose to Missouri. Both teams rely primarily on their defensive ability to force turnovers to drive their offensive output, and the Mizzou Tigers simply don't turn the ball over. Yeah, there was a chance our press might cause them problems, but you aren't a top five team at avoiding turnovers for nothing. The advantage was all Missouri going in and they burned us time and time again as we made stupid decisions with the ball. We kept it close with ridiculous, unsustainable 3-point shooting in the first half but when we regressed to the mean in the second half the game was as good as done (felt like the second Maryland game in that respect). Also, if you don't understand the concept of regression to the mean, read this. Its related to baseball but the idea is the same--if the team has a certain "true" level of performance, then given enough time the team will revert to that level regardless of how well they perform over smaller stretches of time. We went 8-11 from 3-point land in the first half, there was no way we were going 16-22 for the game.
I know everyone is down on the players for not playing hard the last ten minutes of the game, but I think there's a reason. Seems to me they new their margin for error was small--they had to keep things even for 40 minutes to try and pull it out at the end because they wouldn't be able to force turnovers or get enough stops in the halfcourt to spark a run (to say nothing of our complete lack of a four-minute offense). Once they were in a hole, they knew they were beaten. Sure, it's not a good reason for not playing hard and it reflects extremely poorly on the coaching staff for their inability to motivate/prepare the team mentally, but there it is.
I've been yelling it as loud as I can from this tiny blog pulpit: turnovers are killing us. This is the worst year for Clemson at turning the ball over since the first season Purnell took over, and it's not even close. There's been a ton of talk around the blogosphere about the lack of an offensive plan for the Tigers and their inability to even execute simple fundamentals. This is undoubtedly true; I won't argue this point. Purnell and his (newly-hired?) assistants need to take a long look at the tapes this offseason to figure out how to improve the halfcourt set. But I would argue that we have an even more fundamental problem: empty possessions from turnover after turnover. Often, we don't even get a chance to setup the halfcourt 'cause Stitt is dribbling the ball off his leg. This is also a more fundamental problem because it isn't going away next season with Stitt as our de facto team leader and ball-handler.
Next season has all of the makings of a bad year for the Tigers, outlined by ClemBen in the post below. We've got a turnover prone "senior leader" point guard blocking and taking playing time from a better player one year his junior (don't even get me started--the last few games of the season should have sealed in everyone's mind that Young is the better player than Stitt now), a lack of an strong inside presence capable of creating a shot, and a guy starting at the two position that would be fighting for playing time at the back end of the bench for a middling SEC team (how many times was Tanner Smith burned off the ball on the perimeter leading to easy points? I give him credit for decent defensive fundamentals, but when he's matched against someone quick and fluid, he's toast). Most of our problems are related to the most fundamental aspects of the game; for example, perimeter players gotta be stronger with the ball and make crisper passes to right part of the player receiving the ball while inside guys need to improve footwork in the post. It's easy to tell Clemson to go out and make up a few nice offensive sets and practice them 1000 times, but we won't get to .500 in the ACC next season without first improving the fundamentals on offense and bringing our turnover count down to a reasonable range.
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