Apologies for the spotty posting over the last week. An issue with our data led to us being unable to produce advanced stats for a bit. But everything is back up-and-running now, just in time for March Madness.
Arkansas went 1-1 in the SEC Tournament for the third straight year. The Hogs blew double-digit leads in both games, although they recovered to win the first. Positive momentum entering March is minimal. This team has a good shot to win their first game – depending on the matchup, of course – but it’s hard to have confidence in anything beyond that. The pieces of this roster never really fit together, and injuries messed all of it up anyway.
Here’s a quick look at the stats from the two games.
Arkansas 76, Auburn 73
Auburn played much faster and dominated transition, but Arkansas slowed the game down and won in the halfcourt, which was a smart decision given that the Tigers went with a zone, just like they did in the first game. The Razorbacks attacked it perfectly, getting high-post entry passes and good movement. This team has come a long way against zone looks like this.
Arkansas rebounded 59% of its missed shots, which is exactly what you want to see. That helped cancel out an elevated turnover rate (28%) and allowed the Hogs to put up field goals at the same rate as Auburn.
And then Arkansas was better at getting to the rim. The Hogs took an excellent 46% of shots at the rim and shot 83% on those attempts, which was enough to deliver a victory.
MVP honors go to Anthony Black, but note that Ricky Council IV, not usually well-liked in the plus-minus numbers, was +10 in his 33 minutes. Jordan Walsh was a rare miss in the plus-minus, going minus-4 in his 21 minutes. Instead, the Black-NSJ-Devo-Council-Makhi lineup proved to be the best.
Texas A&M 67, Arkansas 61
In the second game, Arkansas tried the same strategy: long possessions (18.8 seconds per possession), and this time it didn’t work.
As we’ll see in future posts looking at Arkansas’ NCAA Tournament prospects, the Hogs tend to do better when they push the offensive pace a bit. In this game, it was Arkansas, not Texas A&M, that slowed things down.
The goal of the long possessions is getting to the rim, and it didn’t happen here. Only 20% of Arkansas’ shots were dunks, layups, or tip-ins, down from 46% against Auburn.
Pace ranks third on the last of stats most highly-correlated with offensive success for Arkansas this year. What’s first? You guessed it: percentage of shots at the rim. Second is midrange field goal percentage, and the Hogs were an ice-cold 26% on those, with Nick Smith alone missing about ten of them. Given that, the fact that this was even a close game is almost surprising.
Any team that can consistently get to the rim against the Hogs or keep the Arkansas offense away from the rim will end Arkansas’ run in the NCAA Tournament. Eric Musselman has been a master of roster-building, but this one was a miss. This team has overwhelming weaknesses that just having Trevon Brazile would not have entirely solved.
We’ll look at Arkansas’ portal strategy in a future post, but an interesting pattern is emerging among players the Hogs are contacting: the contact board seems to be heavy on medium-sized forwards (about 6’8) who are high-volume scorers around the rim. This year’s team leaned too much into tall guards to try and get to the rim, and they have not been able to do it consistently enough, especially against trendy defenses like Texas A&M’s no-middle that took away isolations and driving lanes.
Makhi put up a ton of stats in this one, but no one really played well.
Up Next
Arkansas awaits its NCAA Tournament fate. The Hogs could be seeded anywhere from 7 to 11, depending on how the committee values NET, the eye test, and the Hogs’ momentum (or lack thereof). Eye test and momentum suggest a bad seed, but the NET still thinks the Hogs are a 6-seed (that’s not gonna happen).
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