Fresh off a thrilling 80-75 win over Duke, Arkansas is back at home Monday night hoping to avoid a letdown game. The Furman Paladins come to town as a fairly strong mid-major capable of doing some damage.
We’ll wait and see on Tramon Mark, who missed the Duke game after injuring his back against North Carolina. Eric Musselman has said that Mark should be good to return after this one, but he sounds doubtful. That leaves a big opening for Layden Blocker and El Ellis, who were fantastic against Duke and will be fighting for minutes once the rotation starts to shrink.
Meet the Paladins
Furman has a very experienced team that returns several key players from last year’s NCAA Tournament team that knocked off 4-seed Virginia in the first round, a game that set a lot of brackets on fire since it was in the very first window of the whole tournament.
As you can see from these scores, Furman is capable of putting up some points, so expect plenty of scoring.
Furman’s offense is actually slightly stronger than Arkansas’ according to our model, but the Paladin defense is a problem.
One of the reasons we switched from rankings to normalized values is so we can compare all-season numbers to single game numbers. So Furman’s overall team grades at 49 (in the 49th percentile of all 362 teams), but Arkansas has not had an individual game grade under 50 all year. In fact, the Hogs have been remarkably consistent:
The Duke game grades as Arkansas’ third-best offensive and best defensive performance of the season. For those unfamiliar, our “game grade” just takes Arkansas’ actual net, offensive, and defensive efficiencies from each game and compares it to the opponent-adjusted averages allowed by each opponent in those games. For example, Arkansas posted an offensive efficiency of 103.9 against Duke, whose opponent-adjusted defensive efficiency for the season is 88.0, giving Arkansas a difference of +15.9 for that game. The difference are then normalized to a “grade” of 0-100 for offense, defense, and overall.
So Arkansas has yet to have a performance below 50, and Furman is a team is at 49 for the season. However, the Paladins are coming off their best performance of the season: 86 in a loss to 7-0 Princeton.
Furman presents a serious threat to win the rebounding matchup, and they don’t foul much on defense. The turnover battle has been their biggest problem this year.
Model pick: Arkansas 83, Furman 74. Expect Furman’s offense to be good enough to keep this one relatively close. If the Hogs play lazy defense like we’ve seen before, this could get dicey.
When Furman has the rock
Furman plays very fast and will test Arkansas’ weak transition defense. The Hogs lost transition battle once again in the Duke game, so they’ve still only won it twice all season (against Alcorn and UNC).
Furman’s strength is its incredibly modern shot selection: lots of 3-pointers, basically no midrange. The Paladins aren’t elite at hitting those 3-pointers, but when the shot selection is strong, you don’t have to be elite to have a good overall effective FG% (91).
Furman’s inability to get to the free throw line is slightly concerning for them, as finesse offenses typically struggle against Musselman defenses, so we’ll see what kind of whistle we get. If Arkansas’ 3-point defense steps up, the Hogs could get the upper hand on this end of the floor.
Furman’s roster is very guard-heavy and very, very small. They would like to space the floor with five 3-point threats, but their best
Furman’s veteran two-man combo of 6’1 JP Pegues and 6’4 Marcus Foster will provide the bulk of the Paladin scoring. Pegues isn’t an elite shooter, but he’s the main threat to drive and draw fouls and he’s a very good passer, averaging more than six assists per 40 minutes. Foster is a dangerous shooter and he can draw some fouls as well. Both players have a respectable 14% turnover rate. The low-usage sniper is 6’0 PJay Smith, who takes about 70% of his shots from 3 and is hitting an excellent 40% on those. If you can get the ball out of their hands, the turnovers start to flow. 6’3 Carter Whitt dishes out more than six assists per 40 but has a slightly high turnover rate of 19%, and he’s not a great shooter.
Furman doesn’t really use any other guards besides those four, and there’s a pretty big dropoff when any of them leave the game. But that’s probably not enough size to deal with Arkansas, so they’ll probably have to use some two-forward lineups.
The forward they like most isn’t listed in the table above because he missed the first four games, but that’s 6’5 Alex Williams, who has averaged 11 points per game over the last four. Williams also likes to take 3-pointers, but he doesn’t draw fouls and is not a good rebounder, even for his small size. He’ll likely play the 4. The other possible 4 is 6’6 Tyrese Hughey, who is much lower-usage but is shooting 75% true shooting on the year and is an excellent rebounder at both ends. However, he has a bad 22% turnover rate and grades as the team’s worst defender.
The center spot gets us into the questionable guys: 6’9 Garrett Hien and 6’11 Cooper Bowser. Hein has been the main man this year, but despite presenting a modest 3-point threat (about a quarter of his shots are triples), there are some issues with him, namely an awful 24% turnover rate and 5.6 personal fouls per 40 minutes, which means he’ll be in foul trouble if he’s out there very long. Bowser’s numbers are odd: despite being 6’11, he grabs fewer than two defensive rebounds per 40 minutes. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guy that tall be that poor of a defensive rebounder. He shoots an astonishing 80% eFG% (on very low usage) but also has a bad 22% turnover rate.
As you can probably guess, perimeter defense is the name of the game here. The Paladins have two primaries (Pegues and Foster) who can hit from deep or drive and draw contact, and they’ll demand Arkansas’ best ball-pressure guys. Furman will space the floor well and make it hard to help without punishment. And then there’s the sniper (Smith) who can’t be left alone very often. All told, unless Bowser is in the game, all five Paladins on the floor should be considered 3-point threats.
You may be wondering how such a guard-heavy, 3-point shooting, small lineup fares on defense. Well, it’s not great, for reasons you might expect.
When Arkansas has the rock
This isn’t a friendly matchup at all for Furman. They’re getting punished in halfcourt, which is where Arkansas prefers to be anyway. The Hogs are getting better after a disastrously-slow start to the season, but they still don’t get in transition very well. But the halfcourt offense has been strong all year, and this is the weakest halfcourt defense the Hogs have seen since Alcorn.
That lack of size bites Furman when trying to defend the rim. Only a handful of Division I teams allow more dunks and layups than the Paladins, who also sit in the bottom third of the nation in defending those shots.
Arkansas’ poor shot selection has been a big driver of their struggles in the three losses (especially Greensboro), but the Hogs had great shot selection against Duke and have been very good at finishing all year. That’s probably the game’s biggest mismatch.
To Furman’s credit, they get in position to clear defensive boards and don’t foul, so don’t expect them to help Arkansas out much. But they have no one on their roster who can effectively protect their rim, and any attempt to get more size is going to hurt their offense badly.
Keys to the Game
Patience is a virtue. Arkansas’ offense was very impatient against UNCG’s pack line defense and in other early-season games, leading to bad shots. But they were very patient against Duke. Patience on offense against Furman will lead to not just good shots, but easy shots, since Furman’s D can offer almost no resistance to a good-passing team willing to attack the rim.
No lapses on the perimeter. Arkansas’ perimeter defense, usually a strength under Musselman, has been poor so far this year. That’s a bit of a problem against Furman, since they’ll always have four or five 3-point threats plus good passing and floor spacing.
Avoid cheap fouls. Furman isn’t a great team at drawing contact, but if Arkansas overcommits on the perimeter, that could lead to some driving fouls, which Furman’s main two guys are capable of. Arkansas fouls a lot (no surprise there), but giving Furman gift trips to the line could help the Paladins hang around longer than they should.
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