This season’s starting to feel a little Sisyphean.
Sisyphus, you’ll recall, was a character in Greek mythology who cheated Death by chaining him up, believed he was more clever than Zeus — the god, not Mizzou’s Spanish forward — and was punished for his crimes by being forced to endlessly push a humongous boulder up a steep hill in the underworld for eternity, only for the rock to inevitably roll back down to the bottom of the hill before he could get to the top.
I’m not sure what the Tigers did that was blasphemous, but the basketball gods are clearly not pleased, denying them from getting over the hump.
Think about some of the losses this year. The Braggin’ Rights game was the only one that was a disaster from start to finish. In every other game, Missouri either had a decent-sized lead at some point, or was only a couple of possessions away from pulling out a win. That’s a double-edged sword, though — it’s probably more frustrating as a fan to watch a team repeatedly show it’s capable of winning and routinely lose rather than seeing them get torched on a consistent basis.
I thought @GabeD made some excellent points in his column this weekend. Last year’s team got pretty lucky and maybe this season might be a balancing out of sorts. If the Tigers’ could’ve closed out against Jackson State, Georgia and South Carolina, we’re talking about an 11-6 team. Which, it’s not like that’s a record to write home about and it’s certainly not one that would’ve gotten the team into the NCAA tournament. But it would’ve at least kept Mizzou’s head above water at over .500. Right now, at 8-9, the team’s drowning and there aren’t any life preservers that Dennis Gates can throw out.
The last time Gates had a four-game losing streak was his first year at Cleveland State in 2019-20. He actually had two of them that season — one that lasted six games and another that lasted four. But that Vikings team was so bad, it was a shock when they won at all. Gates was voted as the Horizon League Coach of the Year for merely going 7-11 in conference play with that group.
It might not be time to start thinking about this Mizzou team that way, but it’s getting close. You can’t talk about where things went sideways without starting with the injuries the team suffered. I wrote about the impact of Caleb Grill’s absence last week. John Tonje was never 100% healthy after injuring his foot during the summer, which is why they’re now shutting him down for the season. And while Kaleb Brown might not have made a sizeable impact, he was somebody that Gates thought would be a part of the rotation.
And so, a squad whose depth was supposed to be one of its biggest strengths suddenly isn’t very deep. Gates has just two healthy players who fit in naturally at the small forward spot: Tamar Bates and Curt Lewis. If he needs someone else to play at that spot, what are his options? He can roll out a three-guard lineup with Nick Honor, Sean East II and Anthony Robinson II. That group gives up a lot of size with both East and Robinson being listed at 6-foot-2. Or Gates can try to shoehorn Noah Carter or Trent Pierce in next to a pair of other bigs. Carter doesn’t seem to have the quickness to keep up with perimeter players and Pierce hasn’t looked ready to sustain consistent minutes yet.
So, there aren’t really any good choices for Gates. As my dad put it, “They’re like a baseball team without a closer.” And that’s just one of several issues with Missouri right now.
Here’s another one that I thought about recently: What’s a “good” shot for this team?
Before the season started, Gates said he wanted the Tigers to lead the nation in 3-point attempts. And while they're a good ways away from that mark, they still rank 52nd in the country averaging 25.5 shots from beyond the arc per game. But is that the route this group should be taking?
Mizzou is slightly below the national average connecting on 33.4% of its triples. But most of that is only because East, Bates and Honor have been scorching hot from outside, each of them making above 39% of their treys. The trio has accounted for over half of the Tigers’ makes from distance this year. The rest of the team is shooting 25.6%.
Carter has taken more than double the number of 3-pointers (84) that Bates has this season (40) but has only made four more, shooting a career-low 28.6% this year. Connor Vanover was the top-shooting 7-footer in the nation last season but he’s cratered from 32.4% to 17.6%. When he was still playing, Grill’s accuracy dropped from 36.8% last year to 29.2% now. Lewis, who ranked fifth in the NJCAA making 48.3% of his 3s for John A. Logan College, is just 5-20 from deep since joining the Tigers. The freshmen, Robinson, Pierce and Jordan Butler, are a combined 8-59.
That’s seven players shooting below 30% from 3. And the thing is … they kind of have to keep shooting. Missouri doesn’t have a post player that can go to work on the block. And the looks they’re getting without one generally aren’t terrible anyway.
ShotQuality, a site that “predicts shot outcomes by evaluating the quality of each attempt” by grading each shot “on a 0-100 percent scale, which represents the likelihood the shot results in a made basket, and then is multiplied by the amount of points attempted to get the ShotQuality value” has the Tigers as one of the better teams in the country at finding good looks. Mizzou has an adjusted ShotQuality value of +0.09, which ranks 80th in the NCAA. According to ShotQuality, 83% of the team’s possessions result in a 3-point attempt or a shot at the rim, two of the most valued looks in basketball.
But how valuable is a look from distance, realistically, when it’s not East, Bates or Honor taking the shot? It’s usually a genuine surprise when someone aside from those three connects on a triple, even when they're wide open. That type of shot is better than a turnover, but not by much — especially considering Missouri only pulls down 28.1% of available offensive rebounds, the fourth-lowest mark in the SEC according to KenPom.
MU is a good deal better at scoring inside — Honor being an exception. The team shoots 53.5% on 2-pointers, which ranks 71st in the nation. Eleven players are making at least half of their shots inside the arc. Bates in particular has been dominant when driving to the rim or pulling up in the mid-range, sinking 58.0% of his 2s.
But leaning more heavily on shots from the interior would require a philosophical shift in approach that it’s probably too late to make at this point. More than halfway through the season, this team isn’t changing.
You can’t question the black and gold’s fight. The Tigers are going to keep pushing that boulder up the hill. And maybe they’ll get to the top at some point. Their next two games are against Florida and Texas A&M, both of whom are 1-3 in conference play. I don’t know that Missouri should be favored to win either matchup, but they shouldn’t be ruled all the way out either.
The rock’s going to come tumbling back down, though. More than a few times before the end of this season, I reckon.
Sisyphus, you’ll recall, was a character in Greek mythology who cheated Death by chaining him up, believed he was more clever than Zeus — the god, not Mizzou’s Spanish forward — and was punished for his crimes by being forced to endlessly push a humongous boulder up a steep hill in the underworld for eternity, only for the rock to inevitably roll back down to the bottom of the hill before he could get to the top.
I’m not sure what the Tigers did that was blasphemous, but the basketball gods are clearly not pleased, denying them from getting over the hump.
Think about some of the losses this year. The Braggin’ Rights game was the only one that was a disaster from start to finish. In every other game, Missouri either had a decent-sized lead at some point, or was only a couple of possessions away from pulling out a win. That’s a double-edged sword, though — it’s probably more frustrating as a fan to watch a team repeatedly show it’s capable of winning and routinely lose rather than seeing them get torched on a consistent basis.
I thought @GabeD made some excellent points in his column this weekend. Last year’s team got pretty lucky and maybe this season might be a balancing out of sorts. If the Tigers’ could’ve closed out against Jackson State, Georgia and South Carolina, we’re talking about an 11-6 team. Which, it’s not like that’s a record to write home about and it’s certainly not one that would’ve gotten the team into the NCAA tournament. But it would’ve at least kept Mizzou’s head above water at over .500. Right now, at 8-9, the team’s drowning and there aren’t any life preservers that Dennis Gates can throw out.
The last time Gates had a four-game losing streak was his first year at Cleveland State in 2019-20. He actually had two of them that season — one that lasted six games and another that lasted four. But that Vikings team was so bad, it was a shock when they won at all. Gates was voted as the Horizon League Coach of the Year for merely going 7-11 in conference play with that group.
It might not be time to start thinking about this Mizzou team that way, but it’s getting close. You can’t talk about where things went sideways without starting with the injuries the team suffered. I wrote about the impact of Caleb Grill’s absence last week. John Tonje was never 100% healthy after injuring his foot during the summer, which is why they’re now shutting him down for the season. And while Kaleb Brown might not have made a sizeable impact, he was somebody that Gates thought would be a part of the rotation.
And so, a squad whose depth was supposed to be one of its biggest strengths suddenly isn’t very deep. Gates has just two healthy players who fit in naturally at the small forward spot: Tamar Bates and Curt Lewis. If he needs someone else to play at that spot, what are his options? He can roll out a three-guard lineup with Nick Honor, Sean East II and Anthony Robinson II. That group gives up a lot of size with both East and Robinson being listed at 6-foot-2. Or Gates can try to shoehorn Noah Carter or Trent Pierce in next to a pair of other bigs. Carter doesn’t seem to have the quickness to keep up with perimeter players and Pierce hasn’t looked ready to sustain consistent minutes yet.
So, there aren’t really any good choices for Gates. As my dad put it, “They’re like a baseball team without a closer.” And that’s just one of several issues with Missouri right now.
Here’s another one that I thought about recently: What’s a “good” shot for this team?
Before the season started, Gates said he wanted the Tigers to lead the nation in 3-point attempts. And while they're a good ways away from that mark, they still rank 52nd in the country averaging 25.5 shots from beyond the arc per game. But is that the route this group should be taking?
Mizzou is slightly below the national average connecting on 33.4% of its triples. But most of that is only because East, Bates and Honor have been scorching hot from outside, each of them making above 39% of their treys. The trio has accounted for over half of the Tigers’ makes from distance this year. The rest of the team is shooting 25.6%.
Carter has taken more than double the number of 3-pointers (84) that Bates has this season (40) but has only made four more, shooting a career-low 28.6% this year. Connor Vanover was the top-shooting 7-footer in the nation last season but he’s cratered from 32.4% to 17.6%. When he was still playing, Grill’s accuracy dropped from 36.8% last year to 29.2% now. Lewis, who ranked fifth in the NJCAA making 48.3% of his 3s for John A. Logan College, is just 5-20 from deep since joining the Tigers. The freshmen, Robinson, Pierce and Jordan Butler, are a combined 8-59.
That’s seven players shooting below 30% from 3. And the thing is … they kind of have to keep shooting. Missouri doesn’t have a post player that can go to work on the block. And the looks they’re getting without one generally aren’t terrible anyway.
ShotQuality, a site that “predicts shot outcomes by evaluating the quality of each attempt” by grading each shot “on a 0-100 percent scale, which represents the likelihood the shot results in a made basket, and then is multiplied by the amount of points attempted to get the ShotQuality value” has the Tigers as one of the better teams in the country at finding good looks. Mizzou has an adjusted ShotQuality value of +0.09, which ranks 80th in the NCAA. According to ShotQuality, 83% of the team’s possessions result in a 3-point attempt or a shot at the rim, two of the most valued looks in basketball.
But how valuable is a look from distance, realistically, when it’s not East, Bates or Honor taking the shot? It’s usually a genuine surprise when someone aside from those three connects on a triple, even when they're wide open. That type of shot is better than a turnover, but not by much — especially considering Missouri only pulls down 28.1% of available offensive rebounds, the fourth-lowest mark in the SEC according to KenPom.
MU is a good deal better at scoring inside — Honor being an exception. The team shoots 53.5% on 2-pointers, which ranks 71st in the nation. Eleven players are making at least half of their shots inside the arc. Bates in particular has been dominant when driving to the rim or pulling up in the mid-range, sinking 58.0% of his 2s.
But leaning more heavily on shots from the interior would require a philosophical shift in approach that it’s probably too late to make at this point. More than halfway through the season, this team isn’t changing.
You can’t question the black and gold’s fight. The Tigers are going to keep pushing that boulder up the hill. And maybe they’ll get to the top at some point. Their next two games are against Florida and Texas A&M, both of whom are 1-3 in conference play. I don’t know that Missouri should be favored to win either matchup, but they shouldn’t be ruled all the way out either.
The rock’s going to come tumbling back down, though. More than a few times before the end of this season, I reckon.
Last edited:
