Same song, second verse.
After Missouri dropped its game against Kansas in early December I wrote the following in that week’s column: “To only lose by nine points against the No. 2 team in the country was encouraging, but that only counts for so much.” The Tigers followed that up with a close loss against a beatable Seton Hall team and a blowout loss to Illinois. The “good” loss to the Jayhawks, in the end, didn’t count for anything.
Mizzou played one of its best games of the year against Kentucky on Tuesday, especially considering how short-handed the team was. Noah Carter had his first 20-point game since Nov. 29, 2022. Tamar Bates had his fifth-straight game with at least 10 points and is really starting to solidify his role with the Tigers. I wrote at length about the job Sean East II has done in my stats that stood out piece. John Tonje had his best game of the season. Heck, Mabor Majak was on the floor for eight minutes — the most he’s seen since he was back at Cleveland State — and it wasn’t a complete disaster.
The defense was bad, but there are two points I want to make here. The first is that this was the one game in which both Caleb Grill and Anthony Robinson II, the team’s two best perimeter defenders, weren’t available. The Tigers’ defense as a whole has taken a backslide since Grill’s injury. Opponents were only scoring 67.2 points per game through the first nine contests of the season, but have been putting up 77.8 points per game in the six games since Grill went down.
The second is that Kentucky makes every defense look bad. The Wildcats put up 84 points on Kansas, 87 on North Carolina and Florida and 95 on Miami and Louisville. Jonathan Givony and Jeremy Woo of ESPN had two Kentucky freshmen in the top 16 of their first big board for the 2024 NBA Draft — both players, Rob Dillingham and Reed Sheppard, came off the bench in Tuesday’s matchup. I voted for the Wildcats to finish ninth in the conference in the SEC preseason poll. I could’ve voted for them to be ninth in the nation and that still would’ve been too low.
So, again, given what Mizzou was up against, the team didn’t play half-bad against Kentucky. But it still lost. The Tigers are 8-7. That’s the bottom line. Putting on a solid performance on the road against the Wildcats means zilch if you can’t beat Georgia at home.
The loss to the Bulldogs was significantly more eye-opening about what this team’s limitations are. Missouri got a career-best game from Aidan Shaw, a bounce-back night from Carter and regular contributions from East and Bates. The team had all the momentum on its side after rallying back from being down 17. KenPom gave Mizzou a greater than 67% win probability two different times in the last 10 minutes of the game. And it still wasn’t enough.
I brought this up on the postgame podcast Tuesday night: part of the miscalculation with this season was the assumption that Carter are Nick Honor were equipped to take on bigger roles. Both players have shown flashes of being more than what they showed last year, but they haven’t consistently done so. They also rarely both perform well — Carter and Honor have had 10 points each on just three occasions this season, all three coming in games against mid-major opponents.
According to CBB Analytics, Honor is shooting 60% on corner 3s but is 32.5% from everywhere else. Carter’s field goal percentage is at a career-low 40.3%. And that’s only looking at their offensive shortcomings. On defense, both players are undersized for their position, which often gets exposed by opposing teams.
During one of the possession with under four minutes to play against Georgia, Honor deserted his man on the wing, Silas Demary Jr., to double-team Justin Hill at the top of the key. Hill took one dribble to his left, sent a pass over the top of 5-foot-10 Honor, East chose not to rotate up from the corner and Demary knocked down a wide-open 3-pointer that put the Bulldogs in front by four. If Honor were any taller or more athletic, the double-team might’ve been more effective. And that’s not exactly something he has a ton of control over. But if he isn’t able to get his hands on the pass, I wonder why he’s being sent to double-team in the first place.
While I was writing my preview for the Kentucky game, I went back and looked at the stats from last year’s matchup. Honor had seven assists and zero turnovers that night. He hasn’t had more than five dimes in any game this year. He’s averaging almost half the amount of steals he was a season ago. He’s still got all the intangibles but from a production standpoint, if he’s not canning treys from the corner, I’m just not sure what he’s bringing to the table.
Looking at that game also reminded me of the biggest “What if?” of the season. How different does this team look if Kobe Brown stuck around for his last year of eligibility? He could’ve realistically been the best player in the SEC. He would’ve given the Tigers an interior presence that the roster doesn’t currently have. He’d give them another shooter that teams would have to respect. And, most importantly, he’d allow everyone else to shift into a more-comfortable role. Without him, it feels like most of the team is overextended.
You can get by with Carter and as your Honor fourth- or fifth-best starters. But asking them to be your No. 2 and 3 has stretched them out to a degree they don’t appear ready for.
So, what can they accomplish in the rest of this season?
Barring a miracle in which Missouri goes on a completely unrealistic 14-2 run to close out the season, the NCAA tournament is out of reach. That doesn’t mean they’re not going to try.
After Tuesday’s loss, Carter was asked how the team was going to stay motivated to improve this year.
“We are a well-connected group, so we're never gonna you know fall,” Carter said. “If we get hit, we're gonna get right back up. We just gotta keep fighting, you know? Consistently keep fighting as hard as we possibly can. We know we're right there. We're so close, man. We just gotta keep working and keep fighting and get ready for Saturday. All we can do is just get ready for the next game and continue to fight.”
This is a team full of seniors that have accomplished a lot in their respective careers. It’s a proud group. I think it’d be a disservice to them to not keep plugging away at what can work for this team. At the very least, they have to see what it looks like with Grill healthy again and Bates playing at his current level.
Whatever Dennis Gates thinks gives his team the best chance to win is the path Mizzou has to continue to take right now, even if that means keeping the freshmen in limited roles. I get the clamoring for the rookies to play more. I especially understand the clamoring for the freshmen to play ahead of Majak (we’ll hopefully get to ask Gates about that decision before Saturday’s game). But they haven’t proven they can make the team better on a consistent basis. So there will be nights they play extended minutes and other nights they get benched, just like all the other role players on the team. Throwing them into the fire might help a little for next season, but it isn’t going to magically develop them into All-SEC players.
You can’t tank in college basketball. You don’t improve your odds of getting good players by losing. If you want better transfers in the next cycle, you have to do the most that you can with the ones you currently have. Make all the jokes you want about the NIT — it’s better than nothing. Giving the seniors a chance to play in the postseason has to be the aim moving forward.
After Missouri dropped its game against Kansas in early December I wrote the following in that week’s column: “To only lose by nine points against the No. 2 team in the country was encouraging, but that only counts for so much.” The Tigers followed that up with a close loss against a beatable Seton Hall team and a blowout loss to Illinois. The “good” loss to the Jayhawks, in the end, didn’t count for anything.
Mizzou played one of its best games of the year against Kentucky on Tuesday, especially considering how short-handed the team was. Noah Carter had his first 20-point game since Nov. 29, 2022. Tamar Bates had his fifth-straight game with at least 10 points and is really starting to solidify his role with the Tigers. I wrote at length about the job Sean East II has done in my stats that stood out piece. John Tonje had his best game of the season. Heck, Mabor Majak was on the floor for eight minutes — the most he’s seen since he was back at Cleveland State — and it wasn’t a complete disaster.
The defense was bad, but there are two points I want to make here. The first is that this was the one game in which both Caleb Grill and Anthony Robinson II, the team’s two best perimeter defenders, weren’t available. The Tigers’ defense as a whole has taken a backslide since Grill’s injury. Opponents were only scoring 67.2 points per game through the first nine contests of the season, but have been putting up 77.8 points per game in the six games since Grill went down.
The second is that Kentucky makes every defense look bad. The Wildcats put up 84 points on Kansas, 87 on North Carolina and Florida and 95 on Miami and Louisville. Jonathan Givony and Jeremy Woo of ESPN had two Kentucky freshmen in the top 16 of their first big board for the 2024 NBA Draft — both players, Rob Dillingham and Reed Sheppard, came off the bench in Tuesday’s matchup. I voted for the Wildcats to finish ninth in the conference in the SEC preseason poll. I could’ve voted for them to be ninth in the nation and that still would’ve been too low.
So, again, given what Mizzou was up against, the team didn’t play half-bad against Kentucky. But it still lost. The Tigers are 8-7. That’s the bottom line. Putting on a solid performance on the road against the Wildcats means zilch if you can’t beat Georgia at home.
The loss to the Bulldogs was significantly more eye-opening about what this team’s limitations are. Missouri got a career-best game from Aidan Shaw, a bounce-back night from Carter and regular contributions from East and Bates. The team had all the momentum on its side after rallying back from being down 17. KenPom gave Mizzou a greater than 67% win probability two different times in the last 10 minutes of the game. And it still wasn’t enough.
I brought this up on the postgame podcast Tuesday night: part of the miscalculation with this season was the assumption that Carter are Nick Honor were equipped to take on bigger roles. Both players have shown flashes of being more than what they showed last year, but they haven’t consistently done so. They also rarely both perform well — Carter and Honor have had 10 points each on just three occasions this season, all three coming in games against mid-major opponents.
According to CBB Analytics, Honor is shooting 60% on corner 3s but is 32.5% from everywhere else. Carter’s field goal percentage is at a career-low 40.3%. And that’s only looking at their offensive shortcomings. On defense, both players are undersized for their position, which often gets exposed by opposing teams.
During one of the possession with under four minutes to play against Georgia, Honor deserted his man on the wing, Silas Demary Jr., to double-team Justin Hill at the top of the key. Hill took one dribble to his left, sent a pass over the top of 5-foot-10 Honor, East chose not to rotate up from the corner and Demary knocked down a wide-open 3-pointer that put the Bulldogs in front by four. If Honor were any taller or more athletic, the double-team might’ve been more effective. And that’s not exactly something he has a ton of control over. But if he isn’t able to get his hands on the pass, I wonder why he’s being sent to double-team in the first place.
While I was writing my preview for the Kentucky game, I went back and looked at the stats from last year’s matchup. Honor had seven assists and zero turnovers that night. He hasn’t had more than five dimes in any game this year. He’s averaging almost half the amount of steals he was a season ago. He’s still got all the intangibles but from a production standpoint, if he’s not canning treys from the corner, I’m just not sure what he’s bringing to the table.
Looking at that game also reminded me of the biggest “What if?” of the season. How different does this team look if Kobe Brown stuck around for his last year of eligibility? He could’ve realistically been the best player in the SEC. He would’ve given the Tigers an interior presence that the roster doesn’t currently have. He’d give them another shooter that teams would have to respect. And, most importantly, he’d allow everyone else to shift into a more-comfortable role. Without him, it feels like most of the team is overextended.
You can get by with Carter and as your Honor fourth- or fifth-best starters. But asking them to be your No. 2 and 3 has stretched them out to a degree they don’t appear ready for.
So, what can they accomplish in the rest of this season?
Barring a miracle in which Missouri goes on a completely unrealistic 14-2 run to close out the season, the NCAA tournament is out of reach. That doesn’t mean they’re not going to try.
After Tuesday’s loss, Carter was asked how the team was going to stay motivated to improve this year.
“We are a well-connected group, so we're never gonna you know fall,” Carter said. “If we get hit, we're gonna get right back up. We just gotta keep fighting, you know? Consistently keep fighting as hard as we possibly can. We know we're right there. We're so close, man. We just gotta keep working and keep fighting and get ready for Saturday. All we can do is just get ready for the next game and continue to fight.”
This is a team full of seniors that have accomplished a lot in their respective careers. It’s a proud group. I think it’d be a disservice to them to not keep plugging away at what can work for this team. At the very least, they have to see what it looks like with Grill healthy again and Bates playing at his current level.
Whatever Dennis Gates thinks gives his team the best chance to win is the path Mizzou has to continue to take right now, even if that means keeping the freshmen in limited roles. I get the clamoring for the rookies to play more. I especially understand the clamoring for the freshmen to play ahead of Majak (we’ll hopefully get to ask Gates about that decision before Saturday’s game). But they haven’t proven they can make the team better on a consistent basis. So there will be nights they play extended minutes and other nights they get benched, just like all the other role players on the team. Throwing them into the fire might help a little for next season, but it isn’t going to magically develop them into All-SEC players.
You can’t tank in college basketball. You don’t improve your odds of getting good players by losing. If you want better transfers in the next cycle, you have to do the most that you can with the ones you currently have. Make all the jokes you want about the NIT — it’s better than nothing. Giving the seniors a chance to play in the postseason has to be the aim moving forward.
