Mizzou has the horses for long run in NCAA Tournament
BY SAM MELLINGER
The Kansas City Star
This is twice now that Drew has played Kansas one game and Missouri the next, so it makes sense to ask him to compare. He pauses. Stares. Thinks.
Speaks.
“When Missouri is on, there’s nobody in the country as good as them offensively,” Drew says. “Nobody. Period.”
Nationally, much of the reaction after No. 4 Missouri’s 72-57 runaway from No. 6 Baylor on Saturday at Mizzou Arena will focus on the Bears’ problems. And it should. Baylor is an agonizingly frustrating team to watch, simultaneously loaded with NBA talent and devoid of the fortitude needed to respond to the biggest challenges.
But those are thoughts for another time. Another place.
These words will be about Mizzou, which means these words will be about a legitimate Final Four contender.
Believe it.
MU has famously never made a Final Four, and this is the program’s best chance in a generation. MU hasn’t been ranked this high in February since 1990. It hasn’t been this high after February since finishing the 1994 regular season at No. 3.
We always hear that the NCAA Tournament highlights guards and experience, and, you know, Missouri starts four guards and four seniors. In Phil Pressey and Michael Dixon, MU has two of the best four point guards (Tyshawn Taylor and Pierre Jackson would be the others) in the Big 12.
All the flaws we’ve heard about all season are still here, but the doubts can go somewhere else now because the Tigers’ strengths are good enough to make up for their weaknesses.
They are short, but quick. They can be overpowered around the basket, but win a game from the three-point line. They can give up baskets, but make up for it on the other end.
Or, more to the point from the Baylor game: MU can be obliterated in rebounding (40-27), but find enough other ways to beat a team that — despite all the Bears’ faults — is undefeated outside the top 10.
Against Baylor, Missouri made up for the rebounding with three-point shooting (14 for 28), efficiency (only eight turnovers), crisp offense (18 assists on 24 baskets) and persistent defense (Baylor shot 36 percent).
“We’ve got to find ways to win games,” MU coach Frank Haith says. “That’s the ultimate, is winning games.”
This MU team is hard to make out sometimes. Even for the coach.
Haith calls his a “great” team, but also one that needs to improve defensively to be a “complete” team. When the NCAA Tournament starts, Missouri’s success figures to be dependent more than most on matchups.
But you know what else? Nobody in the country — especially after Murray State finally lost — has overcome more doubts through the season’s first four months. No team has risen farther in the polls, for instance, and nobody has answered as many questions.
The last one was this: what happens when Missouri faces a bigger team that dominates the rebounds?
The answer: MU will defend with pressure, protect the basketball and play so efficiently that it won’t matter. For some teams, that’s a hot game that can’t be reasonably expected to happen again.
For MU, it’s essentially the game plan.
Missouri is one of the best and most efficient offensive teams in the country, whether you go by statistics or the eye test from basketball people like Drew. This is such an unconventional team that the tendency is to dismiss an overreliance on three-point shooting, but MU has actually hit a higher percentage of three-pointers against the best five defensive teams it has faced so far than the rest of the schedule.
If anything, the difference in MU’s three-point shooting at home (40 percent in conference games) and on the road (32 percent) is concerning, but that’s the kind of nitpicking you can do with any team.
After an upper class headed by Kentucky, isn’t Missouri, with its loaded group of guards and clear understanding of what it can and can’t do, as likely as any team to run through an NCAA Tournament bracket?
College basketball’s ultimate event is unpredictable enough to stay away from absolutes. But what we’re seeing this season is Missouri’s best chance since the senior class was in diapers.
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