The cougars fell out of the top 25 with their home loss to Hofstra. They are now 27th in the AP poll. So the DAC will still not have a ranked team play there. Bummer. That said, Charleston will not be re-focused. Drexel coming off a bad week. This spells disaster for our dragons.

Charleston shoots 3's. Lots of them. They rebound well too. When not shooting 3's they will be at the rim drawing fouls. I think Amari can take that away but not sure we are good enough rebounding to take away offensive possessions from CofC. Additionally, we have no real way to help control the pace. Charleston wants to get up and down and havent been good enough to force our way on them. We still dont have a way to score. And oh by the way, Charleston is also the top defensive team in the conference. Kinda wish they wouldnt have lost, this now screams like a disaster waiting.

CofC- 90
Drexel- 58

How is Charleston the top defensive team? They are sixth in points per game allowed, and eighth in field goal percentage defense. Even if you say they allow more points because of their fast pace, that does not explain their field goal percentage defense. They shoot field goals worse than their opponents (.433 to .441) and threes worse than their opponents (.328 to .330). It must be rare for a team to be over .900 this late in the season with a worse field goal percentage than their opponents. Charleston attempts 30.8 threes per game, which leads Division I, albeit the lead could change before this game.

What a disappointing weekend last weekend was .
We had a few freshman who seemed to be doing really well and now hardly play.
Butler #24 seemed really good as does butler # 23.

# 5 and # 15 also seemed to have some quality minutes.
Are they injured.
We should play a deeper team.

Against NC A&T we played right into their hands. They ran the whole game. That is not our style

(01-30-2023 01:02 PM)EvanJ Wrote:  How is Charleston the top defensive team?

They are tops in defensive efficiency (points per 100 possessions adjusted for opponent strength). They dropped hard from the Hofstra game, but are still ranked 97th in D1. UNCW is at 103. Then Hofstra at 147, Drexel at 157, Towson at 165, nobody else in the top 200

Line was 6 and has moved up to 7.5. Still too low. Vegas seems to know, but this seems like easy money on the cougars

(02-02-2023 08:54 AM)dan10 Wrote:  Line was 6 and has moved up to 7.5. Still too low. Vegas seems to know, but this seems like easy money on the cougars

Teams like Drexel tend to get up for these big games, especially at home. Just because they played like crap last weekend doesn't mean it's going to carry over. A loss within 10 points at home is more than a reasonable prediction.


I'll counter your prediction....
Charleston 75
Drexel 70

I dont actually think we give up 90, but dont see us staying close. Its more than just last week. This is just a bad match up. Add to it that Charleston is really good. The way you beat Charleston is slow the pace and rebound like crazy (keeping them from getting o-boards). We do neither well. We play slow but against pressure we will be sped up. Amari doesnt rebound great and nobody else is there to stop their relentless attack for rebounds. We are going to have to score and we have a stagnant offense who has struggled for some time. Add to it that CofC is now going to be re-focused as well. A flat start and the game may be over by the first media. Unless we just magically catch fire from 3 and Charleston shots 25% or worse, I just dont see it.

80-58 is a more realistic prediction by me on how I think it will go. Our offense is slow enough that even a team that wants as many possessions as possible, like CofC, getting to 90 will be tough.

We had the worst 3-point shooting day I've ever seen from Drexel and won.

Bad analysis dan10.

Congratulations Dragons! Dac strikes again

Bad me. I decided to sit out another game, 2 in a row, which I don't think I've ever done, and Drexel has two exciting wins. The Thursday night commute from the suburbs was taking its toll, and I didn't think they'll be able to pull out a win....but I was wrong. Defense kept them in the game despite terrible 3 point shooting. Moore pulled off the clutch shot that so many of his predicessors would usually miss. Great job by the freshman, and great win for the Dragons tonight.

Going by the original post predicting a loss by 32, I wonder if that is dan10's greatest predicted margin of defeat in a win. Thank you for moving Hofstra up to first.

Yup I missed, bad. Still dont understand it. 2-15 from 3 and we gave up 11 offensive boards. You told me that and I would have asked how bad we lost. Yet we won. We shot crazy good from 2, but that happens if you get to the basket. Still dont know why we dont park Amari down low. He had another influential game down low, Charleston was afraid to get anywhere near the basket. His body language continue to be poor at best. Justin Moore has really stepped up the past few games.

Really, I think our free throw shooting was actually good for once and kept us in the game. It was obvious that we just needed the 3s to start falling for us to close the gap. Lo and behold, once we hit a couple, we were within a possession.

It did seem like Amari struggled to get into the flow. I was wondering if he's hurt or sick or something. He only played 27 minutes -- despite having not one single foul. Was that a coach's decision? He was cycled in and out a LOT. (I didn't see the disastrous North Carolina games, so I dunno what happened there.) I like Turner and think he's a good backup with some upside, but his stat line contained a lot of zeroes.

You can't play what-ifs, but I will just point out how much harm last weekend did to Drexel's spot in the standings. Brutal.

It's obvious this team has talent. It's consistency that's the issue, and has been the issue for some time now. I would have hoped that Coach Spiker would have started to solve the consistency issue by now, because if they could give this level of performance every game, we could be at the top of the CAA standings. Maybe we're not good enough to do that, I dunno. It's frustrating because the potential for something special is clearly there.

EDIT: To add to this, every team ahead of us in the CAA standings has a winning record on the road in conference games. We are 1-4. It's a trend that continues to kneecap us. But at least the home fans are getting to see wins.

Totally agree. Charleston is very good. I don't think they're Top 25 good, but they are very good.

But the distance between them and Drexel didn't feel like a chasm at all. Drexel is close. You might not realize it from some of our road results.

To me consistency is a talent thing. If the play is erratic then that says that is the skill of those players. It does point to the ceiling could be quite high though if it can be attained. I dont feel like the staff is attaining those ceilings of the players. Im getting some of the same feelings we had about Bru. He wants his style to work regardless as opposed to playing a style that fits the pieces. I say this because when our team plays faster it seems like our team plays better. We move the ball better and look like a better team, yet we prefer to chew up clock and be stagnant on offense.

We continue taking one of the best forwards in this league and having him shoot 3s and set high ball screens when he is not a great pick and roll type player and he doesnt have the handles to dribble through the lane. Yet we seemingly refuse to use him in a traditional center role. Things like that tell me coaching is helping to limit achieving the our players talent ceiling.

Another example from last night was the backdoor cuts. Beautiful basketball. Nice wrinkle added. Got us buckets as ease, so why did we stop and go back to our more stagnant standing around offense? Why go away from what was working? Its baffling.

(02-03-2023 12:12 PM)dan10 Wrote:  We continue taking one of the best forwards in this league and having him shoot 3s and set high ball screens when he is not a great pick and roll type player and he doesnt have the handles to dribble through the lane. Yet we seemingly refuse to use him in a traditional center role. Things like that tell me coaching is helping to limit achieving the our players talent ceiling.

Another example from last night was the backdoor cuts. Beautiful basketball. Nice wrinkle added. Got us buckets as ease, so why did we stop and go back to our more stagnant standing around offense? Why go away from what was working? Its baffling.

I think you have to give Charleston/Kelsey some credit here. They adjusted their defense to stop the backdoor cuts. We tried on several occasions later in the game and they were ready.

I'm with you on Amari though. I wouldn't suggest that they depart from the offense altogether but I think Drexel needs to recognize and take advantage of mismatches. At times they were using Bolon to guard Amari - when you have that kind of size differential, to me you should put him under the basket and everyone else outside the three point line. Make them leave someone wide open, if they want to double.