Missouri State Basketball - 2009-2010 Season Preview - Part 1

It's a new season of Bears basketball, and it's really a fresh start. Tons of new players, and from what I've seen so far, a lot more athleticism. Last year was a fresh start too, and we struggled, to no one's surprise, after Barry left the cupboard almost bare.

Now that Barry's had a year to get back on his feet, serving as "administrative assistant" to Bill Self at KU (if that's what you call a person who solicits donations from alumni over the phone and is not officially listed on the coaching staff), surely he's found a coaching job, right? We were such fools to let Barry go (according to Sporting News, and many others), and surely another quality program has snatched him up by this point. No? Not even a D-II or D-III school? NIAA? High School? YMCA? Nothing? Wow, that's weird. Maybe he wasn't such a great coach after all...

Anyway, now that the Barry-taint is mostly off the program (good riddance, Knapp and Lauries), Cuonzo is starting his 2nd season in charge with a team that is starting to resemble something that maybe can win in the coming years (how's that for extremely tempered optimism?). I still think that we can't evaluate his job performance until the end of his 3rd year (time to get his recruits there, coach them up and assimilate them into his system), but I like what I've seen so far from some of these new players.

There are 7 new players this year - 3 freshman (Jones, Porter and Pickens), 3 juco juniors (Leonard, Mallett and Ricks), and 1 sophmore transfer who is now eligible (Patterson). For the returning players, we've basically got 1 great player (Weems - sophomore), 1 pretty good player (McFarland - sophomore), and a bunch of average to below-average players (Fury, Creekmore, Jehle and Rhine). Even though Creekmore is a starter and Fury is our only Senior, I'd put them both in the below-average category, but more on that later.

The Bears won both exhibition games by 20-30 points, as expected. There was a lot of rotation of players in and out, so it was tough to gauge our lineup or the flow of our offense, since players wouldn't stay in for more than 3-4 minutes at a time. Nothing too memorable overall from the Exhibition games - the teams we played chucked a lot of threes, made a lot of turnovers, and didn't have much size, so you can't really evaluate the Bears play vs. those teams. Henderson State did play zone for about 75% of the game, so that was some nice practice for what we may see going forward. Any Bears fan knows that the Bears do NOT handle the zone very well, and I'm shocked more teams don't play that exclusively against us. The first half of the Henderson St. game was a bit of a struggle, with us settling for outside shots and threes against the zone (sound familiar?), and we had a small halftime lead. In the 2nd half though, the Bears seemed to penetrate the zone a lot better (McFarland did a good job of this) and get more mid range jumpers or drives/passes to the basket, so we ended up pulling away. I'm still worried about going up against the zone defense, but at least this year, it seems that we at least have guys on the team that can (and hopefully WILL) try to dribble to the middle of the zone to create something besides outside jump shots. With Fury and the Lauries as our primary ball handlers the last few years, this was often not possible.

The game vs. Auburn was a nice start to the season. Auburn was the exact opposite of a zone team - they were a man to man team that constantly pressured the ball handlers, often before they even crossed half court. For the most part, the Bears handled the pressure well, but there was a spurt of a few minutes in the second half when the Bears were up double digits that Auburn was especially aggressive with the ball pressure (i.e. reaching and slapping for the ball) where we had several turnovers in a row from our primary ball handlers (namely, Leonard, Ricks and McFarland). But that eventually got straightened out through some foul calls and better and safer ball handling and passing, and we somewhat cruised in the 2nd half to a double-digit win.

The first half started sloppy, and brought back memories of last year's team, which had a lot of trouble scoring points most nights. I can't recall exactly, but I think we probably had 9 points through the first 10 minutes or so. Aside from this too-sick-for-words dunk from Jermaine Mallett, there was little going good early on. Luckily Auburn was struggling as well, with plenty of turnovers and missed threes (they were chuckers), so it was still a close game. Eventually, we broke out of the funk with some nice fastbreaks off of turnovers, some Adam Leonard threes and a few drives to the basket, and ended up scoring 36 first half points for a halftime lead.

In the second half the offense got going a bit better, with Adam Leonard sinking some big threes (4-7 for the night, including a 25 footer as the shot clock expired) and Weems and Mallett providing a decent midrange-to-inside driving game. Rhine and Jehle actually had some nice inside play, cleaning up after some nice passes or missed shots, and aside from that turnover spell described above, we pretty much cruised in the 2nd half, holding a 10-15 point lead most of the way.

Overall, the performance vs. Auburn was encouraging, but far from great. We ended up scoring 73 points, which is a huge step from the 60 or so we averaged last year, so that was nice. On the other hand, Auburn really did play pretty sloppy overall (partially due to our defense, but mostly due to their carelessness), and their turnovers really helped us build our lead. Auburn also relied a bit too much on their outside shooting (24 attempts, only 20% from 3-point range), and their misses really helped us. I say "their" misses, because most of Auburn's three point shots were pretty open, with very little pressure from the Bears. Lots of drives and kick-outs by Auburn, or poor- or over-rotation on defense by the Bears, leading to wide open three pointers. On Monday night, Auburn missed a lot. If they made a just a few more of their open threes, it could have been a different story. But hey, we could have made more too, and that's just the way it goes.

As for the Bears offense, it was scattered. Leonard made several threes while he was covered, which is encouraging. At the same time Weems missed a lot of threes (1 for 6), and I'd like to see him take less 3's and drive a bit for more mid-range shots. Those are his bread and butter.

There was very little inside game to speak of, and frankly, there seemed to be very few plays run for the post players. Very little "set up on the block with your back to the basket and try to score" like we've seen in previous years from Richards and Knapp (unsuccessfully). But that's probably a good thing, since our post players suck, and Creekmore could do very little from the block last year. But I was pretty shocked at how little we even attempted to go inside to the post. Creekmore only took 3 shots, and very few plays were run for him. I'm down on Creekmore, but I'd still like to see if he can develop as a post presence. Luckily, we didn't force it down in the post to Creekmore (as we so often did last year, with poor results), and instead relied on our athletic perimeter players (Mallet, Pickens, Weems, McFarland) to handle the ball and make something happen. That seems to be the Bears M.O. this year, at least through one game. Hopefully we can gradually mix in a better balance of inside play and start shooting better from the outside, but that's entirely up to the development and improvement of Creekmore and Patterson. If they don't get better as the year goes on, we can't force it, and will just have to find other ways to win, like we did vs. Auburn.


So there's a brief overview and my take on the Bears through the two exhibition games and the first regular season game of the season. I will follow up in Part 2 of my Season Preview with my observations and my impressions of each individual player on the Bears from what I've seen so far. Til next time....