The Missouri Tigers missed out on the NCAA tournament last season. They will try to repair their image and the way they play basketball this season. They have a new coach and a chance to chart a new course. However, will that matter when the tip-off of the season begins?
What Went Wrong Last Season?
The Tigers won only three road games last season, marking them as one of several teams in major college basketball which could not carry a consistent style of play from home games to the road. The Tigers did not travel well. They won at North Carolina State in non-conference play and won at Arkansas and Auburn in conference games. That was it. The Tigers lost the rest of their road games, a sign of a team with little resilience.
Statistically, Missouri was typically soft on defense in its road losses. The Tigers allowed at least 70 points in all but one of their SEC losses last season, and at least 77 points in five of those losses. Missouri went 0-3 against Kentucky and Florida, the two really strong teams in the conference. Missouri came somewhat close to beating Kentucky at home, but a lack of interior defense doomed the Tigers to an 84-79 defeat which kept them on the outside as far as an NCAA tournament berth was concerned.
Missouri played a modestly challenging non-conference schedule with two NCAA-bound teams, UCLA and North Carolina State, but a lot of the teams on the Tigers’ schedule didn’t pan out last season. This left the Tigers untested when they got to the SEC, and it showed.
The defensive rankings magnify how bad Missouri was at that end of the court last season. The Tigers were seventh in the SEC in overall field goal percentage defense, but they were 11th in the SEC in two-point field goal percentage and ninth in three-point field goal percentage defense.
Missouri was next to last (13th) out of 14 SEC teams in terms of forcing turnovers. The Tigers turned over opponents only 10.3 times per game. With Missouri committing an average of 18.4 turnovers per game and handing out 10.1 assists per game, the assist-turnover differential was hugely negative for the Tigers, and this is clearly something the team failed to overcome during the season. A blowout loss to Florida in the SEC Tournament ensured that Missouri would not go to March Madness.
Offseason Changes
The Tigers lose their highest-impact players, also their foremost scorers from last season. Jabari Brown and Jordan Clarkson both went to the pros to collect a paycheck. Brown was the team’s elite bomber, a three-point shooter who wasn’t afraid to launch early and often.
Brown hit 41 percent of threes and was a high-volume shooter. He was extremely hard to defend. Clarkson was the dribble-drive guy for the team. He had a lightning-quick first step and was able to parlay that into a 17.5-point-per-game average. Missouri will try to replace these two guards with newcomers Deuce Bello, Tramaine Isabell, Jimmy Barton, Namon Wright, Montaque Gill-Caesar, and Keith Shamburger. Wes Clark is a holdover from the 2013-2014 roster.
Projected Finish
The Tigers will finish in the top half of the SEC, but that’s no special achievement, since the SEC had only three NCAA tournament teams last season. Missouri is taking a step back as a program and will probably need at least one year to get all of its new backcourt players to play well together. The Tigers will go to the NIT again.
Pick: Sixth in the SEC, NIT
