What’s next for South Carolina basketball? Pray for a better matchup in NCAAs
Tournaments are fickle experiments. Fun? Absolutely. Fair? No way.
March is glorious because March is unpredictable. Upsets. Buzzer beaters. Tennessee losing early (OK, maybe we saw that coming). But both the conference and NCAA Tournaments can sometimes feel like lotteries.
After winning a school-record 25 regular-season games and nearly snatching the SEC regular-season title, the Gamecocks came out on the wrong side of a four-way tiebreaker and fell to the 5-seed in the conference tournament.
South Carolina missed it on a double bye, a chance for coach Lamont Paris to add another milestone to this breakthrough campaign. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was the opponent. Waiting for the Gamecocks on Friday was Auburn — the same Tigers team that blew USC out by 40 back in February.
It’s a terrible matchup.
“I think that’s a fair assessment,” Paris said Friday after the Gamecocks’ 86-55 loss to Auburn. “I would have to say, just based on our personnel. They’re suited to take away some of the things, and there aren’t many teams that have been able to do that. But they’re suited to take away some of the things we like that make us comfortable.”
A day before the game, Paris candidly said he debated throwing away the tape from that first contest. Auburn shot 61% from the field that night. Paris message: There’s no chance the Tigers do that again.
“That would be some real bad karma if they could do that twice in a row against us,” he said with a grin.
Well, Paris might need a new rabbit’s foot. Perhaps there’s a shrink along Broadway who can right his juju because, well, Auburn did it again.
It was downright silly. The Tigers were shooting peas into the ocean. Their numbers did take a little slide — this go-round, they only hit 49% of their shots, a mark that included 42 points in the paint and a 47% clip from beyond the arc. Even worse: South Carolina made just over a quarter of its shots.
Perhaps Paris will reconsider his past choice. This film should end up in a Nashville dumpster.
The only thing it was indicative of is bad fortune. It was a brutal draw. The lone takeaway should be this: South Carolina needs to create some positive mojo ahead of Selection Sunday and into next week.
What Gamecocks need in March Madness
If the bracketology predictions stand, the Gamecocks will be a 5-seed in next week’s NCAA Tournament, which means they’ll be the dreaded 5 vs. 12 “favorite.” For the Gamecocks fans who haven’t thought much about March Madness in a few years, the first-round games between the No. 5 and No. 12 seed lead to an upset nearly 40% of the time. It’s not even close to a sure bet.
Thankfully, South Carolina will not play Auburn in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The hope is that the Gamecocks’ karma turns around over the next 48 hours, that the selection committee does not put USC against another squad that presents a really difficult matchup.
Which would be what exactly?
Great question. For starters, Paris has pushed back at the notion that South Carolina — No. 354 nationally in KenPom’s tempo metric — struggles when opposing teams push the pace. Which is interesting given that in games where South Carolina has under 68 possessions, it is 23-3 but just 3-4 in games with more than 68 possessions.
“Because they were scoring so many baskets, we weren’t getting stops,” Paris said. “Then they were pressing some on the end of that; it got bogged down a little bit for us on the offensive end. That was a big part of what happened.”
When asked why Auburn presents such a tough matchup for South Carolina, Tigers’ coach Bruce Pearl was respectfully coy. To answer that question honestly, he said, would be giving up secrets he didn’t want future opponents to know.
“The other thing, too, this doesn’t get enough talk. It’s about matchups,” Pearl said. “I’m not going to tell you why it’s a good matchup for us and a bad one for them. It just is. There’s things about the way we play and they work that sort of works out for us.”
Some of it, he mentioned, begins with Auburn’s personnel. The Tigers are not just loaded with incredible post players — 6-foot-10 Johni Broome, 6-7 Chad Baker-Mazara, 6-7 Chaney Johnson — but post players who can step out and knock down a triple.
They force other teams’ forwards/centers to step out of the paint, leaving lanes and room to operate. On Friday, the Tigers scored 42 points in the paint.
“There’s a temptation to settle,” Pearl added, “because South Carolina does such a great job of sinking and stripping and ripping on penetration, things like that.”
It all starts on defense. When South Carolina isn’t forcing stops, it isn’t able to surprise teams on offense. It gets out of rhythm, out of sorts. If the officials allow the game to be chippy, as they did Friday, that throws the Gamecocks’ game plan even more off-kilter.
All South Carolina can do now is hope. Hope for a squad that doesn’t go 10-deep. A team that doesn’t have sharp-shooting big men and the superb coaching to exploit even the smallest trends.
Hope for a solid matchup in March Madness.
