These were the biggest issues that plagued Missouri basketball in 2023-24
The sequel to Missouri basketball coach Dennis Gates’ spellbinding debut year in Columbia went the way most of them do.
The Tigers were a major letdown.
Mizzou lost 19 straight games, all against SEC opposition, to finish the year 8-24 and with a first-round exit in the SEC Tournament on Wednesday following a 64-59 loss to Georgia. MU went winless against league opposition for the first time since 1908.
But the woes are now over.
To make sure they stay that way, here’s a look at what went wrong during the disastrous 2023-24 campaign, and what the Tigers can do to make sure they correct those mistakes come November:
Missouri basketball missed in transfer portal
The biggest preseason question proved to be one of Missouri’s biggest in-season flaws.
How were the Tigers going to replace, among others, Kobe Brown, D’Moi Hodge and DeAndre Gholston?
Answer: They didn’t.
Missouri largely missed on its transfer-portal acquisitions over the last offseason. Indiana transfer Tamar Bates was consistently the lone exception.
Seven-foot-5 center Connor Vanover’s lone double-digit rebounds game came against Georgia on Wednesday. Guards Caleb Grill and John Tonje sat most of the season with injuries. Neither Jesus Carralero Martin nor Curt Lewis averaged more than 2.1 points per game in mostly reserve roles.
The Tigers can’t afford to have another portal group as poor as that.
Missouri has the No. 4-ranked recruiting class in the nation arriving next season, but it will need to support the five incoming freshmen with experience as Sean East II, Nick Honor, Noah Carter and Vanover have each exhausted their eligibility.
The college basketball transfer portal opens Sunday and closes May 1, which shapes up to be a busy 45-day period for MU’s staff.
First and foremost, Missouri needs an experienced big man. Mizzou, by a margin of three boards per game, was last in the SEC in rebounding.
Next up on the priority list: point guard. East and Honor have exhausted their eligibility. Anthony Robinson II and incoming freshman T.O. Barrett are both likely to play, but the Tigers need some experience in their backcourt.
A high-volume 3-point shooter will be high on the list of priorities, too. Nobody on the Missouri roster lofted more 3s this year than Carter and Honor, who were the only MU players to take at least 100 deep shots. But they combined for a 111-of-332 (33.4%) mark.
The year prior, four players attempted 100 triples or more. They were 244-of-618 (39.4%) on those attempts. That’s a big difference, and for a team as reliant on the 3 as Missouri, it showed in the win-loss column.
Stat sheet tells the tale
A glance at Missouri’s numbers makes it easy enough to comprehend how the kingdom crumbled.
Here are the glaring issues:
Assist-to-turnover ratio: The Tigers had 390 assists to 370 turnovers, a +20 margin. In Gates’ first year, Missouri had 169 more assists than giveaways.
Three-point shooting: This season, MU was 31.9% from 3-point range, down from 36% in 2022-23. From the field as a whole, Missouri was at 43.9%, down from 47.2%.
Rebounding: Mizzou was 338th in the nation in rebound margin (-6 per game) this season. There are 351 Division-1 teams.
Free throws: Missouri attempted 583 free throws this year, while its opponents shot 771. That’s nearly six fewer per game.
Gates has consistently said he will not deviate from the way he wants his teams to play: aggressive defense designed to create possessions; fast-paced transition offense; take the deep ball whenever an opportunity is presented.
Not much of that worked with this roster.
Depth hampered by injury woes
Gates mentioned Mizzou’s injury troubles on each of March 1, 2, 5, 7 and 11, which is every meeting with local media between the beginning of the month and the SEC Tournament.
The coach often said he wasn’t making excuses for MU’s poor run, but every mention of the Tigers’ five in-season surgeries and injury woes made it more clear that he saw it as a major player in MU’s slump.
Grill injured his wrist against Wichita State on Dec. 3 and never returned. Tonje never seemed to reach full health with a preseason foot injury before his season, unofficially, came to an end Jan. 13. Kaleb Brown played two games in November before he was done for the year with a stress fracture. Trent Pierce had surgery on an infected ear, but returned before the end of the season. East sat out a pair of games through the long slump with a knee injury. Walk-on Danny Stephens was on a knee cart for the entire season.
Here’s how that hurt: Missouri went 4-15 in games decided by 10 points or fewer this season. That pushed the Tigers to dead last in the nation in KenPom’s “luck” index, which measures how a team’s record compares to its expected record — how you perform in coin-flip games.
Depth surely had a role to play in that, as the Tigers were forced to look further and further along the bench for minutes.
In October, the Columbia Daily Tribune asked Dennis Gates about his roster size, which at that time stood at a stout 18 players.
Gates said he’d prefer to have five more.
It’s not the only reason the Tigers went barren late in their SEC Tournament loss to the Bulldogs, but five players registered over 30 minutes in that contest, while five others played eight minutes or fewer.
Beyond its main corps, Missouri was missing impactful minutes. The Tigers ranked 214th in the nation for points off the bench, with 17.7 per game.
It’s a new era in the sport. Gates has previously mentioned that the scholarship limit of 13 players is now less of a roadblock, as NIL funds could help bring extra players on board without the need for an open scholarship.
Expect Missouri’s roster to eclipse 20 players next season.
The Star has partnered with the Columbia Daily Tribune for coverage of Missouri Tigers athletics.
