Early Results and the Battle 4 Atlantis Thanksgiving Tournament

Depending on your families’ preference for timing of Thanksgiving dinner, Villanova’s 1:00pm EST game against USC in the Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament will most likely start your 8 hours of eating and watching TV on Thanksgiving.  That makes me happy, especially because do to prior obligations I have watched way too little of any  Villanova game so far this season.  It really is a shame.  But Thursday is just the appetizer to the main dish served on Friday at 9:30pm EST, a likely match-up against Kansas and Andrew Wiggins, the Maple Jordan.

Again that match-up only comes to fruition if we beat USC, which in all likelihood should happen.  No matter what happens however, we will play 3 games, and with the exception of Kansas we should be favored in the other two matchups.

With four games down against shitty competition, there are some interesting early season trends and numbers that I am interested in seeing how they shake out when the competition over these next 3 games improves.  So let’s dig in.

Is Ochefu really this bad offensively?

Through the first four games as a team, Villanova is shooting 60.6% from 2.  Currently that ranks 7^th in the country, and is largely do to the fact that we haven’t played anybody.  Despite being the tallest player on the court in 3 of our 4 games so far Mr. Ochefu is shooting just 28.6%.  According to hoop-math.com, an absolutely fantastic database, Ochefu hasn’t hit a jump shot yet this season and is only shooting 37.2% on shots at the rim, which overall the team is making 65.7% of and the D1 average is 60.0%.

Look, Ochefu is in there to challenge and block shots and rebound, but we need him to be able to score a little bit.  While this is just a sample size of four games, the numbers are pretty incredible, and I am interested in seeing how he moves forward.

3 Point Shooting

I talked about both offensive and defensive 3-point shooting in the season preview, and well, the early results are not too pretty.  As a team we are shooting 25.5% from 3 so far.  Bell and Hilliard are almost exactly at their averages last year, 36% and 32% respectively, but Arcidiacono has made only 3 of his 19 attempts thus far.  JVP, who really knows better than to take a lot of threes, is only 1 of 11 to start.  Arcidiacono is the key as last year he attempted the most threes – I will get to his struggles in a minute – but we need to shoot better than 25.5% if we are going anywhere this year.

Defensively, our opponents are shooting at an average rate of 34% from 3, but we are once again conceding way too many 3 point attempts.  Opponents are taking a whopping 41.1% of their shots from 3 this year, good for 331^st in the country.  Maybe this is a result of them being down for long stretches of the game, and so they are jacking more threes to get back in it.  Let’s see what happens in closer games against better teams.

James Bell is killing it

 Bell has been on fire so far.  I neglected Bell in the season preview because over the last two seasons his numbers were almost identical, which made it hard for me to believe and or predict that Bell’s impact would change.  In the four games this year Bell’s %shots while he is on the floor has jumped significantly.  In 2012 he took 18.2% of Villanova’s shots.  In 2013 that number rose slightly to 19.7% of our shots, 4^th on the team.  But in 2014 thus far that number is 29.5% and just a tick below JVP’s team leading 29.6%.

The difference it seems is that Bell is taking a lot more shots at the rim to go along with his 3 point shooting.  In his previous 3 seasons Bell has never taken more than 20% of his shot attempts at the rim, but this year that number has jumped up to 32.1%.  It seems as if Bell’s off the dribble game has improved, and that is likely the reason for his increased shot attempts from close range.  Again let’s see what happens against a good team first.

 Struggling Arcidiacono is adjusting to a new role

Two years ago when Wayns decided to get paid and Ty Johnson was absolutely awful in his one season and decided to transfer, Jay knew he was in trouble at the point guard spot.  Arcidiacono was already coming to the Main Line, but we had no one else.  That’s when Jay brought on board the two transfers in Ennis and Chennault.  If you read between the lines in the quotes from Jay in the Chennault piece about hardship transfers, it’s pretty clear that Chennault was only really intended to be a stop gap backup for one season.  Ennis was the guy Jay had in mind to run the point alongside Arcidiacono, and that’s why Chennault almost transferred this season.

Moving along to this season, here is a nice quote from Arcidiacono on media day before the season started:

“It really doesn't matter who brings the ball up, because someone is going to have to get us into the offense... It could be Dylan, it could be Taj [Bell]. There's no point guard, shooting guard”

Allow me to translate.  We are going to play more ball handlers at once, and Arcidiacono is going to more or less play like a shooting guard.  This is essentially what happened with both Scottie and Nardi in years past, ball handler in the early years and more of a scorer in the later years.

With Ennis hurt – his cast is off by the way and he is likely to get a tiny, tiny bit of playing time in the tournament – Hilliard and Chennault have assumed his role as main ball handler while Arcidiacono is adjusting to playing more off the ball.  That change is seen in the fact that his ARate of 23.6 from a year ago is way down to only 13.4 this year.  Conversely Chennault and Hilliard’s have increased a lot.

It’s not easy for a guy who has played his entire life with the ball in his hands on every possession to suddenly have to give it up so someone else runs the show.  In the long run this will help our team as Arcidiacono is a very capable second ball handler, but it will take time for him to adjust.  I think he will bounce back nicely in this tournament and he will continue to improve throughout the year.