As Vanderbilt’s offensive inconsistency continued for another week, head coach Bryce Drew has a serious conundrum on his hands.
“Our margin for error is really small,” Drew said after the Commodores’ 72-59 loss to Seton Hall in Brooklyn on Friday. “We have to shoot well, we have to be able to play much better defense.”
The Commodores’ schedule-adjusted offensive efficiency is down to 76th in the country according to Ken Pomeroy, and that figure includes preseason projections that are keeping it from sinking lower.
Vanderbilt has produced a top-50 offense by Pomeroy’s metric every year since its current crop of seniors arrived on campus. Drew has tried four different starting lineups in six games with the hope of finding some chemistry, but none have found sustained success.
Perhaps Drew’s solution is hiding in plain sight. While the loss of Luke Kornet’s shooting was always going to hurt the offense, Vanderbilt’s point guard play has been another issue this season. It just so happens that the Commodores’ starting point guard from last year is still around.
That’s right. It’s time to move Riley LaChance back to the point.
The ‘Dores need all the shooting they can get right now, and starting LaChance at point guard allows Drew to swap Joe Toye into the starting lineup for Saben Lee, who has little confidence in his outside shot and hasn’t earned the respect of opposing defenses from three.
In the loss to Seton Hall, the Pirates routinely parked center Angel Delgado under the rim whenever Djery Baptiste caught the ball on the perimeter. This almost completely eliminated Vanderbilt’s driving lanes and contributed to the team’s ghastly 21 percent shooting and seven turnovers in the second half.
This strategy makes perfect sense. Baptiste obviously isn’t going to take a 19-foot jumper, and if he initiates a dribble handoff with Lee or Larry Austin, Jr., the guard isn’t a threat to shoot either. With LaChance on the floor, this strategy doesn’t work nearly as well.
Drew felt that the Commodores got good shots and simply missed them on the day, which feels like a naive way to look at the situation, even if he may be right about that specific game.
“If I could go back and write that over, I would take those shots all day,” Drew said. “We still had the lead going into half and I thought we were getting good shots. … We did a really good job in the first half; in second half we didn’t come out with same intensity and didn’t really recover as far as making shots.”
The Commodores can’t afford to let opposing teams mix the best aspects of man-to-man defense (rebounding and pressure) with the best aspects of zone (a big man under the rim at all times) if they hope to have any success this year.
Vanderbilt already ranks toward the bottom of Division I in two-point percentage, three-point percentage and the percent of its two-point shots that get blocked, and that second point in particular is uncharacteristic of a team still with plenty of shooters.
Vanderbilt won’t shoot 30.3 percent from three all year, but Drew needs to adjust rather than rely on regression toward the mean to bring that number up.
Maybe LaChance won’t turn out to be the cure Vanderbilt needs for its offensive ineptitude, but it makes sense to at least try and find out, beginning Tuesday night against Radford.