The UW-Whitewater men’s basketball team will hold its final tune-up for the regular season today (Friday Nov. 9) when they play host to Elmhurst College in a two 20 minute half scrimmage at Kachel Gym in Williams Center.
Yesterday I watched, for an extended time, my first
UW-Whitewater men’s basketball practice. Several of observations I came away
with:
1: The intensity of practice. That intensity was very
noticeable last year.
2: The focus on defense and rebounding. It is a must now in
the Warhawk system.
3. The overall athleticism and how that fits into the WW
system.
4. Last year’s
returnees experience and attitude shows in practice
5. Last year Chris
Davis led the WIAC in both scoring and rebounding. This year the scoring
especially will be accomplished more “by committee.”
6. WW returns three
of the top 15 in the conference in assists (Merg, Bryson, Young)
7. I look for Luke
Knoble to be among the top inside players in the conference. Not flashy but as solid
as any big man in the WIAC.
8. The Hawks have
several quality freshmen and transfers. As is always the case, how will they be
able to play within the WW system and blend in with the returnees.
Those are some of the things that jumped out at me while
watching practice. Will I come away with the same thoughts after watching today’s
scrimmage? Sure hope so.
I'll be blogging both during and following today's scrimmage.
Get an early start to your weekend and drop by Kachel Gym this afternoon at 4:30 and check out your Warhawk men's basketball team - the defending NCAA Division III national champions.
Seeing #2 as a UWW focus is scary (from a "rest of the WIAC" standpoint). I think that this is part of the piece that the Warhawks had missed over the years a little bit and it was the reason that they weren't able to get over the hump nationally until last year.
ReplyDeleteI think historically, UWW had very talented offensive and especially very athletic players. These players were able to have success earlier in the year before team defenses have really figured themselves out.
But I think that UWW has struggled (I'm not talking major struggles, but minor ones) against elite teams because the other elite teams have put in the work defensively to continue to improve.
This may just be a perception thing and it's a generalization (I don't think it is true of every UWW team prior to last year), but I had thought that UWW was going to be able to make a good run purely because of their defensive intensity last year, and they proved me right.
Elite teams need to be able to grind out victories as opposed to simply trying to outscore people, and we really saw that from the Warhawks last season.
The other thing that I saw from last year's UWW team that was, shall we say, atypical, was their ability to take care of the basketball and their willingness to share the basketball (#'s 5 and 6 above).
Here's the turnover margin and assist to turnover ratio from the last four years:
08-09 -0.97 0.95
09-10 -1.24 1.09
10-11 -0.04 1.03
11-12 +2.67 1.12
The dramatic upturn in the turnover margin means that this is as many as 3-4 more possessions that UWW gets a chance to score instead of the opponent. That may not seem like a lot, but it actually has twice this impact. It's 6-8 chances to increase a lead (take away an opponent's chance AND provide an offensive chance).
That's huge, especially when you have the type of players that Whitewater does who can create something out of nothing... and when they're able to create AND look for their teammates, it creates an offensive machine that's very hard to stop.