Basketball

Baylor Basketball Preps for Homestand

By chris ⋅ December 11, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

While the upcoming schedule is far from daunting, the next seven games in Waco, TX is going to go a long way to polishing this team up in preparation for conference play.  I’m not going to go into much detail for each of these games, because frankly it doesn’t really matter what their 7-deep rotation looks like, these are teams Baylor should be beating going away.

I do think there are things that should be accomplished during this stretch, though.  Here are four keys we need to work on in order to be successful in conference play:

1. Killer Instinct -
   For the past few years, Baylor has struggled to stay focused and really put opponents down when they had the opportunity.  This homestand will offer a number of opportunities when Baylor will have large leads and they will have the chance to either lose focus and play soft, or keep pushing and pushing and just keep piling on without mercy.  We really need to lose our nice guy approach and bury every single one of these teams.  There’s no question that we have the ability to do so, it’s just going to take the mental toughness and desire to dominate everyone that’s put in front of us.
2. Get the Younger Players Involved -
   Quincy Acy has been a force so far, and Fred Ellis has shown up in some games so far, but these seven games are golden opportunities to get all these younger players time on the court to learn the offense, defense and how to play with each other.  Anthony Jones in particular needs to log some big minutes.  He’s such a great talent, and you can see the ability that he has, but he’s got to have the opportunity to put it together on the court.  If we can put some of these teams down early, and give him a semi-pressure-free environment to learn and improve in, I think it will pay dividends later in the year.  And even with Acy averages 8 points and more than 4 boards a game, he’s got plenty of areas to improve on, and this is a great chance for  him to increase his comfort level, and be an even greater focus of the team.
3. Defense, Defense, Defense -
   None of these teams are going to have the athletes that Baylor has on its roster, but that likely means that their staff’s are going to be more focused on fundamentals and team play.  While I’m not one of the “Drew can’t coach” crowd, I think it’s obvious that we play worse against technically and fundamentally sound teams than those that like to play an up-tempo game like we do.  We have got to learn how to deal with those that play at a slower pace, and that always starts on the defensive end of the court.  As long as we play 3 or 4 guard sets, we are going to be facing mis-matches that even less talented teams will be able to exploit.  Despite our big improvements defensively this year, we need to be a sound defensive team that can depend on the defensive end of the floor to make our leads stand up and also to give us some easy, or even just additional, opportunities at points.  This is even more important since we don’t have a strong post presence to make the lead stand up.  We will largely be a jump-shooting team, and that means we need to be very sound on defense so that we don’t give back leads as easily as we build them.
4. Run the Offense -
   I know I just said I wasn’t one of the “Drew can’t coach” crowd, and I promise I’m not.  I do think that we need to make the most of this opportunity to drill the team into running the offense.  Making crisp passes, taking smart shots, and consistently driving the ball to the basket.  We need to get to the point where driving and dishing is a habit, and where the post players touch the ball on every possession, without exception.  I love that we have wonderful three point shooters, and I think we should take advantage of them, but those three pointers are a lot easier to make when they come in the flow of the offense rather than after hovering around the three point line for 20 seconds until we get stuck with 5 seconds left on the play clock.

This is a great chance for us to improve as a team, grab 7 pretty easy wins and hopefully end up in the Top 20 before our showdown with A&M in early January.  Not all the games are gimmees, but they are all games we should expect to win and be very disappointed if we don’t.   I hope we make the most of this stretch, because it could really pay off come February and March.

Tags: Basketball, keys, schedule