Shouts to Andrei over at Paint Touches, as he very helpfully answered the call I put out at the top of the recap of Marquette’s 76-73 loss to Villanova. My biggest flaw as a basketball observer/recapper/blogger
is that I stink at recognizing what is happening live. As such, when I saw Chase Ross badly miss a three-pointer as Marquette needed a three to tie Villanova in the final seven seconds on Saturday, I really needed to see the game tape to see exactly what went wrong for the Golden Eagles.
And so: Video of those 7.3 seconds so we can break down the *ahem* break down.
Okay, let’s set the stage. It’s Nigel James inbounding in front of the bench. Michael Phillips is in the far corner as we’re looking at it from the TNT camera angle. Royce Parham starts in the near corner, with Chase Ross and Adrien Stevens up top and Ross closer to the camera of the two. For simplicity, I’m just going to refer to the Villanova players by who they’re initially defending as it starts, their identities don’t really matter here. It’s also important to remember that in this case, Villanova doesn’t care in the slightest if Marquette gets a layup, since the score is 76-73. They can completely sell out at the three-point line and ignore the paint because it does not matter.
As we pick up the action in the clip, Parham has started his cut from the near corner to out past the far free throw line elbow to almost as far as the three-point line. Everyone’s defenders are right with their man. I’ve got no problems with anything here, because with 7.3 seconds left, everything is still an option, up to and including masking James and his 7-for-9 three-point shooting on the day as the inbounder. Have him throw the trigger pass and perhaps part of the plan is to try and catch Nova ball watching and lose track of James.
James lobs the inbounds pass to Parham and steps inbounds. Parham lands with the ball on the three-point line, bringing his defender along with him. Stevens starts switching sides of the court with Ross sliding towards the ball underneath Stevens. Neither man does anything to impact the other guy’s defender, so Villanova just switches, leaving Stevens’ man to just turn around and try to impact Parham’s intent with the ball. Phillips starts moving towards the ball, bringing his defender with him. In theory, he’s starting to move to screen James’ defender as James shifts to the corner, but for now, Parham is effectively triple teamed because James’ defender is right there with him as well.
This is where the clock starts, with the design of how to get the ball inbounds resulting in the guy with the ball with the clock running in a triple team. This is already slightly doomed.
According to the TNT broadcast clock, 1.3 seconds have elapsed in this possession to this next screenshot. There are still six seconds left which is forever, given that by rule, you need 0.3 seconds to catch and shoot. However, Parham has bailed out of his situation by handing it off to Ross, who is out by the Al McGuire Court logo partially because Parham’s landing spot on the three-point line allowed the Wildcat originally defending Stevens to just hang out there, and thus the whole thing is now moving further away from the basket.
It is at this time that I want you to look at Royce Parham’s location in this next still and compare it to the previous one.
Y’all, Royce Parham traveled and the referees didn’t call it.
He lands on the three-point line with the ball, and without dribbling, he moves both feet a good two feet beyond the arc. 1) That’s traveling, 2) that has contributed to pushing Ross even further away from the rim. Phillips is doing what I presume is his job here, which is screening James’ defender, but that just means that Phillips’ defender says “oh, I’ll just stay here in the corner since the guy shooting 7-for-9 has walked over here.”
At no point has anyone other than Parham gotten anywhere near what you would call “open,” and I’m only assigning credit to Parham for getting open because he went and got the inbounds pass completely cleanly.
As the clock hits 5.1 seconds to go, the ball is out of Ross’ hands. He took the handoff from Parham and immediately rose and fired, letting loose as Parham’s defender gets in his face and his own defender is right there, too. This is a contested shot and is by default not a good shot. That’s before we take into account that Ross is shooting 26% on three-pointers on the season as he lets this go, and an absolutely disastrous 15% in Big East games….. and he came into the game shooting 2-for-20, which is 10%.
But that’s not my problem here.
My problem is that no one has moved. Adrien Stevens and Chase Ross switching sides up top with zero impact on the defenders and Nigel James walking to the corner as Michael Phillips moves approximately 12 feet to screen James’ man is the only action here. There is no second option, not really, because James is never an option for anyone to get him the ball. Stevens is the only one on the near side of the court, and if Ross were to throw him a skip pass here, it would most likely be easily tipped or intercepted by his defender. No one is open. No one is mid-cut or mid-screen to create a second option.
This was, 100%, drawn up for “get it to Chase and let him shoot it.”
With 7.3 seconds left.
They had one idea with no backup or secondary ideas and that idea was “Let the 26% shooter fire away.” It wasn’t even “Let’s do this clever set of screens to get Chase open to shoot it.” Nope, just “hand Chase the ball” with zero trickeration or attempt to mislead the Nova defense in the slightest.
The idea was not “let the guy shooting 78% in this game (James) fire away.”
The idea was not “Let the guy shooting 38% on the year and 47% in Big East play (Stevens) fire away.” Maybe we can let that slide because Stevens was 0-for-3 behind the arc in this game and maybe the coaching staff says “hey, let’s not let that guy on this day decide the game.” No objection to that idea from me.
I don’t even hate the idea of shooting with five seconds left because that opens the door to an offensive rebound and a kickout for a second try. But I do hate the idea of making Ross be the one to shoot the ball with five seconds left with absolutely zero other action in the play.
And that brings us to…..
3.6 seconds left to play as Ross’ shot dully clonks off the backboard after going long over the rim and caroms to the floor. At least two Villanova players have a prime opportunity to get the rebound which is about to clatter to their feet and create a scrum on the floor for the time remaining. Ross is on the ground in front of the bench as he attempted to draw a landing space defensive foul on Parham’s defender.
Maybe if Ross hits iron at least, maybe then the ball pops up into the air and maybe Phillips, Parham, or Stevens haul it in and whip it to the otherwise unattended James in front of the Marquette bench. Like I said, that’s why shooting it with five seconds left makes sense. But he didn’t and it didn’t and they didn’t.
Ball game.
Again, as I said in the recap: Marquette did not lose this game because of this. The previous 39 minutes and 54 seconds contained a multitude of reasons why they did lose.
But deciding “Well, Chase Ross is a senior, he deserves to shoot this, and we’re only going to run a half-assed action to get him a handoff to shoot it from 30-plus feet” is how you fail to win the game.
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