Big 12 play begins!
In the past 22 days, Kansas has played just two basketball games. Hopefully that period of rest around the holidays has them healthy and rested, because the meat grinder that is the Big 12 conference schedule begins New Year’s Eve. First up is a home game against West Virginia, who Bart Torvik ranks 9th in the conference but still 39th in the country. Yeah, this league is going to be tough.
West Virginia, like so many Big 12 opponents, is a better defensive team than an offensive one. Torvik ranks their defense 33rd nationally with just the 72nd ranked offense. For comparison, Kansas sits at 10th overall, with the 31st ranked offense and great defense sitting at 6th in college basketball. West Virginia tries to slow the game down, rating just 253nd in pace this season, turning the game into a half court contest where they hound teams into taking bad shots. The Mountaineers are top 10 nationally allowing just 42.3% of their opponents’ twos to go in, while blocking a whopping 15.9% of opponents’ shots. The Mountaineers aren’t the turnover machine they’ve been in years past, ranking 60th defensively, so their plan won’t be to generate steals and turnovers as much as it will be to funnel two point shots into the paint where 6’11 center Eduardo Andre is an elite rim protector. Hunter Dickinson doesn’t draw a ton of fouls, but if he could get Andre into foul trouble it would certainly make this game easier.
Offensively, West Virginia wouldn’t qualify as being particularly great in any area, aside from free throw shooting. They put up a LOT of threes (48.8% of their shots), but barely rate inside the top 100 in hitting those threes at a 35.4% clip. Their 2P% is a mediocre 52.7%, they don’t crash the offensive boards much at all, they rarely get to the line as a result of their shot selection, and their TO% is just ok at 16.7%. The short story here is that West Virginia will try to make life miserable for Kansas when the Jayhawks have the ball, forcing them to decide between threes and heavily guarded twos. On the other end, they’ll hope to hit enough threes to put even more pressure on the Kansas offense.
Prediction
Given that Kansas shoots about as few threes as any team around, I don’t love this matchup. Hunter Dickinson won’t have any huge offensive advantage and forcing him the ball likely won’t generate easy looks, though again, if he can draw contact from West Virginia’s shot blocking machine in Eduardo Andre and get him into foul trouble, things would largely open up offensively.
I don’t like seeing Kansas go up against defensively-motivated teams, and that’s a really bad thing in the current Big 12. I don’t think West Virginia has the overall talent for me to pick a loss in Allen Fieldhouse, but I can see this being another game where the KU offense is frustrating and has a hard time generating good shots. KU has faced a few slower-paced teams this year and they’ve managed to dictate a higher-paced game against most of them, so if they can get out and run in transition, not allowing the Mountaineers’ half court defense to set up, they may get enough easy buckets to build up a comfortable lead. I hope they do, since there’s no indication that they’ll go nuts from three or get many shots from the free throw line. Regardless of how that aspect of the game plays out, I just don’t see KU dropping this game.
Kansas 79, West Virginia 71