UP @USF, 02/23, 8:00 pm CBSSN

USF is favored by 8 points, with ESPN analytics giving the Dons an 81.6% chance of winning.

If the Pilots are going to sneak out of the bottom 4, they must win tonight. Assuming they even got out of town.

The Blazers sant on the tarmac for several hours befor their flight to Sacramento was cancelled.

Geezaldinho wrote:The Blazers sant on the tarmac for several hours befor their flight to Sacramento was cancelled.

The Pilots men's team did not have to contend with the same delays the Blazers and WBB endured.

The team's flight to SFO was on time and the guys are ready to play!

Couldn't find a way to watch tonight.

Perry starting? I guess Meadows is hurt again?

Meadows came off the bench and looks just fine. The Pilots' defense, on the other hand, does not look fine at all.

Fortunately USF's is nearly as bad

It's a pain in the ass for me to figure out how to watch it... but man is it fun watching the Pilots play with CBS SN's iconic college hoops theme music playing before the breaks.

The 4th foul call on T-rob might be the worst call I've ever seen made in college basketball. Absolute joke, and I'm not one to complain about the refs.

Announcers crying about that last call on Shabazz but for some reason I've got no sympathy

These announcers completely suck. Probably showed up in USF face paint.

Dean Murdoch wrote:These announcers completely suck. Probably showed up in USF face paint.

At least one of the refs did, too.

Maybe someone that knows more about hoops than me can chip in here, but it seems like the greatest mystery about this version of the Pilots is how much trouble they have defensively.

Per Kenpom they are ranked 31st in “minutes continuity” from last year, but they have plummeted from 196th last year to 270th in defensive efficiency. That’s a huge fall for a team with only two contributing newcomers.

Dean Murdoch wrote:Maybe someone that knows more about hoops than me can chip in here, but it seems like the greatest mystery about this version of the Pilots is how much trouble they have defensively.

Per Kenpom they are ranked 31st in “minutes continuity” from last year, but they have plummeted from 196th last year to 270th in defensive efficiency. That’s a huge fall for a team with only two contributing newcomers.

Loss of Chris Austin? Gorosito getting a lot of minutes that Chris would have taken if available.

Extremely fun but frustrating game last night. Too many bad turnovers by the Pilots down the stretch made the difference.

Inexcusable to not find a way to improve our three-point defense over the course of the season. Would be interesting to see a side-by-side comparison of each of our opponents’ three-point percentage for the season vs what the Pilots allowed them to do.

Frustrating that we regressed so notably this season after all the momentum and returning experienced players from last year.

NoPoNeighbor wrote:Would be interesting to see a side-by-side comparison of each of our opponents’ three-point percentage for the season vs what the Pilots allowed them to do.

Starting to look at this, but the last three opponents, SMC, SCU and USF, made 15, 16 and 16 respectively, averaging 46.5% combined. Yikes!

So I looked at just the WCC opponents, and compared their 3P performance against UP versus their season performance minus Pilot games, i.e. everybody else on their schedule including non-conference opponents.

SCU, GU, USF and LMU torched the Pilots from 120% to 125% better than their other opponents.  SMC was 111% better.  BYU and USD were about a wash, +/- 3% points.  And UP held PU and UOP to 93% of their performance against everybody else.  Overall the conference is hitting 36.4% of their threes against everyone else and 40.6% against UP.

Announcers last night said UP has given up the most 3s (raw number, as opposed to percentage) among WCC teams during conference play.

In my mind, the 3 point defense struggles come down to not having a playable big man. To my eye, many of the threes are coming from scrambles after offensive rebounds and from kick outs after the defense has collapsed to help in the paint. In the case of the St Mary’s game, they even played a pretty terrible zone for huge portions of that game to try to compensate for no defensive presence in the paint. That also didn’t work out very well. If this team had a big man that was even an average rebounder and rim protector, then they would be in a lot better shape. It’s especially frustrating because this was the biggest need last offseason as well.

USF shot 5-25 on 3P shots tonight at BYU. Shabazz was only Don in double figures, and only made 3-10 3P shots. Guess their shooting arms were tired from Thursday's game.