Friday, March 05, 2010

Deacons’ Half-Court Blues

The first day Coach Dino Gaudio met with the media, back in mid-October, he talked at length of a need to establish a better half-court offense.

“I talked to those guys the other day and said `We must be a better half-court-executing offensive team,’ ‘’ Gaudio said. “We have to screen better, we have to read defenses better, we have to pass the ball a little better. We have to. We don’t have Jeff (Teague) and James (Johnson), who are just going to break guys down and go one-on-one. But I think those things are big.

“You’d better do them all year.’‘

The year, despite what I’m hearing from many people inside and out of the peanut gallery, is not over. The Deacons have hit a ditch, as they did at the end of last season. The difference this time around is there is still time to get back on the blacktop with Sunday’s final regular-season game against Clemson and next week’s ACC Tournament.

But to avoid another bitter end to what was, in mid-January, such a promising season, the Deacons are going to have score more points against set defenses. It won’t be easy because, as Gaudio said a week ago, there’s no secret to what opponents are doing. They’re clogging the lane to a) keep Ish Smith from getting all the way to the cup and, b) surround Al-Farouq Aminu, Chas McFarland and Tony Woods with bodies inside. They’re also doing a surprisingly good job of closing out on the Deacons’ best 3-point shooters, freshmen Ari Stewart and C.J. Harris and junior Gary Clark. So they’re basically double-dog daring players such as Smith, Aminu, L.D. Williams, Tony Woods, David Weaver and Chas McFarland to beat them with jump shots.

Aminu and Williams have attempted to compensate by slashing to the basket, but given that neither is a great ball-handler, the results have been painful to watch. Aminu, over the past three games, has committed 13 turnovers and made only eight field goals. Williams has committed only five turnovers in the three games, but he’s nine of 29 from the floor.

Anyone who has watched the Deacons over the course of the season knows how offensively challenged they can be. Smith and Harris are the only two threats to create their own shots, and Smith shoots 42 percent from the floor and 22 percent from 3-point range, and Harris, until his 12-point performance (that also included four turnovers) at FSU was going through a dreadful freshman slump.

So is the answer that the Deacons just don’t have enough scorers to be anything more than a middling ACC teams (have they, like water, found their own level?) or is it that Dino and his staff haven’t been able to solve a problem they knew they had way back in October?

The other, equally obvious, issue is that Wake isn’t getting enough baskets in transition. The Deacons scored four of their first six points at FSU on fast breaks, and had only one more fast-break basket the rest of the night. I’m headed off to practice in a minute and that’s one of the things I’ll be talking to Dino and the team about.

I’ll let you know what they said.