Cal WBB falls to Louisville, 70-63

The Bears again turn the ball over too frequently in defeat

photo via @calwbball instagram

I’ve come up with a pretty simple tool to predict the outcome of a Cal WBB game: I look up the ability of an opponent’s defense to force turnovers.

The Bears are 19-5 this season. When they play a team outside of the top 75 nationally in defensive turnover percentage, the Bears are a spectacular 16-1. Those 16 games include impressive wins over top 25 NC State, Florida State, and Alabama. The only loss is an inexplicably random no-show against Clemson.

And when the Bears play a team in the top 75 nationally in defensive turnover percentage, they are 3-4, with four really ugly losses and some wins that weren’t great performances against teams that aren’t particularly good except for an exceptional ability to force turnovers.

In short, Cal is a really excellent team unless or until they face a team that can credibly play a high ball pressure defense.

I wish it weren’t this way. I would like to believe that this is a flaw that could somehow be fixed in season. But this is a veteran-led team with a 4th year senior and three 5th year seniors playing the bulk of the available minutes. Barring some kind of massive, unrealistic offensive style change that would almost certainly do more harm than good, this is the fatal flaw that you have no choice but to live with.

When Cal faces teams that DON’T play pressure defense, like Stanford, NC State, and Florida State, the result is beautiful flowing team basketball. When Cal faces teams that DO play pressure defense, like Duke, North Carolina, and Louisville, the result is basketball that is . . . hard to watch.

On Wednesday night on the road against Louisville, Cal turned the ball over 23 times in a 74 possession game. That’s 31% of their offensive possessions.

That by itself would probably have been enough to earn Louisville the win, but the double whammy of these pressure defenses is that Cal tends to get sped up and off-kilter. When the Bears don’t turn it over, they are too often taking rushed shots and even their in-rhythm shots miss at a higher percentage. Against Duke, UNC, and Louisville Cal produced their worst, 2nd worst, and 5th worst shooting performances of the season.

There are other things about this game I could talk about. Cal’s bench played a combined 43 minutes and attempted exactly one shot, and it’s increasingly clear that if Cal wants offensive production they have to run their starters heavy minutes. But a glimmer of hope came from a 13 minute performance from Texas transfer Gisella Maul, who had barely played over the last month for unclear reasons (injury?) but scored Cal’s only bench points while also dishing out a couple of assists and pulling down 5 rebounds. I could talk about Cal’s defensive performance, which was pretty solid considering the fact that Cal had to do a bunch of scrambling in transition off of their own offensive turnovers.

But it’s hard to talk about anything else when one single factor all but eliminates your chances of winning and overshadows anything else that happens on the court. In the first half, when the story of this game became clear, I posted the following semi-joke:

I do earnestly believe that this Cal team could make a Cinderella run in the NCAA tournament if they get the right matchups. When you have a team that can hit 18 threes in a game, you can catch really good teams by surprise. Likely early round hosts like Kansas State, TCU, or Kentucky who don’t play pressure defense could be upset candidates.

But if Cal happens to draw a first round opponent who can play credible pressure defense, it’s very possible that this fun, unexpected season ends in quick and grisly fashion.

I have no solutions for this problem. Achilles had his heel, superman has his kryptonite, Cal WBB has pressure defenses.

Next up is top 5 Notre Dame, a team that doesn’t really make a point to force a ton of turnovers. But they do have Hannah Hidalgo, who averages 4 steals a game, and they led Stanford by the hilarious-but-terrifying score of 72-24 at one point on Wednesday night, so brace yourselves for the coming storm.