Cal WBB Recap: A turnover-filled road split

The Bears suffer painful defeat at Duke but salvage the weekend with a win over Wake Forest

photo via calbears.com

The bad news? Cal WBB had 141 total possessions against Duke and Wake Forest this week, and turned it over an astounding 59 times. That’s a hard-to-fathom 42% turnover rate.

The good news? Cal managed to win one of those two games. Pretty comfortably, in fact!

Duke 72, Cal 38

I suppose we have to talk about what happened on Thursday night against Duke first, because it was as sobering a defeat as I can recall. You might remember that I was a little leery about this game:

Duke specifically may represent a tough challenge for Cal because the Blue Devils do two things defensively that are important against Cal. First, they force lots of turnovers, which has been the relative weakness for Cal’s offense. Secondly, they are good at preventing teams from attempting 3 point shots.

It appears I wasn’t alone, based on Charmin Smith’s postgame comments:

In preparing for them, I thought one of two things would happen. I thought that we could do really well or that we would turn over 35 times. That's what I thought coming into the game.

Our worst fears came true - Cal turned it over 31 times and only attempted 12 threes all game long. To be fair, it’s hard to attempt a 3 if you turn it over before you get to attempt a shot, but anybody who watched the game can attest to the fact that Duke was incredibly active and extended their defensive pressure out well beyond the free throw line. They were not going to let Cal get open looks from three.

But anybody can extend out their defensive pressure. What impressed me about Duke was how well they defended at every level. They didn’t allow easy entry passes. They stayed in front of Cal’s ball handlers when they attempted to drive past their pressure. It was as comprehensive a defensive performance as I can remember since Nikki Caldwell was perfecting anti-basketball at UCLA.

It makes it hard to talk about this game in any sort of in depth manner, because there’s exactly one story to the game: Duke forced Cal into turnovers on nearly half of Cal’s possessions, and that made winning utterly impossible. Cal’s defense against Duke was unremarkable but mostly fine, but it could have been brilliant or awful and it wouldn’t have changed the result of the game.

But the result is obviously discouraging because it’s a major relapse after weeks of progress taking care of the ball. Cal only turned it over ~16% of the time against NC State and Florida State, and it was a big factor that powered Cal’s huge home sweep. That all fell apart against Duke.

Despite the magnitude of the defeat, losing a road game to Duke won’t materially harm Cal’s NCAA tournament positioning, though it’s a lost opportunity to build a resume that would earn a top 4, protected seed. But the magnitude of the defeat may illustrate the gap between a good team like Cal and a top-10/top-15 team like Duke. The reality is that WBB is typically very stratified nationally, and this is a pretty strong indication of where Cal falls in a very solidified pecking order.

Cal 67, Wake Forest 55

Cal’s game against Wake Forest ALSO featured a huge number of turnovers, but that’s about the only way the two games this week were similar. Even the nature of the turnovers were very different, and here is where I want to go on a rant about officiating in women’s college basketball.

Fact 1: the average turnover rate across all of men’s college basketball over the last few years has been around 18%.

Fact 2: the average turnover rate in women’s basketball this year is roughly 23%

That’s a pretty notable difference; an average WBB team, in a game of average pace, will turn the ball over 3-4 times more than an average MBB team.

Now here’s another fact: Cal was called for TEN offensive violations against Wake Forest. Seven were travels, and three were three-seconds-in-the-key.

I don’t have the numbers to prove my theory, but I believe that the bulk of the difference between the turnover rate in WBB vs. MBB is because women’s basketball refs call an absurd number of offensive violations, and in a manner that doesn’t happen on the men’s side.

I suppose if you’re an old-school purist, or a stickler for a rigid adherence to the rule book über alles, you might see this as a good thing. But I can tell you that Cal wasn’t about to gain any kind of actual advantage with the goofy travels that were called. Most were instances where a player receives a pass and takes a step before dribbling, which is 100% never called at any level of the men’s game. Marta Suarez was called for a travel on a euro step that isn’t even typically called in women’s college basketball.

Hell, there isn’t any consistency even at the women’s college level. 3 seconds in the key is so rarely called, but every once in a while you get a game where a ref decides that it’s the most critical rule in the book and so you see a bunch of whistles after weeks and weeks without a single violation like that.

And it actively makes for a less entertaining product. I do not tune into these games to watch an 8 second possession end in a ticky-tack whistle. I watch it to see Ioanna Krimili bomb away from deep. In this specific way, the men’s basketball product is objectively more entertaining, and it’s a problem that could easily be fixed by the NCAA and its conferences.

So yeah, Cal turned the ball over a ton against Wake Forest, but I’d say that it was actually a pretty average turnover performance by Cal, with a whole bunch of bad calls thrown on top because the refs decided that they needed to really earn their paycheck on the day.

Thankfully, Cal did everything else well in this game. When the refs weren’t calling travels, Cal shot the ball very well from every level and did a good job grabbing rebounds. Wake Forest had a miserable shooting night (8-39 on jump shots) and Cal pulled away pretty easily.

For five minutes, the game looked scary. Cal still looked out-of-sorts and sped up, and they threw the ball away and took bad shots on the way to zero field goals in the first five minutes. But the Bears presumably calmed down and realized that Duke’s defense wasn’t out there any more, and they settled in to play their normal brand of basketball after the first media time out. Krimili and Lulu Twidale both ended up with 4 made 3s each, Marta Suarez was efficient inside, and Cal had a MASSIVE shot quality advantage. Just consider this:

Shots defined as mid-range
Cal: 1-3
Wake Forest: 3-18

Are Cal’s (non-dumb-ref-based) turnovers frustrating? GOOD GRAVY YES. But they’re in service of getting high quality shots. Against non-elite defenses, the Bears have almost always been able to get great quality shots inside and outside, and that powered them to an easy win over Wake Forest on Sunday.

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Cal’s next two games are massive.

Last week, I said that Cal should have three quad 1 wins when the NET rankings were next updated. Turns out I was wrong. That’s because WBB, for reasons unclear, uses a different quadrant system than MBB*. The WBB system defines a quadrant 1 win as follows:

Home games against teams 1-25 in the NET
Neutral site games against teams 1-35 in the NET
Away games against teams 1-45 in the NET

Cal’s home win against NC State (#21 NET) and Alabama (#19 NET) count, but Florida State at home (#28 NET**) is in quadrant two.

Well, Cal’s next two games at Stanford (#42) and at home vs. North Carolina (#13 NET) will both be Quad 1 games. And they represent two of five chances for Quad 1 games left on Cal’s regular season schedule. Considering that one of those games is at Notre Dame and as a result very, very tough, these next two games represent massive opportunities to build a resume to earn a high NCAA tournament seed.

First up is Stanford. Did you know that Cal has not swept Stanford since the 1985-86 season, the last year before women’s basketball was offered within the Pac-10 conference, and the first year that Tara Vanderveer coached at Stanford? If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you weren’t alive when it last happened. I was about a month and a half away from my first birthday when Cal beat Stanford 77-59 to sweep the Cardinal back in ‘86.

Is Stanford down by their lofty standards? Yes. Will that diminish my joy if Cal were to beat them on the road for a season sweep?

Not. One. Iota.

*In case you were curious, Quad 1 on the men’s side is Home vs. 1-30, Neutral vs. 1-50, Away vs. 1-75. The NET has existed in the men’s game for seven years but for unexplained reasons I haven’t had a need to learn about how it impacts MBB OR WBB until very recently.

**I guess we need to root for Florida State to get to #25 in the NET rankings.