March is the Cruelest Month

For Cal MBB and WBB, is it better to have been on the bubble and lost, than to never have been on the bubble at all?

If you have to settle for shots like this, your team might not end the season with a great 2 point shooting percentage - via @calmbball twitter

At some point in mid-February, a painful premonition popped into my head while watching a Cal basketball game: we were on our way to 1 seeds in both the NIT and the WBIT.

I spend too much time staring at tempo-free stat summaries, WAB rankings, and NET quadrants. The story they told was always the same: the most likely outcome for both Cal men’s and women’s basketball was the cruelty of being just barely on the wrong side of the NCAA cut line.

This prompted deep mixed feelings in me. I did not expect either team to seriously compete for a tournament spot this year. The Cal men of course haven’t even finished above .500 in nearly a decade, while the Cal women lost all but one rotation player off of last year’s tournament team. It’s hard to be upset at a team for failing to hit a stretch goal so lofty . . . but we’re also talking about two programs that have combined for one NCAA tournament spot in the last seven years. To be so close to the promised land only to come up short, twice, is painful even when it wasn’t expected.

The paths were different for each team. For the Cal women, it was too many missed opportunities for critical resume wins against top quality opposition. For the Cal men, it was a weak schedule that was filled with too many opportunities to step on banana peels and not enough opportunities to build a resume robust enough to pass muster.

Let’s talk about where each team sits at the end of the regular season:

Cal MBB: ACC Tournament Preview

The intro to this article is built on the premise that Cal will not make the NCAA tournament . . . but technically Cal has a chance. It’s just that to have a chance, they need to beat Duke on a neutral floor.

Yes, Duke, the #1 team in the country that already beat Cal by 15 in Berkeley, has two losses by a combined 4 points, and has won 13 ACC games by double-digits.

And they need to beat Florida State just to create that chance for themselves.

A neutral court win over Florida State is very unlikely to put Cal on the right side of the bubble, and Cal would still be incredibly vulnerable to any bid thieves in conference tournaments around the country. No, only a shocking upset win over Duke would give Cal the resume boost they would need to leapfrog over everybody else right on the edge of a bid.

Thanks to Cal’s season sweep over Stanford, the Bears at least earned a first round bye, and will play at 4:00 PT on Wednesday in the 8/9 game of the ACC tournament. If the Bears win that game, they will play Duke at 4:00 PT on Thursday.

When Cal lost to Florida State on the road in late January, it looked like a bad loss. The Seminoles were 8-12 entering the game and looked pretty dead in ACC play. But that win over Cal launched a redemptive month of basketball - FSU has won 9 of 11, their only losses to sure-fire tournament teams Virginia and Miami.

Cal was without Lee Dort in that game, and without their big man they couldn’t score in the paint (more on that below). Will Dort’s availability help swing the rematch in Cal’s favor?

Cal WBB: Will a WBIT bid act as a catalyst for next season?

Cal women’s basketball’s late-season fade means that there will be no drama come Selection Sunday - the Bears have a negative WAB, a 1-8 ranking against Quad 1 teams, and enough bad losses that they are not really even viewed as being on the bubble despite a top 50 efficiency profile.

As a result, the Bears are all but guaranteed to receive an invite to the Women’s Basketball Invitational Tournament (WBIT) which has only existed for two years but has already become the 2nd most prestigious post-season tournament.

And when I look at the profile of this Cal team, I think about two different teams from the past.

The first team is Minnesota. Last year the Golden Gophers were 20-11 (8-10) in the regular season, then won themselves a WBIT championship. This year, returning the same core group of players that won the WBIT, the Gophers are 26-7 (13-5) and in-line for a protected top 4 seed in the NCAA tournament.

The second team I think of is Cal. In 2010, Alexis Gray-Lawson and a bunch of talented-but-inexperienced freshmen won the WNIT. Two years later the Bears were an eight seed that pushed national runner up Notre Dame, and three years later the Bears were in the Final Four.

The Cal women this year have a really intriguing group of players who could return next year. Lulu Twidale and Gisella Maul are two shooting guards who can score inside and out. Taylor Barnes and Puff Morris were both able to hold their own as freshmen and have the skills to bust out as sophomores. Mjiracle Sheppard is a plus defensive player who can facilitate as a secondary point guard. Naya Ojukwu can rebound and finish like she’s two inches taller than her actual height.

All of them are eligible to come back next year and constitute a really strong core to build around. The Bears would enter the WBIT as one of the strongest teams in the field, and the tournament could represent a springboard for next season the way.

It will require the Bears to take the WBIT seriously, and then it will require Charmin Smith to find a way to retain that core talent. But this team has the talent to do something fun in the WBIT, and the talent to do something even more impressive next year if they stick around and develop in Berkeley.

Cal MBB: everything but the inside shot

In one particular way, Cal men’s basketball is a deeply unusual team: They are a good team that cannot earn 2 point baskets. For most of the season, all of the things the Bears are good at kept them afloat, but their biggest weakness finally caught up to them.

The ability to make (and prevent opponents from making) 2 point shots is fundamental to the very sport, and teams that struggle on one or both ends are typically terrible. You will be unsurprised to learn that every single team under Wyking Jones and Mark Fox were below average nationally in 2 point shot percentage, and often bottom-of-the-barrel.

In some ways it’s perplexing that his Cal team is so bad at earning 2 point buckets when they are one of the single best shooting teams in the country. The Bears are 54th in 3 point percentage and 21st in free throw percentage. But they are 249th in the country in 2 point percentage at 50.3, and 17th in the ACC in conference-only 2pt% at 47.6.

What gives? Well, not all of Cal’s sharp shooting guards just aren’t good at creating their own shot inside. John Camden and Chris Bell both finish well, but they usually only go inside when they’re wide open - they only has 50 and 60 shots at the basket respectively for the entire season. Justin Pippen and Dai Dai Ames go to the bucket more frequently, but both are slightly below average finishers. Lee Dort is really the only high frequency and high efficiency finisher on the team.

You see it in Cal’s shooting splits - the Bears are 320th in the country in the percentage of non-dunk shots that come at the basket, and more or less nationally average at hitting those shots when they actually get them.

What this means is that Cal is very dependent on 3 point shooting to carry their offensive efficiency. This can be a problem in two ways. Sometimes, a team is good enough defensively to take away 3 point shots, like Clemson did when they held Cal to just 13 attempts, or when Virginia held Cal to 19 attempts. And sometimes Cal just has a bad shooting night from deep, like they did recently against Pitt and Wake Forest. When either of those things happen, there’s not another reliable source of high-volume, high-efficiency offense to turn to, and Cal’s offense withers.

The Bears have managed through this weakness by doing almost everything else well. The Bears shoot well from everywhere else on the court, they don’t turn the ball over and do a decent job getting to the free throw line. And Cal’s defense has been consistently solid and actually getting better across the season . . . though the Bears have been helped by sporting the lowest opponent free throw shooting in the nation (thanks SMU!)

Cal can absolutely overcome their Achilles’ Heel to beat FSU. But Duke is a different animal, and the Blue Devils defend everywhere on the court. If the Bears get that far, it’s going to take a crazy shooting night just to have a chance to pull the upset.