Cal Men's Basketball: Southern Dominates Cal, 74-66.

The Offense was bad. The Defense was worse.

Within the first four minutes of Friday night’s game, Southern was leading 9-1. Cal never got closer than seven points for the rest of the contest. This was not a fluke win for Southern. They outplayed Cal on both the offensive and defensive ends of the floor to earn their first win of the year. During the previous week, Southern had lost to Arizona by 17, and lost to St. Mary’s by 18.

Coach Mark Fox began his postgame press conference with, “I think we should blame the coach. I can’t put a defense together that gives us a chance to win.” The rest of the press conference continued with the same tone of dejected self-awareness.

For the last 6 games of the 2021-2022 season, Cal’s opponents shot 33% cumulatively from 3-point range. So far this year;

Opponent/3PT% against Cal/3PT% against all other opponents

UC-Davis/43%/40%
Kansas St/26%/40%
UCSD/41%/27%
Southern/52%/34%

Southern was 12-23 on 3-point shots. Of the makes, none of them were highly contested or high degree of difficulty.

This is about the average difficulty that Southern had on their 3-point attempts. Southern executes a couple solid high screens to free up the shooter. Askew is closing out, but it is not in time to impact the pending shot.

But the team also underperformed on the offensive end. Southern employed a soft press to cause Cal to take time to get across half court. Cal went deep into the shot clock on most plays, as there was a distinct lack of decisiveness to their plan. The numbers back this up;

• 11 turnovers in the first half, 20 for the game.

• 5 offensive fouls in the first half alone.

• Kuany Kuany is statistically Cal’s best shooter this season. Kuany had 2 fouls within 5 minutes, then picked up his 3rd and 4th foul within 5 minutes into the second half.

• Devin Askew finished with a decent stat line, but 11 of his 21 points came with less than 5 minutes left in the game. For most of the first half, he had more turnovers than points.

As Rob and I watched the game, Rob made a comment to the effect of, “This is what Mark Fox heroball looks like, when you don’t have a Shepherd or Bradley who can actually deliver”. In his postgame comments, Coach Fox said that “He was asking [Devin Askew] to do more than is probably fair.”

I am not going to belabor the point. This team is a mess right now, lacking confidence and looking for answers that aren’t easily available. Cal actually did run more slicing and cutting action like I have been requesting, but Southern’s team speed nullified it. This could have been a Lars breakout game as he was the only potential mismatch. But Lars is not efficient on the offensive end. He lacks lateral speed, and the defense relied on too much man-to-man and help defense that required quicker responses. He finished with a solid stat line, but did not impact the overall game.

I left the game actually questioning the overall talent on the team, as Southern just looked better in all facets. After a couple days reflection and watching the replay, I circled back to Coach Fox’s sentiment of “blame the coach”, and was mildly disappointed in myself for questioning the players. I still believe this team has the potential to be interesting, come conference play. Outside of Arizona and UCLA, the rest of the conference is full of question marks. This team needs new leadership if it hopes to have any chance of salvaging some level of respectability this season.