There is no reason, other than official incompetence, that TJ should not be shooting an and-1 on 75% of the shots he makes. I would wager that there is not a player in the country that scores as much as he does, who get less of their points from the line. TJ is very good at finding open areas, and getting uncontested put backs, but he also draws lots of contact that goes without a whistle.
Hopefully we are working non-stop in practice on our zone offense, because we won’t play many teams this year that don’t zone us. It’s an easy decision for the opposition, against man-to-man, I think our guys can hold their own against most any team in the country. Beating the zone seams so easy on paper, just get the ball to the high post, and break the zone down from there. In application, it seems as though our guys have a harder time with it. There is no reason we can’t run the UCLA offense against a zone, and our guys have to learn that. But they are young, and I’m sure they will keep getting better at it.
Lastly, Gott needs to work on his skill at working the refs, if there is such a thing. We don’t even get the normal home team favorable calls that you would expect against the scrub competition. How much of that we can control, outside of our “tendencies”, I honestly don’t know. All I know is that the best coaches out there are good at working the refs, and that doesn’t mean just complaining when they make a bad call.
