Preaseason: The Fight for Respect

Queue music: Aretha Franklin’s Respect (pop up audio)

Just 8 days until the season begins.

And if you’re reading this, you’re probably a serious St. John’s die-hard, or a serious damn masochist, or a bit of both.  And it’s been tough to watch the men’s basketball team play at home or on the road. The Redmen/ Red Storm/ Johnnies have not provided that winning basketball that the fans and students want to see.  The players have stayed clear of scandal and represent the school well – no pot smoking or woman beating, and the players are progressing academically.  But this is the Big East. The students, fans, and alums want to see winning. Because those W’s?  They bring in fans, recruits, publicity, and respect. And they reward the long-suffering fans for their patience and faith.

And apparently, the administration also wants to see winning ball, according to the New York Post:

“The parameters of [Coach Norm Roberts’] contract, which initially weighted heavily his player’s academic and conduct performances, now also demand greater success on the court.”

Certainly, some of the long-suffering fans will go off on rants about “accountability”, and they are free to let loose with those rants. But is that bit of news a reason to believe that there is some kind of win threshold? We’ll find out, perhaps, at the end of the season… if things go awry.

Then again, while the conference’s coaches pick St. John’s to finish 11th, and others inexplicably have St. John’s at 15th, others see what I see – a lot of returning minutes and consistency of roles in a league that’s in flux. Returning minutes tend to mean improvement in most cases.

But how much improvement? The difference between St. John’s and their opponents in conference was about 12 points per 100 possessions. Put more plainly, the Red Storm scored nearly 8 points less than their opponents in any given conference contest. Adjusting for 6 wins, that’s a number of blowouts. (If you want to read more about last year, here is a 2008-2009 review post to help you brush up).

How can that change?

• Offensive Turnovers. They need to stop. Whether they are turnovers on ill-advised drives, the shaky ballhandling by guards or the lack of awareness/ hand strength in the post, those turnovers have to be cut down. This is probably the best chance for the Red Storm to move up in the Big East hierarchy, by not giving the ball away (and giving up easy scores afterwards).
• Defensive Turnovers. The team is not big (except for Dele Coker). The defense has been on a downward trend, especially in conference, allowing opponents to shoot a higher effective field goal percentage each year since 2006. If the team can’t stop opponents from scoring, they can at least reduce the other team’s opportunities to score. Coach Roberts speaks about increased defensive intensity; hopefully a tough, harassing, ball-snatching perimeter defense will materialize.*
• Scoring Droughts. Keeping the ball means having a chance to score; but not enough of the players on the floor have been efficient at scoring. With the addition of a scoring JUCO (Dwight Hardy) and an athletic JUCO (Justin Brownlee), plus a creative freshman guard (Omari Lawrence), and hopeful improvements from the returning guards, this could be a thing of the past. That is dependent, of course, on holding on to the ball long enough to squeeze a quality shot off.
• Reliable Post Play. Down the stretch, DJ Kennedy and Paris Horne carried the team in victories and defeats. But Justin Burrell had some nice moments against Georgetown, and Sean Evans was a horse against Richmond. If they can be constant threats, and if Dele Coker can stay on the floor to provide a defense-first big who rebounds (and supplements the turnovers with some blocked shots), the team will be much less predictable on both ends.

Coming in this week: Notes on the season. Player notes. And the preview of the first official game, against Long Island University‘s Blackbirds.

*Yes, ball-snatching is a reference to that Malik Boothe photo in the Boston College game.

Peter a/k/a Pico writes for the East Coast Bias and the Church of Bracketology. He’ll be doing the Calm Before the Storm posts, just like last year.