What do you think of North Texas today?
This was posted at another site, I had no idea they lost 2 of their top 3 scorers. Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
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For years, Denver has benefited from it's huge home court advantage vs Sun Belt opponents due to the lengthy travel and altitude associated with playing there. But playing away from Magness Arena was an entirely different story for the Pioneers....until this year. DU is 6-2 away from home this year--with the six wins equaling as many wins away from home that they've had in the previous five seasons combined. This includes conference road wins already at Arkansas St (by 3), South Alabama (by 17), and LA-Monroe (by 15). Not to mention an impressive road win at Utah St by 13 earlier in the year.
And just as their past road woes have been well documented, so has the slow pace at which Joe Scott wants his teams to run his Princeton style offense at. In the previous 4 years, Denver has finished every season in the bottom 5 nationally with respect to tempo, never averaging more than 59.7 possessions. An interesting fact this year though is that Denver has "sped" things up a little bit more, averaging 61.0 possessions per game (#336). To take the correlation one step further, in the four games that they played opponents this year with tempo's ranked in top 100, they exceeded 69 pts each time and went 3-1 (only loss was by 2 in OT to Iona). Maximizing the additional possessions with their highly efficient offense, Denver scored 69 pts on 66 possessions vs Portland St (#86), 78 pts on 74 possessions vs Iona (#18), 79 pts on 66 possessions vs Troy (#46), and 78 pts on 60 possessions vs W Ky (#89). Today they will go against a N Texas team who will be the second fastest they've yet to face this year who rank 38th nationally with respect to adjusted tempo.
And now for the maybe the most important angle to today's game. Denver is catching a N Texas team who will be playing their first game since the announcement was made that Chris Jones and Jordan Williams will miss the remainder of the season due to academics earlier in the week. It cannot be stressed enough how big of a blow this will be to the Mean Green today. Jones was the team leader in points, assists, and steals. Williams was third on the team in points. The combined 25 points the two contributed equaled 37% of the team's total offense per game. UNT coach Johnny Jones on the situation, ?Our rotation has been cut down. We lost our first- and third-leading scorers. Those guys played a lot of minutes.? Now they will have to rely heavily on freshman Trey Norris to lead an offense vs a Denver defense ranked 30th nationally, only allowing 60 points per game.
Denver should be extremely focused today as well based on the fact that Denver was embarrassed by 22 points in last year's trip to Denton and scored a season low 41 points. As a result, I can see this game quickly becoming lopsided due to Denver's highly efficient offense benefiting from the extra possessions it will get going vs an undermanned N Texas team.
