Lobos proved highly vulnerable on defense
But it was hardly the first time
If Lobo basketball fans thought the second half of Saturday’s game at Air Force – a 100-92 Air Force win – looked about as bad they could remember this season, they were right.
The Falcons, who scored 100 points in a regular Mountain West Conference game for the first time on Saturday (the league is in its 19th season), also scored a Lobo-opponent high 59 points in a half, dropping UNM to 12-14 overall and 7-6 in league play.
UNM’s defense has allowed four 50-point halves this season:
59 — second half vs. Air Force, Saturday
5 3— second half vs. Tennessee Tech, Nov. 21
51 — first half vs. Tennessee Tech, Nov. 21
50 — second half vs. Utah State, Jan. 31
All four of those halves came in three Lobo losses. Maybe as perplexing as those happening at all is the fact that Air Force, Tennessee Tech and even Utah State, though to a lesser extent, aren’t exactly the top offensive teams on the schedule according to the adjusted offensive efficiency ratings of all 351 Division I teams on KenPom.com.
Air Force ranks 216th in adjusted offense and Tennessee Tech is 273rd. Utah State is a respectable 104th, but UNM played nine other teams with statistically better opposing offenses.
Utah State, a dangerous perimeter shooting team, torched UNM for a Lobo opponent high 13 made 3-pointers.
But Tennessee Tech and Air Force, teams that have proven average defenses can keep them in check, killed the Lobos with the most basic of plays: uncontested layups and dunks.
According to shots charted by StatBroadcast.com, three Lobo opponents have hit 20 or more layups/dunks in a game this season:
25 — Air Force, Saturday 21 —Boise State, Jan. 3 20 — Tennessee Tech, Nov. 21
“Unfortunately (there were) some breakdowns in the frontcourt,” Lobos coach Paul Weir said Saturday. “I thought in the first half we really weren’t being aggressive enough, and because our defense was just struggling, we were trying to up the tempo and trying to get some turnovers and trying to get the game going to where we could get some turnovers and get back in the game. But they scored in the back of the press. They played really, really well.”
WHAT’S IN A HEADLINE?:
OK, so Saturday morning’s Journal sports page headline that read “Kuiper got call, ended slump” didn’t age well.
That feature was about Kuiper ending a fourgame, 0-for-17 streak from 3-point range by scoring 11 points and hitting a pair of 3-pointers vs. Boise State last Tuesday. Then, the day of the article, he went 0-for-4 from the floor and missed all three 3-point tries.
But, as Weir has said all along, Kuiper does other things that keep him on the court. More proof of that came in Saturday’s plus/ minus chart that shows how a team’s scoring margin changes during the minutes a player is on the court.
Kuiper was the only Lobo who had a positive scoring margin Saturday. The Lobos outscored Air Force by six points in the 26 minutes Kuiper played. No other Lobo carried a positive plus/minus score while on the court Saturday.
The team’s lowest in the game? Sam Logwood’s minus-10 in 21 minutes on the court.