The Floyd Street Tribune: The straightforward case for Louisville's offense becoming more efficient

Inside: Louisville has missed how many open 3s?! Why the Cards may not be so far off the path on offense. Plus, a look at the NCAA Tournament profile, recruiting and more.

Happy holidays! Thanks for reading The Floyd Street Tribune. In the previous edition, we broke down the drawn-up play for Matt Cross’s big 3 at NC State and included a video review on the importance of drive-and-kick 3s to Louisville’s offense. By the way, if you enjoy this newsletter, consider gifting a subscription to other Cards fans as the perfect stocking stuffer!

Now, onto this week’s post …

One big thought

If Louisville fans find themselves pulling out their hair over their team’s offense — and Twitter and the message boards suggest they are — imagine how the coaches and players feel. The difference is that Louisville’s staff and players believe the Cardinals’ shooting will improve. I’m not sure the fan base is there right now.

I run the risk of dying on this hill — and I know we talked about a similar subject in the Going to the Monitor portion of last week’s newsletter — but I still think Louisville’s shooters will find their touch as the season progresses. The start to this season feels a lot like 2016-17, when Louisville expected to have a good shooting team but started 64 of 201 (31.8%) from 3 before ultimately coming around and finishing the season at 35.5%. No, this team doesn’t have Donovan Mitchell, but the shooting history of a number of the current players is significantly better than their current clips. The path to a respectable and dangerous 3-point shooting clip is not rocket science or that far off. To quote the great basketball philosopher Mike Rutherford: Gotta make shots.

To test this theory, I watched every Louisville 3-pointer over the past five games to track shot selection using the NBA’s definitions. The NBA labels shots as wide open, open, tightly contested or very tightly contested. (Hat tip to Brett Dawson, The Courier-Journal’s new men’s hoops writer, for mentioning this data category to me.) Turns out, there has been no shortage of open and wide-open looks — Louisville is just missing a lot of them.

Here are the shot definitions followed by a chart of my findings:

• Wide open: A shot where the closest defender is 6 or more feet away from the shooter

• Open: 4-6 feet

• Tightly contested: 2-4 feet

• Very tightly contested: 0-2 feet

The Cards are 19 of 50 on open and wide-open 3s. Now, 38% from 3 in a vacuum is good, but these are open-to-wide open shots. The makes on wide-open 3s need to be closer to 8-10. Just four more makes on wide-open 3s alone over the past five games would add 2.5 points to Louisville’s scoring per contest. The makes on open 3s should be better than 39.5%. That’s a huge chunk of good looks — the vast majority of them from reliable shooters — going by the wayside.

Now, the tightly contested and very tightly contested attempts are high, too. Some of those are late-clock shots, but in watching all of them, a big portion are unnecessary, quick-trigger 3s. This is why Mack (and his assistants and team leaders) harp on getting into the lane, breaking down defenders, posting them up — anything to create more open and wide-open looks because the defense has collapsed. This is also where Samuell Williamson and Jae’Lyn Withers regaining some confidence would help Louisville a lot.