2012: 4-21, 2-12 8th place
win that made you raise an eyebrow: Albion 81-54, Adrian 52-49, Hope 68-65
loss that made you raise an eyebrow: none really
Seniors: Garner Small, Dakotah Ellis, Matt El
 | ||
| the smoldering crater of Olivet basketball, circa spring 2012 |
So how did they do it? Lets start with the schedule. Some of this might sound critical but it really isn't meant to be, its just kind of reality. Olivet downgraded the non-conference portion of the schedule pretty significantly as I noted way back in October. Wins over Purdue-Calumet and Union, Ky are never going to impress in most seasons, I'll note here that both of those teams ended up just over .500 on the season. If that's your measure of a 'good' team then those were good wins. Olivet won 3 games over Marygrove, Illinois Tech and Lawrence Tech. Marygrove won 3 games, the two Tech's won 2 games each and were resurrecting dormant basketball programs. These aren't 'good' wins.
I forget exactly when Chris Coles was hired but it wasn't at a time conducive to great recruiting success. It wasn't much of a surprise that Olivet went the transfer and Junior College route. Garner Small came over from Goshen and DaunTrell Hill came from a JC deep in Illinois, not a big deal since he's from Grand Rapids. These two guys themselves made Olivet a lot better offensively, add in Fr. TJ Vondette and Jeff Cain and Olivet went from a lineup that would have looked something like a JV team to one that could put together a season better than last.
The real story of Olivet's season was their performance inside the Cutler Event Center where they went 6-1 in the league, 8-1 overall. That one and only loss came at the hands of league champion Calvin. Opening with a 27 point thrashing of Albion and then upsetting Adrian a week later it was clear the Comets were a different team at home than on the road, the highlight being a last second win over Hope. Unfortunately for Olivet for every home game in the league there's a bus trip and they went 0-7 with really only 1 close game, a 4 point loss at Trine which was really more of a come back than a close game. As the wins and losses fell in the league, being able to scrape just one road win would have carried Olivet into the MIAA Tournament. That seemed far less probable last spring than it turned out.
Statistics Corner
It was really interesting how different Olivet was at home vs on the road this year. What it resulted in was a team that had only one stretch of more than 2 losses in a row, right at the beginning, and a team that never won more than 2 consecutive games.
Olivet was a little bit all over the map when it comes to statistics vs the rest of D3. They were good in some of the ball control stats like turnovers and assists and were probably one of the top 50 3-point shooting teams in D3. But they were in the bottom half of most of the points related categories at both ends of the floor, although a lot closer to the middle than the bottom.
thing they did better than anyone in the league: chuck 3's, make 3's
thing they did worse than anyone in the league: lose to Central Michigan
Olivet took a lot of 3's this year, 555 to be exact or a shade over 33% of the shots they attempted. They made 205, a percentage that put them in the top 20% of D3. The Comets weren't very good at being tall and thus were out-rebounded in most games and pretty much abandoned even going for rebounds against Hope in favor of getting back on defense. They made up for it by being pretty good at taking care of the ball, having a fluid assist laden offense that made a bunch of three's and being an improved defense that thrived on creating turnovers.
Efficiency
Offense: 98.80 Defense: 102.52 Total Eff Rating: 196.28
Team rank out of the last 10 years: #5
League rank out of the last 10 years: #45
Well if you believe in Eff ratings being able to tell you something about a league and its teams the Comets are your example A. They were #5 in the Eff and #5 in the standings, both defying your eyeball observations no doubt. More importantly they were unquestionably better than last years Olivet team which ranks as the worst Olivet team in the past decade and 3rd from worst in the league in that time frame. Chris Coles did this with a patchwork roster and hardly any depth. Those Eff numbers above are right about where an "average" D3 team should rate.
Olivet was a real jekyl and hyde team at home and away this past season. Within just their league results this shows up in efficiency like this.....
Home: Offense: 103.49 Defense: 94.85 Total Eff: 208.64
Away: Offense: 99.12 Defense: 103.14 Total Eff: 195.98
Almost exactly polar opposites of themselves.
2013-2014
Key Returnees: DaunTrell Hill, Blake Krum, TJ Vondette, Marquis Childers, Jeff Cain
 |
| DaunTrell Hill and his fantastic beard |
Olivet loses two pretty significant pieces of the offense in Garner Small and Dakotah Ellis. Matt El seemed to be the one guy physically able to bang inside. These 3 guys are pretty much the only height the Comets had. What returns next year is no one over 6-2 that played any significant part in this past seasons team. Priority number one for Coles and his staff is finding some height. Priority number two is improving the numbers. Olivet has 9 guys returning from their varsity program but only 5 saw significant playing time. This team was pretty thin so its doubtful the JV is going to provide much in the way of depth, because they already would have. One of Olivet's problems as a program has been retention of players. They always seem to lose one or two every year, if one or two happen to be from the names above things get troublesome.
Chris Coles can coach, I'm sure of that. I can point to the handful of Comet games I watched this year and in each one he seemed to call a good timeout and diagram a play for his kids to run which they ran to perfection, including the ends of the Adrian and Hope upsets. If it hadn't been for one of those dreaded high ankle sprains to Garner Small early in the MIAA season Olivet could very well have easily been in the MIAA Tournament. Garner never seemed to recover fully from that and the fact Olivet continued to play so well without him at full strength is a testament to the abilities of the Olivet staff to adjust and still have decent success.
 |
| Blake Krum no doubt eyeing a way into the paint |
Range of Finish: Unfortunately I think you have to put them in the 7th or 8th category until next Fall. Things don't look to rosey unless you have some faith Chris Coles can bring in some players to fill out a roster that he can put together into some kind of team. Not being able to do that could land the Comets squarely in the 8th spot and back in the crater.
No comments:
Post a Comment