Bonnies vs. Richmond (Sat. 02/22 @ 6:30 pm)

Winner of this game is in the driver's seat for the 3 seed, which is pretty important. I am hoping after a week of stewing over Davidson, they will come out firing.
 
This is an insightful thread so far. Now you'll have to excuse me, I'm going over to that other site to catch up on Bobby P.
The insightful or full of shit post from me is a work in progress, but luckily we have 2.5 more days for people to post more than what you can find on that other site.
 
Hopefully this thread (and game) won’t get the Bonaballa kiss of death. Off limits: “rolling,” starting a sentence with “I can see,” etc.

Contain Gilyard, have Lofton try to post up and pray we get reaching calls in our favor, let Shoon deal with Golden, and hope Francis misses.

Cayo, Sherod, and their supporting players are all solid. Sherod is a streaky but good shooter. They’re a very good team and are probably salivating at the thought of those RC rims. Bill’s zone will be needed in this game, but I don’t know if Schmidt will use it enough.
 
If you have time and are interested in Xs and Os. Hoopvision did a good breakdown of the Princeton offense a year ago and Richmond is heavily featured. If you don't want to watch the video read below I try to describe some of what Richmond does since some people seemed to like what I wrote about Davidson (the video does a much better job explaining the intricacies of the offense). Sorry in advance for the long winded post. Also don't expect this for other teams Davidson and Richmond are just the teams that have been explained like I'm 5 to me.

My starting point for a Richmond breakdown is a thesis statement from Petey Buckets. Richmond is a better version of Davidson and is the team everyone thought Davidson would be preseason. Which is true in the sense that both teams have great guards, shooters and passers and Richmond has more depth than Davidson now that Prichett and Frampton are out. Before you think I'm going to gush over Richmond like I did Davidson, think again. Bonas matches up better with Richmond than with Davidson. Both teams have similar skillsets and get open shots from similar areas however how Richmond gets its open looks is much different than Davidson.

They run the Princeton offense like I said above and it is predicated on entry into Golden in either the high or low post and him passing out of it or making a 1v1 play. The post Aldridge version of Davidson rarely plays through their 4s and 5s. After watching the Richmond vs VCU game on Saturday, I believe Grant Golden is the most important player on Richmond. Against VCU it seemed like he made the right decision everytime either finding the open shooter (Sherrod was hot in the first half) or used his speed to get by MSS and attack the basket. I think keeping OO out of foul trouble will be huge as always (duh!) but mostly because his length cuts off a lot of the cross court passing lanes that Golden takes advantage of and his lateral speed will keep Golden from rumbling down the lane. This is the perfect situation on paper to get Carpenter minutes over Ikpeze as the backup 5 because he can stay with the quicker 5s on Richmond. Golden is also skilled at grabbing an offensive board and kicking to an open shooter. He isn't a great offensive rebounder but when he gets one they make you pay.

How else does Richmond differ from Davidson? They set fewer flare screens. In Davidson's offense the weakside wing is almost always getting a flare screen or backdoor cutting if you are overplaying the pass to the shooter. Richmond however does more twist action, imo. This is not to say Richmond doesn't incorporate any flare screens they just aren't constantly setting up the flare like Davidson does.

My understanding of twist action is when there are two guys on the weakside one in the corner one on the wing swap places. With the guy who was on the wing cuts towards the baseline to give a pseudo screen to the guy in the corner who moves to the wing. The defender of the player in the corner is almost always sagging off in help position as his man is two passes away. By making the baseline cut the corner defender has to get through the cutter and the cutter's defender on the way out to his man now on the wing. This often leads to an open look for the guy who just popped from the corner to the wing, but what ultimately happens is the ball is passed to the wing and both defenders move to the ball and the cutter is either open on the post or drifted to the corner for the extra pass uncontested 3.

When Sherrod and either Francis or Gilyard are on the same side you see them twist often because all 3 can shoot really well. The Bonnies can switch those actions in normal man to man because Welch/English/Lofton/Vasquez will have those assignments. I think Welch can handle being on Gilyard when he has the ball just because Welch is so much bigger, but I worry if he gets switched on to Francis that could be trouble. The other option is we can play our normal 2-3 zone vs Richmond. Because there first option is to get the ball to Golden in one of the posts our zone can deny that entry pass especially when the off guard drops to the free throw line. I think we could see Winston and Welch playing much higher than they would in a traditional 2-3 to make it almost a 1-3-1 because Richmond uses two high guards (Gilyard and Francis). Two high guards means instead of one PG having the ball in the middle third of the floor, they split the floor in half and have essentially two point guards, one for each half of the floor.

Other quick notes:
Cayo gets the majority of Richmond's minutes at the 4 and I would compare him to Griffin as a junior. He does the dirty work for Richmond. Cleans the glass, blocks shots, and finishes around the rim when his man doubles one of the guards and they drop it off to him.

The Bonnies should be careful with dribble handoffs or any other time they are passing back to Lofton to reset. Gilyard is one of the best thieves in college hoops and likes to pounce on lazy passes or dig down on guys dribbling in the post. Which is why I see English having to create more in this game.

I plan on watching Richmond play Mason tonight with a focus on their defense. So maybe tomorrow or Friday I will have more thoughts on how to attack on the Richmond defense.
 
Last edited:
Excellent breakdown. Holy shit, is there a quiz on Friday? I don't have anything to add because I'd look like an idiot, which some have said isn't difficult for me.

With the crazy results we've seen this past week, the double bye is there for the taking, maybe more. I would just like to see us start well, which we kind of did against Davidson, and then got overwhelmed. It's late enough in the season we need to see good basketball.
 
Five games left and this just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser, Alice. This weekend we have the top 8 teams in the A10 prepared to cannibalize one another. I'm hoping the Bonnies aren't dessert.
 
So I watched parts of the Richmond vs Mason game last night. It wasn't much of a game as Mason couldn't make a shot for stretches, and had more turnovers than made field goals. The stat the Richmond broadcast was throwing out was Richmond hasn't allowed more than 60 points in its last 5 games. They failed to mention those 5 games were GW (without Potter), Fordham, LaSalle, VCU (without Evans), and Mason last night. VCU is the only one in that group in the top half of the league 7th offensively, and without Evans they wouldn't even be 7th.

Richmond on defense, hedges hard against ball screens similarly to how we defend the ball screen. Although Golden is very athletic he can struggle to recover from that hedge. They also apply token 3/4ths court pressure that Lofton and English shouldn't have a problem with. They will trap if the offense slips up and makes a bad pass or a poor ball handler gets it but the pressure is mostly to delay teams from starting their offense early in the clock. It seemed like Mason was running the shot clock below 10 seconds on almost every possession and then getting rushed shots off.

Mason's turnover issue was as much self inflicted as it was forced. I think they were called for 4 travels in the first half. Gilyard and Cayo live in passing lanes when they are the help defender and will pick off or deflect any lazy passes. If Bonaventure moves the ball against Richmond and reverses it side to side without making sloppy passes we can get Richmond out of position and get open chances.

When Golden sits Richmond goes away from the Princeton offense and runs more spread ball screen actions to get Francis and Gilyard attacking the basket. Francis is a very capable mid range shooter but takes a lot of them, I think we need to hope his midrange game is off.

Richmond also struggled to dial it in from distance but it didn't really matter because Golden feasted when Mason put Oduro on him. This is a preview of what to expect if we try to play Ikpeze on Golden. Golden's offensive game is built on using speed to take advantage of slower bigs, MSS, and Langevine also have struggled vs Golden throughout their careers.

While the game was still close Mason ran one possession of 1-3-1 against Richmond. Richmond got an ok shot but it was deep into the shot clock. So even though Richmond has the shooters to torch a zone most nights I think switching defenses every few possessions could slow them down.

Cayo is more offensively gifted than I gave him credit for in my previous post but still does most of his damage 10ft and in. Tyler Burton is a freshman that backs up Cayo and is a similar player to the 4 from Davidson that gave us fits Friday night. Burton was called on to do a little more when Francis was injured but has a short leash at times.
 
Jive, you and @SBUnfurled need to team up for recon articles on sbunfurled.com. Between your breakdown and his info graphics that would some seriously great content.

Blackburn review does recon articles, and Sbunfurled I believe was already dubbed a "poor man's blackburn review thing you've got going on there", so it's a perfect idea.
 
We learn more about basketball from Jive's breakdowns, but who needs that? Our world view of useless information has been greatly expanded by Commenter's game previews. Passing lanes, moving screens, cutters, blah blah blah. Come on, Trump played on the squash team at Fordham. The Wright Brothers literally learned how to fly to gtfo the wasteland we call Ohio. We learned more about Erie (another wasteland) than we ever wanted to, or needed to.

Oh.. '84 are you going to the game this weekend?
 
Jive, you and @SBUnfurled need to team up for recon articles on sbunfurled.com. Between your breakdown and his info graphics that would some seriously great content.

Blackburn review does recon articles, and Sbunfurled I believe was already dubbed a "poor man's blackburn review thing you've got going on there", so it's a perfect idea.
Probably by some smarmy a-hole.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top