Baylor Basketball: Why Bears get so many shots blocked in 2019-20 season

Personnel?

Jared Butler

Baylor’s highest usage player in sophomore guard Jared Butler has been exceptional this season (15.8 ppg.), but he’s been susceptible to getting his shot blocked.

Butler has been aggressively attacking the basket, with 24.0% of his shots coming “at the rim” per hoop-math. Although his efficiency on these shots has been fine 59.8% (D-1 average ~60.0%), it hasn’t been uncommon for his misses to be blocked.

At 6-3, the sophomore isn’t a super explosive athlete, and when he faces resistance in the paint, he doesn’t always get much elevation on his interior floaters/runners (makes blocks more likely).

MaCio Teague

Another guard in junior MaCio Teague isn’t all that dissimilar from Butler. The UNC Asheville transfer is a talented scorer (14.1 ppg.) but doesn’t have elite athleticism either. He can struggle to get to the rim (19.2% of shots) and he’s finished these shots at a slightly below average 57.1%.

Some of these misses have been blocked. Teague, who also doesn’t get a ton of elevation on his shots, has actually done a solid job of using floaters/runners to avoid defenders. This doesn’t work every time, however.

Davion Mitchell

Another notable contributor in sophomore guard Davion Mitchell has a level of explosiveness that has likely made him a much smaller part of Baylor’s “block problem.”

36.6% of Mitchell’s shots have come at the rim (more than Butler/Teague), which has inevitably led to some blocked shots, but he’s shooting 62.2% on these attempts (better than Butler/Teague).

Mark Vital

At 6-5, junior forward Mark Vital is one of the better defenders in the country. His combination of length, versatility, motor and athleticism gives opposing offenses fits.

Despite all this, Vital’s 6-5 stature inevitably leads to some of his interior shots being blocked. He also has the 70th-best offensive rebounding rate of any player in the country, meaning he’s taking a lot of those aforementioned putbacks in traffic.

Freddie Gillespie

Like Vital, Gillespie has been outstanding defensively this season. And also like Vital, he’s slightly undersized for his position at 6-9. While this provides him the versatility to switch and hang with guards on the perimeter, there also some drawbacks (e.g. some shots get blocked).

Continuing the Vital comparison, Gillespie is also an exceptional offensive rebounder (9th-best nationally). Again, this has surely led to some contested putbacks that are blocked on occasion.