Arizona State Basketball: 3 takeaways from loss to San Diego State Aztecs
Too many empty offensive trips for Alonzo Verge Jr.
If you look at the box score from Thursday’s game, you will notice that Alonzo Verge Jr. led the way for the Sun Devils with 25 points. The next thing that you will notice is that it took Verge 20 shots to score those 25 points, and of those 20 shots Verge only managed to make eight of them, which may a bit concerning for Arizona State fans. Why? Well, I will clearly break it down for you.
You only get so many offensive possessions in a basketball game, so if one player (who is the focal point of your offense) has the ball in their hands a lot during a game and misses 10+ shots, you’re chances of winning automatically decrease. If you want to take 20 or more shots in a contest, you need to make sure that you are scoring efficiently, and not coming away with 0 points multiple times (especially in a game that is relatively tight).
Unfortunately for Verge, there were too many possessions where he winded up overdoing it and bailing the Aztecs out. Offensively, Verge has an array of moves that he can use during games, but he loves to implement a swift double crossover before taking one hard step back, and then crossing back over to his left or right.
The problem with Verge’s version of the dribble combination, is his somewhat robotic single crossover back into his defenders, after initially completing his double crossover and then stepping back.
On Thursday, I wanted Verge to realize that because his double crossover into a step back combo is so quick and decisive, he will almost always have the ability to stop and look to see where his defenders are, before prematurely crossing back over into them (which didn’t work on Thursday, because his defenders were able to beat him to the spot continuously).
I am not saying that I wanted Verge to launch a three every time he created a little space, but if he really wanted to cross back over and get to the rim, he should have waited for a second or two for his defenders to get closer to him, and then utilized his single crossover so that he could get from point A to point B without having to exert a ton of energy (which would have given him more scoring opportunities at the basket).
Additionally, Verge probably would have benefited from playing off the ball a little more on Thursday, so that he wouldn’t have felt like he needed to pound the ball excessively and make something happen on his own constantly.
Seven of Verge’s eight made field goals were three-point baskets, and he was able to notch most of them by allowing his teammates to penetrate and kick the ball out to him (however, Verge did jab to his right a few times, get his defenders to stumble/retreat, and then knock down threes on a few occasions).
There was one time when Verge was able to keep things simple by catching the ball on the left-wing, pump faking (because his defender left his feet as he was closing out on him because Verge had already made a few threes), covering a lot of ground during his two push ahead dribbles, and relaxing on his pull-up jump shot.
San Diego State’s defense certainly didn’t make life easy for Verge, but at the end of the day Verge needs to be more of an efficient scorer moving forward, if the Sun Devils want to compete for a Pac-12 championship.