March surprises last all month
Good shots don't fall, NC State wins eight, Duke out-toughs Houston with Jamal Shead out, and either Rick Barnes or Matt Painter is headed to the Final Four
A weird thing happened to Marquette this season — weirder even, perhaps, than what ended Tyler Kolek’s career Friday night.
For much of the first half of the 2023-24 Golden Eagles’ season, at various points in a semi-disappointing 11-5 start to the campaign, and sometimes for whole weeks at a time, Shaka Smart’s team simply couldn’t shoot.
Despite being a brilliant floor-stretching, flow-state-enjoying, hot-shooting breakout story the season prior, and despite pointedly retaining everyone from that team, and despite running the same stuff to get the same shots, Marquette started 2023-24 unthinkably cold. They went 5-of-17 in a tight Maui Invitational loss to Purdue, 7-of-29 in a bitter defeat to Wisconsin, 8-of-24 in a win over Notre Dame, 4-of-20 in a Dec. 19 loss to Providence, 5-of-31 in a hapless, scoring-bereft defeat to Butler.
There was no obvious explanation for this. Nothing had changed. Marquette’s offense was the same. The looks were as good — objectively, statistically — as they had been in 2022-23. The process was sound. The results stubbornly refused to follow.
And then, of course, they did. Right on cue, with no discernible change in tactical approach, in mid-January Marquette began to enjoy a positive regression renaissance. From Jan. 15 to Feb. 13, Marquette won eight games in a row. In a four game stretch from Jan. 24 to Feb. 3, Tyler Kolek and Co. smoked 47 of their 104 attempts from 3. By the time the Big East campaign was over, Marquette had gone from the low-30s in 3-point shooting percentage in November and December (including all of those noticeable outlier performances against top competition) to nearly 37 percent in Big East play, which if they had shot that rate all season would make them one of the 20-ish-best 3-point shooting teams in the country. The shooting came back and so Marquette cruised. All was well.
Then came Friday, when it inexplicably left again, abandoning the Golden Eagles as quickly and readily as it had returned. Marquette, one of the best perimeter offensive teams in the country for the past two months, went 4-of-31 from 3 in Dallas Friday night. NC State will play in the Elite Eight Sunday. “It's going to be hard to win,” Shaka Smart said Friday night, “if you go 4 for 31 as a team.”
In the NCAA Tournament, it really is that simple — and that quick, and that ruthless. Months of hot shooting gone.
Which is not to say NC State didn’t deserve credit for their triumph. Of course they did.
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