Assessing The 3-7 Start For Miami Basketball; First Alert, December 12th, 2024
Following the disappointment of Tuesday night's loss to the Tennessee Volunteers in Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night, Miami head coach, Jim Larrañaga, spoke about the progress of his team early in the season.
"We did a better job tonight... we still got a long ways to go," he said. "Our defense is getting better. And eventually, and this is what I told the team afterwards, eventually, the winning will follow. You have to follow the process."
Ten games in, winning has not followed at nearly the rate Larrañaga would've liked. Statistically, the Canes don't appear like a team that would be dead last in the 18-team ACC field. The Canes are currently 7th in scoring (75.8 points per game) and 11th in points allowed (73.6 ppg), yet still are in the midst of a seven-game losing streak.
On their current losing streak, the team is averaging about 69 a game and allowing 77, so the picture gets clearer after removing the first three games.
So exactly is the issue with the team with such high hopes going into the season? Offensive consistency can be highlighted as a more glaring issues, and specifically the starts the team has gotten off too.
In six of the seven games of this slide, Miami has trailed going into half, and the lack of reliable individual scorers makes the team stagnant often times.
The Canes only have two players currently averaging double figures, guard Nigel Pack (13.9 ppg) and center Lynn Kidd (10.9), that simply is not enough offensive firepower to compete with quad one opponents.
The offensive issues become clearer when assessing Miami's free throw rate among national ranks. Currently, the Canes rank 312th overall in the country, another issue that plagues Larrañaga's group in the early parts of the season.
The solutions lie in finding additional scoring threats within this roster, and one name stands out that has been detailed on this site multiple times this week.
Five star freshman, Jalil Bethea, inexplicably has logged just 12-minutes per game early on this season, which has led to questions of what exactly is going on.
Whatever the case may be, Coach Larrañaga needs to find a spark offensively in the final two games of their non-conference schedule.
Hurricanes Schedule:
No games scheduled.
Hurricanes Results:
No games scheduled.
We'll Leave You With This.......
Jared Verse and Keir Thomas trolled Rams teammate Kamren Kitchens for Miami going to the Pop-Tarts Bowl instead of the CFB Playoff 😂 #Noles pic.twitter.com/Hf6mIiv2Yd
— Logan B. Robinson (@LogansTwitty) December 10, 2024
Peyton Davis is an intern with BamaCentral, covering football, basketball and baseball. He has also covered for the Miami and Boston College OnSI sites. He will graduate from Alabama in the spring of 2025 with a degree and news media. During his four years at UA, Peyton appeared on the radio for WVUA-FM as well as Tide 100.9, along with covering games for WVUA23 and beat reporting for both football and basketball. Born and raised in New Orleans, Peyton has also contributed for local sites such as Cresent City Sports, covering high school football and baseball as well as BootKrewe Media, where he covered the New Orleans Saints.