13 hours Ago By By Tom Timmermann St. Louis Post-Dispatch
There are a few things that spell certain trouble for the St. Louis University basketball team and two of them showed up at Chaifetz Arena on Friday night. Robbie Avila, the center who the team’s offense runs through, had his second clunker in a row, and this one was worse then Tuesday’s off night against Virginia Commonwealth.
After committing seven turnovers and scoring 14 points, eight of them at the free throw line, against VCU, where he didn't get his first points until 4:49 was left in the first half, Avila followed that up with another seven-turnover game, and this time scored four points, on 1-for-7 field goal shooting and 2-for-6 free throw shooting, not scoring until there was 18:17 to go in the game. SLU lost to Dayton 71-63 before a sellout crowd, the team’s first in two years. The other problem is turnovers, something that SLU (13-9, 6-3) has become very prone to lately.
The Billikens turned over the ball over 19 times against Dayton, which the Flyers (15-7, 5-4) converted into 23 points. Over its past six games, SLU has averaged 16 turnovers per game, with an average of 18 points per game coming off those turnovers. SLU is 14th out of 15 teams in the A-10 in turnovers and last in turnover margin, by a lot.
At KenPom.com , SLU is last in the A-10 in percentage of possessions with turnovers. Avila plays such a big role in so many parts of SLU's attack that even with two other big scorers in Gibson Jimerson and Isaiah Swope, problems for Avila translate into problems for the whole team.
“Just a rough patch for him,” said coach Josh Schertz. “He's had really two high, high turnover games ..
. where he's thrown the ball away a lot. That's not normally him.
He's normally a two-assist-to-one-turnover guy historically in his career, I don't know. I mean, obviously we have to look at it as a staff and figure out what's going on. “He's got to play better.
He knows that. I don't have any doubt that he will. I think this is the roughest patch for him in his three years, even as a freshman, and I think there's a variety of reasons for that, but the biggest thing is he has to keep working and work through it.
We have all the faith in the world that he'll be better moving forward. He was great when he got healthy, so it's not a health thing, I don't think, it's not anything where he looks any different.” The turnovers this time were more self-contained, unlike the passing that got him into trouble against VCU.
There was an offensive foul, he fell down, or had the ball taken from him. And this time it bled into other parts of his game. Avila is a career 77.
3 percent free throw shooter, but he missed his first three shots at the line, and he’s 0 for his last three games on 3-point shots, matching the longest gap of his career, though he hasn’t tried a whole lot of 3s in those three games. He was 0 for 2 on Friday to go to 0 for 5 over the past three games. His first try on Friday was wide left and didn’t touch the rim at all, banging off the backboard.
With SLU down 59-55 with about four minutes to go, SLU got the ball to Avila around the rim and he missed a layup. After a Dayton 3, SLU got the ball to Avila again, and again he missed a layup. With SLU down five with 50 seconds to play, he made a bad pass for another turnover and then committed his fifth foul and was out of the game.
But Avila wasn’t alone in having trouble with the ball. Swope had five turnovers and Kalu Anya had four. “I thought they were soft turnovers,” Schertz said.
“It wasn't like they were pressuring us, not like VCU, or they're into you. Dayton's a good defensive team, they're fine, don't get me wrong, but the turnovers were just, I gotta go back and watch the film, so many were just boneheads, soft plays, getting the ball taken out of our hands, playing in crowds, trying to force passes that aren't there, we got a couple charges. You can win a game when you turn over 19 times and whatever, but you would have to be so much better than we were, defensively.
“We've got to really look at it and try to figure it out. But the number one key offensively would be to not turn the ball over. I think tonight was 27, 28 percent of our possession we turned the ball over.
We're turning it over in the conference over 20 percent of our possessions, which is one of every five. We were like 16 percent last year (at Indiana State). That doesn't seem like a lot, but that's a massive difference in turnover percentage, and we got to be and it's been now about five games in a row where our turnovers have been way too high percentage wise.
” “We're leading the league in turnovers and for us, it's just making simpler reads, I think,” Jimerson said, “not being as careless with the ball. Live ball ones are the ones that kill you, because they get out in transition. They had a lot of points off of our turnovers.
If we can limit that, obviously, we win that game, but that's on us. We got to be better. We got to be tougher with the ball.
And that's something that we'll definitely fix.” SLU fell behind by 17 in the first half in a run where Dayton made 10 consecutive field goals, going from down 8-6 to up 32-17. Somehow, SLU got within two points with about 7 minutes left, at 54-52, but from there, as it did every time it got close, it could not make the stops it needed on defense or make the baskets it needed on offense.
After a basket put the Flyers up four, Jimerson, who led SLU with 21 points, missed a 3, and after a Dayton turnover, SLU turned the ball over itself on consecutive possessions, and was soon down seven. SLU was down five with just under a minute to play and turned the ball over, and Dayton’s subsequent free throws pretty much ended it..
