"Loyola heads to George Mason Wednesday night for the first of two games in the DC area. The George Mason Patriots enter the game at 15-7 overall, 4-5 in the A10, and at 96 in KenPom. The Ramblers at 15-7, 7-2 in conference, and slowly inching up KenPom to 115.
The work first-year Head Coach Tony Skinn has done in the past eight months is super impressive. Skinn, famous as a key member of George Mason’s 2006 Final Four team under Coach Jim Larranaga, took over suddenly for his first head coaching gig when Kim English got the Providence job. Oh, and English took with him three of the top four players eligible to return to Mason this season. Only senior point guard Ronald Polite III returned, while Skinn patched together a roster from transfers: Darius Maddox from Virginia Tech, Keyshawn Hall from UNLV, Amari Kelly from UNC-Wilmington, Woody Newton from Oklahoma State, and Jared Billups from Siena. These kinds of shotgun marriages have the potential to go south fast, but Skinn used defensive commitment to bind the pieces together.
Mason uses a veritable kaleidoscope of defenses to keep opposing teams off balance. They started off the season winning 13 of their first 15 games against an easy-ish schedule, but since the first week of conference play they’ve lost five of the last seven. At home, Mason is very strong, winning all but one of their 11 games in Eagle Bank Arena—a 54-50 loss to vcu in mid-January is the only exception.
Coach Skinn has started the same five players just about every game this year: 6’7” sophomore guard/forward Keyshawn Hall, 6’5” junior guard Darius Maddox, 6’9” senior forward Amari Kelly, 6’2” senior point guard Ronald Polite III, and 6’5” guard Jared Billups. Hall, a UNLV transfer, is one of the best players in the conference, averaging 17.1 ppg, and a conference-best 8.7 rebounds per game. Maddox adds 13.6 ppg, and is the top three-point shooter (47 made threes), hitting them at 40.2%. Kelly is the third double-digit scorer at 12.3 ppg, and is a dangerous three-point threat. Polite adds an average of 8.0 points to go with a team-leading 3.0 assists per game. Billups is the defensive star, averaging 5.2 points, 4.2 rebounds, and 1.0 steals.
The Mason bench is led by impressive 6’3” freshman Baraka Okojie, and also features 6’8” senior forward Woody Newton, and 6’8” senior forward Malik Henry. Okojie is a great defensive player leading the team in steals and a pretty good offensive player for a freshman averaging 7.3 points, 2.6 rebounds, and 2.0 assists.
The Patriots are one of the best free throw shooting teams in the league, with Hall, Maddox, and Polite each averaging over 82% and the team averaging 74.7%. They also have the ability to really lock down on defense when they need to-- ask St. Bonaventure about that, 69-60 losers after leading Mason 52-47 with seven minutes left.
Through their first 19 games of the season, George Mason’s defense kept opposing teams from shooting 50% or above from the field, and held the opposition to a 38.8% field goal percentage. That’s exceptional. Teams tried to find their way around that great defense (a lot of it tricky zones) by shooting more from behind the arc—in the first 19 games against GMU, opponents shot an average of 26.6 three-point attempts, and they hit them at a rate of 34.2%. But over the past three games, opposing teams are shooting 47.0% overall and 39.4% from three. Two of those three games, the opposition shot over 50% from the field, ending GMU’s streak, and two of the three were losses.
By way of comparison, Loyola over the past 11 games has held opponents to 38.3% shooting from the field and 33.0% from distance, resulting in a 9-2 record in that span. Loyola has defense that can match nearly any team in the league these days. But the Ramblers’ offense needs to be ready for tough on-ball defense, sudden shifts to complex zones, and inbounding pressure from Mason—tough conditions, especially on the road.
GMU seems like they struggle more when it’s a slow-paced, defensive rock fight kind of game. They lost to Charlotte 54-49 when both teams shot below 37% from the field. They lost to vcu 54-50 when the Patriots held the Rams to 35.3% field goal shooting (and the Rams held GMU to 0-of-15 shooting from three). Last time out, Mason lost to high-scoring UMass (they average nearly 81 per game) after holding them to just 66 points."
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