Rodney Terry pleased after Colorado scrimmage, looking for more from transition defense
Ahead of the start of the Texas men’s basketball season, Rodney Terry‘s Longhorns trekked to Colorado over the weekend to face Tad Boyle’s Buffaloes in a “secret scrimmage.”
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Dillon Mitchell scored 22 points, Max Abmas added 12, and Tyrese Hunter dropped 18, according to Jeff Goodman.
That’s solid production from three players who will be asked to carry a lot of the offensive load this year, though that production was sporadic in the final portions of the game. Texas was up 65-64 around when the under-eight timeout would have been in a conventional game, but went on a scoring drought while the Buffaloes pulled away. Of course, Texas was without two frontline frontcourt players in Kadin Shedrick and Dylan Disu.
Even so, Terry was mostly happy with what he saw from his team in the behind-closed-doors exhibition.
“That was a great scrimmage for us,” Terry said Wednesday. “They’re going to be a top 25 team, one of the best teams on the West Coast. For the better part of that scrimmage, you were talking about two teams that looked they were already in midseason form in a high-level game, a highly competitive game.”
Terry said his team forced 19 turnovers and scored 22 points off of them. Texas was able to succeed on the offensive end, but there was a key aspect of defense that Terry identified as needing to be addressed ahead of the season.
Terry lamented the performance of the Longhorn transition defense, something guard Chendall Weaver echoed during his meeting with the media on Wednesday. That’s a sign that Terry hammered the point home with his team after they returned from the Rockies, and is something he hopes to see improved ahead of Monday’s exhibition versus St. Edward’s prior to the start of the season.
“It’s getting back, stopping the ball, keeping guys out of the paint,” Terry said. “We’ll use some football language from time to time: we need to have a helmet on a helmet. When we get back, a helmet needs to be on a helmet. We’ve got to get back, stop that ball, we’ve got to sit down and really load our defense and set our defense. They challenged us to do that because they had guards that could really push the ball up the floor.”
Colorado boasts veteran guards as well as talented wing players like five-star Cody Williams and senior Tristan de Silva. They will play physically in the post and utilize the benefits of experienced ball-handlers, qualities analogous to the Horns’ conference opponents.
Since the games at this juncture don’t count, Terry has time to fix the issue and had confidence his staff would be able to do that ahead of the season opener on November 6 versus Incarnate Word.
“We’ve got to get back, set our defense,” Terry said. “We can’t let those guys score in transition whether it be threes or to the paint. But nothing we can’t fix. When we got back I said, ‘guys, all the things and the issues we had in the scrimmage, we can come back and fix everything.’”
That’ll be just one part of the mentality his team has during the early portions of the year. The Longhorns won’t be challenged often in the non-conference, but quality power conference teams like Louisville and Marquette are on the schedule, and the chance to play defending Indiana or national champion UConn exists as well.
During that time, and during the whole season that features new players, new coaches, and a new full-time man in charge, Terry wants to see his players develop over the course of the campaign in an effort return to the second weekend, if not further.
“From the outset of this journey with the group, we just said we had to have a growth mindset every day with what we’re trying to improve, getting familiar with one another on the court every single day,” Terry said. “I think just like any team as they start a season, there’s going to be a number of different things you have to continue to get better with each and every day.”
