The Ball Briefing: Mikal Bridges Tape, FGCU's stat breaking offense, and an impossible comeback
Mikal Bridges isn't Kevin Durant but Brooklyn should be very excited, also FGCU women make a stat look stupid and an impossible comeback in Northern Virginia
Ball and Order is a newsletter with basketball analysis, reporting, and takes that strives to cover the game no matter who is playing. My name is Gabe Ibrahim (twitter: @gabe_ibrahim). I cover the Washington Wizards for Bullets Forever, women’s basketball for Her Hoop Stats, and coach the JV basketball team at Meridian High School. Subscribe and tell your friends! Also, check out our YouTube channel!
Welcome to the Ball Briefing. I cover, watch, and/or coach a lot of basketball at every level and find a lot of interesting stuff to talk about. The briefing will feature as much of that stuff in a weekly newsletter as possible. My personal goal here is to learn more about basketball and hopefully help you love this game in the same way I do. Let’s have some fun.
NBA: Mikal Brooklyn Bridges
I gotta say watching a guy torch your favorite team for 45 points will really catch your eye. Miami has struggled defensively as of late, but Bridges and the Nets deserve most of the credit for the performance. Nets coach Jacque Vaughn put Bridges in perfect spots and Bridges delivered.
I threaded out the buckets that caught my eye on Twitter. The general gist is that Bridges is deadly coming off the right wing and the Nets have a bunch of ways to get him going downhill from there.
Often, the play below would involve Bridges going over a pindown from Cam Johnson to get a dribble hand-off. Jimmy Butler may be able to fight through the pindown or force Bridges into a shot from behind it. Instead, Bridges goes underneath Johnson to force Butler to switch off Bridges.
Bridges is taking the most mid-range shots of his career this season with middies accounting for 43% of his field goal attempts in Phoenix. He was one of the most accurate shooters in the NBA from the midrange in 2020-21 and 2021-22. His field goal percentage from that range dipped this year, but he’s still reliable. These actions allow him to operate in the mid-range, which will be big for Brooklyn because that’s where Kevin Durant did a lot of his work. Bridges isn’t a superstar yet and he may never be. But he can at least fill the void of a superstar on this team right now.
After running the underneath route for Bridges a couple of times, Vaughn switched it up and sends Bridges into the lane on a staggered zoom action. Knowing that the Heat don’t want to switch anymore, Bridges gives Gabe Vincent just a slight hesitation before going over Ben Simmons’s screen and sprints to the opposite elbow.
The Heat did about as well as they could on the action, but that tiny hesi put the smaller Vincent too far back to bother Bridges. Notice that Simmons actually has some gravity as a lob threat, which keeps Bam Adebayo from helping Vincent. If Bridges can keep up this style of play, he may help the Nets salvage something from Simmons.
I don’t know how good Mikal Bridges can be, but not many players can put up 45 points on the Miami Heat or toast Jimmy Butler like he did there. The Nets deserve a lot of crap for what’s happened the last few seasons, but getting Bridges has to make them feel pretty good about the future.
NCAAW: FGCU And The Failures Of Pace
Over the past two decades, FGCU Women’s Basketball Head Coach Karl Smesko built the program into an analytics darling. In 2022-23, they’re scoring 110.9 points per 100 possession, which is the 7th-best mark in the country and would put them in the top 16 of points per 100 possessions for the 5th time in the last 6 years.
They’re scoring 44.6% of their points from three this season. The Eagles have hit the 44% mark six times since 2009-10. No other team has done that more than three times. Just 1% of their field goal attempts are mid-rangers. FGCU’s shooting heat map is like something out of Daryl Morey’s deepest fantasies.
We’ve established that FGCU’s offense relies on space to create one of the most efficient offenses in college basketball. It follows that they also rely on pace. After all, any analytics or just basic basketball logic will tell you that points are easier to come by in transition or early offense. Almost a quarter of FGCU’s possessions come in transition and 35.4% of their possessions are completed within 0-10 seconds. Both those numbers are among the best in the nation.
“Pace” only measures how fast an individual game moves rather than how fast an individual team moves.
YET, they somehow rank 200th out of 361 D-1 teams in “pace,” aka possessions per game. It really doesn’t make sense until you consider what the stat measures. In any given basketball game, there will be an equal number of possessions for each team because only an offensive score (field goal or free throw) or a defensive stop (turnover or rebound) can end a possession. Therefore, pace only measures how fast an individual game moves rather than how fast an individual team moves.
An offense’s tempo obviously has an effect on pace, but so do their opponent’s offensive decisions and their own defensive prowess. In FGCU’s case, their opponents want to slow down the game because an uptempo game will usually favor the Eagles and give them more chances to score with their high-powered offense.
If you’ve watched FGCU, you would know this without much thought because they are flying up and down the court. However, not every analyst or commentator can watch every team or have access to the numbers I had to dig/pay for. So they’ll use pace as the primary stat to talk about the tempo offenses play with and give an incomplete (and often inaccurate) view on the matter.
BONUS: Olivia Miles shocks Louisville
This kid is special. She ended up one assist shy of a triple-double with some truly jaw-dropping assists. That’s more or less expected from the Notre Dame sophomore. I don’t think it would fair for her to make that shot, though. Watch how she drops Mykasa Robinson to her knees with a v-cut before exploding into the handoff. She may have taken an extra step on the gather. It’s close enough that no ref would ever call it. Also, who cares? That was a great finish to a great game. Let’s hope we get Hailey Van Lith vs Olivia Miles in the ACC Tournament next month.
High School: An Impossible Comeback
Sometimes, you see something real and tangible in this world but your mind continues to believe it’s impossible. I've seen a man survive a jump to Earth from space, I’ve seen Larry Allen bench press 700 pounds, and I’ve seen a 105-pound woman eat 183 wings in 12 minutes. None of that feels possible still.
In Alexandria, VA, Lake Braddock High School girl’s basketball pulled off something that seemed impossible. The Bruins were getting hammered by the West Potomac Wolverines in the Patriot district semifinals. They scored just 17 points through the 21 minutes of a 32-minute game and trailed by 18 with 6:38 left in the 4th quarter.
Somehow, the Bruins won the game 57-51 in overtime to get back to the district finals. I wish I had some clever basketball reason for the comeback, but really Lake Braddock just never gave up, got shots to fall, and got a little lucky. The comeback was kickstarted by this huge play by freshman Sovay Reid, which sums up how the Bruins won.1
Also, West Potomac deserves credit for playing the game to the final whistle. They played deliberately and, perhaps, that hurt them. But they didn’t just sit on the ball for 7 minutes like some teams would. The Wolverines will certainly be kicking themselves for losing, but I hope they don’t regret playing the right way.
Reid might be a player to keep your eye on as a college prospect. She’s got the size, speed, and skills as a freshman to reach an elite level. This is the first time I saw her play but I hope it’s not the last.