Last night George Mason dominated Penn in an 87-66 victory.
Xavier Johnson flirted with a triple-double finishing the game with 12 points, 9 rebounds and 7 assists but the true mismatch issue for the Quaker would be Josh Oduro.
The 6’9″ junior big man led the Patriots with 20 points and 8 rebounds.
Penn rotated three players on Oduro even though the bulk of the coverage came from two of their front court players, Max Lorca-Lloyd (6’9″) and Nick Spinoso (6’9″). The third player who Oduro faced was Michael Wang (6’10”) but that happened only one possession. In that one possession Oduro blew by Wang and finished with a reverse layup.
First we’ll take a look at how he did against Lorca-Lloyd.
On the defensive end, Lorca-Lloyd didn’t provide in issues for Oduro. Early on, Penn tried to put Oduro in screen and roll with Lorca-Lloyd. It didn’t work well as Oduro’s footwork never put him in a bad position but also the Patriots were putting great pressure on the ball handler pushing him towards the sideline. The Quakers got away from it pretty quickly as they really got into their Princeton-type stuff.
On the offensive end, head coach Kim English did a great job early on in getting Oduro against Lorca-Lloyd in space. It started out with a screen and roll with Oduro diving hard and getting to the front of the rim. The hard dive prevented Lorca-Lloyd from properly cutting off the ball. Even though, DeVon Cooper missed the shot, Oduro was right there to clean it up to get the first two points of the game.
Most of Oduro’s damage came when he was able to get ball in space on the perimeter. He was able to take Lorca-Lloyd off the dribble whenever he wanted. When D’Shawn Schwartz was parked in the corner, Penn couldn’t come over and help on Oduro’s strong hand. There didn’t seem to be an effort to push Oduro left away from Schwartz who ended the night with 18 points on a strong 4-7 three point shooting.
Penn also didn’t choose to run a second guy down to dig when Oduro put drove to the basket. No stunting. No doubling. No nothing.
Spinoso would be next up. He is quicker on the perimeter and I’m sure the thought was, he could take the drive away from Oduro. That wasn’t necessarily the case. Oduro’s first drive resulted into a layup. But after that, Spinoso improved a bit. There were times that after two or three Oduro dribbles, Spinoso could beat him to the spot but his lack of athleticism came into play. Oduro could simply finish over him or out-muscle him.
Oduro will have a test when he faces Maryland’s Qudus Wahab but he seems more and more prepared for the big stage.
English’s ability to keep Oduro in Fairfax is paying off game-by-game.
