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A statistical look at Michigan State basketball, with a dash of football talk

Robert Morris Game Preview

Posted by kj on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

9:50 Friday night.  The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis.  CBS.

First, some fun facts:

  • Robert Morris’ mascot is the Colonials.
  • That’s appropriate, as the university is named after Robert Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who was nicknamed the “Financier of the Revolution.”
  • RMU is located in Moon Township, near Pittsburgh.
  • It was founded as a school for accountants.
  • Hank Fraley, an offensive lineman with the Cleveland Browns, is among the university’s notable alumni.
  • This will be RMU’s sixth NCAA Tournament appearance.  Their last trip to the Big Dance came in 1992.  They lost in the round of 64 in each of the previous five appearances.

On to the stats:

Robert Morris compiled a 24-10 record this season.  Their conference mark of 15-3 was good enough to win the regular season title of the Northeast Conference.  Kenpom ranks the conference #29 out of the 31 Division 1 conferences.  RMU also took home the conference tournament crown, earning their NCAA Tournament berth.  The Colonials squeaked by Mount St. Mary’s 48-46 in a 57-possession game in the conference title game.

They’ve played three games against KenPom top-50 competition this season: losing by 8 to Miami of Florida, by 21 to Xavier, and by 20 to Pittsburgh (all on the road).

RMU is stronger on defense (#91 nationally in adjusted efficiency) than on offense (#170).  Their defensive strength is creating turnovers.  They rank 26th in the nation in defensive TO% at 23.5%.  Senior guard Jeremy Chappell leads the Colonials with 2.5 steals/game.  RMU’s statistical profile indicates they play mostly man-to-man, as do the new articles I’ve read over the last two days.

Their defensive weakness is that they foul quite a bit, ranking just 248th nationally in defensive free throw rate.  The Colonials will face a serious size disadvantage against MSU; they have no players taller than 6′8″ and only one player listed as heavier than 215 pounds.  MSU should be able to get the ball into post and get to the free throw line.  Once again, Delvon Roe will be matched up with a smaller player; as the season has gone on, he’s shown an increased ability to get the better end of such a mismatch.

Offensively, Robert Morris excels at one thing: shooting the ball.  Their shooting line is 51.0/39.7/70.7.  The 3-point percentage is 16th best in the country.  Three players are shooting better than 40.0% from beyond the arc: Chappell, junior guard Jimmy Langhurst, and sophomore guard Gary Wallace.  Chappell leads the team in scoring with 16.9 points/game.    Junior forward Rob Robinson is RMU’s main interior scoring threat, averaging 11.4 points/game on 52.7% two-point shooting.

Chappell is the Colonials’ best all-round player.  He boasts a shooting line of 53.4/40.6/85.1 and also leads the team in rebounding (6.3 per game) and assists (3.2 per game).  Expect him to see 25-30 minutes of Travis Walton defense.

RMU’s offensive weakness is turnovers–so we can expect a decent number of turnovers on both ends of the court.  They rank just 280th in the nation in offensive turnover percentage at 22.5%.  Tom Izzo is talking about picking up the tempo/pressure; keeping Robert Morris off balance on offense may be a good way to keep them from putting consistent defensive pressure on our perimeter players.

Kenpom predicts a 74-60 MSU win in a 67-possession game.   Robert Morris’ 3-point shooting proficiency and ability to create turnovers are somewhat concerning.  But, as I’ve argued previously, this year’s MSU team has really only struggled with turnovers against teams with talented and aggressive man-to-man defenders.  I don’t expect RMU to be able to match UNC, Purdue, or Illinois in terms of defensive intensity.  (On the other hand, we’ve post turnover percentages above 23.0% in 6 of our last 8 games, so maybe my theory isn’t as solid as it was a month ago.)

My instincts say this game will be a lot closer than we want it to be at halftime, but our size and athleticism will wear the Colonials down in the second half for a comfortable win and a match-up with USC or Boston College on Sunday.

P.S. You can check out Colonials Corner for a Robert Morris perspective on the game as the week goes on.  Apparently, the Colonials were very close to being a #14 seed, for what it’s worth.  Also of interest: RMU head coach Mike Rice is plugged into the Jud Heathcote coaching tree.  Most recently, Rice was an assistant to Jamie Dixon at Pittsburgh, before taking over as head coach at Robert Morris two years ago.

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Filed in game preview13 responses so far

13 Responses to “Robert Morris Game Preview”

  1. Benon 17 Mar 2009 at 10:49 pm 1

    Strangely enough, Robert Morris was one of the teams in the first college basketball game I ever saw in person. Monmouth University (also a Northeast Conference member) is about 2 minutes from where I grew up, and I saw them beat RMU back around ‘90 or so.

    3 guys who can shoot from outside worries me, since, sadly, we have only one Travis Walton. The you mentioned are 6′3″, 6′3″, and 5′11″, respectively, so Summers, for instance, should have somewhat of a size advantage. They’re obviously not going to hurt us on the interior, so it seems as if our challenge will be to make sure that our guys run through screens and do whatever’s necessary to ensure that their perimeter players have a hand in their faces at all times.

  2. Mark in DCon 18 Mar 2009 at 8:13 am 2

    Summers, with his quickness and size advantage, seems like the perfect guy to put on one of their sharpshooters. Our perimeter D was pretty bad in the pre-Big 10 season but since then has been very good, so I think with good effort we should be able to limit them. The key will be perimeter D, and going inside on offense. We tend to have lapses where we seem to stagnate on offense and stop getting the ball down low – we should keep throwing it in there in this game given our size advantage. Suton especially should feast, but Roe and Morgan should also be able to score down low. We should demolish them on the boards so I don’t think it’s essential that we shoot particularly well from the outside in this one, although it would be nice because we will need some perimeter shooting eventually and gaining confidence in this game would help.

    I’ve noticed that Lucas seems to be coughing the ball up more often lately (in the OSU BTT game he had 3 assists and 3 turnovers – not the ratio we are used to seeing with him). Hopefully he can get that corrected as he is typically not prone to turnovers.

  3. kjon 18 Mar 2009 at 8:18 am 3

    It’d be nice to get a really dominant rebounding effort out of the team in this one. We haven’t had a 50%+ OffReb% in a game in almost two months. (I realize I’m setting the “dominance” bar kind of high.)

  4. TMadison25on 18 Mar 2009 at 9:53 am 4

    One of the six Bracket “Experts” at CBS picked us to win it all.

    http://www.cbssports.com/colle.....xpertpicks

  5. kjon 18 Mar 2009 at 10:01 am 5

    And it’s Pete Tiernan who picked us–a stats guy who’s apparently now doing work for CBS Sports.

  6. Jasonon 18 Mar 2009 at 10:48 am 6

    I’d personally rather see Allen over Summers. I remember at least one play on Saturday where Summers did a horrible job defending the 3. Allen’s TOs are really down. If either of them can step up I think we can play with anybody.

    Minutes the last two games were Allen 22, Summers 9 and 26/18. Is this significant?

    If I go back further it seems a bit more even: 10/23, 18/22, 13/17, and 24/6.

  7. witless chumon 18 Mar 2009 at 11:03 am 7

    I heard Jim Comparoni from the Rivals MSU site on Sportstalk with Earl Robinson from WKAR (I get it as a podcast).

    He said that from watching tapes, Robert Morris looked like they were playing MSU’s system almost exactly on offense and defense. Talked about how they’d been built in the mold of Pitt who were built in the mode of MSU.

  8. kjon 18 Mar 2009 at 1:20 pm 8

    Joe Posnanksi likes us too, using a much-less rigorous methodology (and only to get the championship game).

    http://sportsillustrated.cnn.c.....f=si_ncaab

    Also, this guy’s approach is exactly the opposite of scientific, but I like the result:

    http://www.tdtnews.com/story/2009/3/16/56492

  9. Mark in DCon 18 Mar 2009 at 2:39 pm 9

    That second guy appears to be geographically challenged, or considers East Lansing to be seperate from Lansing, the State capital, otherwise he would have eliminated us on those grounds.

    Not sure what to do in the Allen vs Summers debate – neither one has been very consistent lately. Allen looked pretty good against Minnesota so I say give them both a few minutes and let the one who looks ready to play the majority of the minutes. If neither of them look to be on put Lucious in – he doesn’t seem to have a fear of shooting.

    +1 on the rebounding dominance and against Robert Morris we should be able to accomplish it, although that is a high bar. They just don’t have the height or bulk to match us.

  10. Joeon 18 Mar 2009 at 5:39 pm 10

    East Lansing most definitely is a seperate entity from Lansing. The other schools mentioned play in the same city where the state capitol building is: Columbus, Baton Rouge, Austin and Salt Lake City. While a stones throw away from the Capitol…MSU is in a different city…semantics, maybe, specious probably…still his selection method is more tongue in cheek than anything.

  11. Con-Ton 19 Mar 2009 at 6:35 am 11

    Chappell is clearly their star: he plays 80+% of the available minutes and is the NEC player of the year. He merits a heavy dose of Travis Walton. Their 3-point shooting is even better than the team stats indicate: their top three shooters (Chappell, Jimmy Langhurst and Gary Wallace) are all over 40% and Bateko Francisco is at 36%. They are dragged down a bit by the 7-32 shooting of Mezie Nwigwe from beyond the arc. Nwigwe, incidentally, had a brush with the law recently that the University is choosing not to act on until the legal system runs its course (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29607792/).

    Our course seems clear: pound it inside, play aggressive man-to-man to force turnovers and try to shut down Chappell and make the other guys beat us. If they get hot from outside, it could get dicey. They’re a pretty strong #15 and even got a sniff of the top 25, receiving one vote in a February poll.

  12. Mark in DCon 19 Mar 2009 at 8:21 am 12

    Tongue and cheek or not it’s probably just as good a way to make bracket picks as anything else. Pouring over every stat you can get your hands on for hours on end doesn’t seem to work out all that well either.

  13. MSU-Robert Morris Open Thread | Spartans Weblogon 20 Mar 2009 at 5:27 pm 13

    [...] my game preview for anyone who might have missed it.  To repeat what I said then: My instincts say this game will [...]