I would like to see us play a little faster, but I'm not sold our offense would be anymore efficient. I'd love to see the team that we saw in that first half against Purdue too, but that was a crazy combination of our lowest turnover% of the year combined with really good shooting. It also featured our worst half of defense in the 2nd half when Purdue scored at a crazy 1.63 PPP clip. It was a game that turned into an shootout and that has been the exception this year by far.
After playing a variety of paces in Hawaii that all featured terrible defense, I think our staff figured that if we didn't improve on defense we weren't going to win many games. TOs have still plagued this team, but continuing to let teams shoot 58% or better is the main thing that had to be fixed for any success. In many ways I think they had to rethink what they went into the season with; it seems our original approach was to play fast and "outscore" people, but our defense became so bad that this approach wasn't realistic. Unfortunately the transition to slower, defensive basketball became even uglier in late December. I'm not sure it will work out, but I'm sure we'll continue to see this approach throughout Big 12 play.
