La Salle was the team I preferred playing, just looking at their numbers.
They are a bad rebounding team. In games vs Top 100 teams they got beat by over 6% on OR%.
They don't defend the paint well at all; very low block% and a very high 2PT% given up.
Their key strengths match with ours. They win by limiting 3s (to their credit, they were very good at that, though not great tonight), defending 3s well (lottery), and forcing TOs. All things that are our strengths offensively.
Defensively they take a lot of chances for steals (thus their high steal percentage), but clearly that ends up in them giving up a lot of open looks and lay ups. With Angel playing so well (and Tay/Will for that matter as far as limiting TOs), we should be able to exploit that often Friday afternoon. Their perimeter defense and pressure may limit our looks from 3, but I suspect Gip/JO could both have big games inside.
Offensively the spread 4 wide and play a lot of 2 man games leading to drive. To be fair, that has been a weakness of ours defensively. We'll need some solid minutes from JO, especially on defense. If he plays well, he could approach a triple double because I think he'll have a ton of block opportunities, chances to score, and oboards. Fortunately for us, playing small ourselves helps us match-up better than a lot of teams would against them.
La Salle will score some, but I highly doubt they can maintain the shooting they showed tonight. Plus, we provide a ton of match-up problems for them as much as they do against us. The last 4 games they've given up at least 1.09 points per possession and I see the Cats at least matching that.
Cats 78 - La Salle 63
