Disappointing offense compounds losing streak

Last week’s key word for the women’s basketball team remained: offense. Shots refused to fall yet again for the Lions in last weekend’s road losses to Dartmouth and Harvard. In three of the four games that comprised Columbia’s current losing streak, the Lions held their opponents to under 65 points, the team’s approximate average per-game scoring last season. Even in the latest defeat, though—a 77-46 loss at the hands of Harvard—head coach Paul Nixon points to the stagnant offense as the culprit.

“When you’re playing basketball, the object of the game is to put the ball in the basket,” Nixon said, “and when that’s not happening, it takes a really resilient and mentally tough team to keep working with the same effort and intensity level on the defensive end as they do when they’re making shots.”

Columbia allowed Dartmouth only two more points last Saturday than when it defeated Dartmouth at home three weeks earlier. The difference? Sixteen fewer points on the offensive side, stemming from a 10-point drop in shooting percentage from the field. Columbia also managed fewer steals, gave up more turnovers, and, maybe most notably, spent less time at the charity stripe—eight fewer attempts resulted in five fewer points from the free-throw line. These stats, perhaps, are indicative of the lack of intensity Nixon noticed after the team’s first weekend sweep.

“I don’t think we played hard enough offensively,” Nixon said about the Penn and Princeton games. “I don’t think we cut hard enough, I don’t think we set good enough screens, I don’t think we did a good job of setting up our screens—just overall, I thought our offensive execution was not nearly as sharp as it had been in our recent home games.”

The biggest indicator of success for the Light Blue this year seems to be how well the team shoots from beyond the arc. In wins, an average of 23 points comes via 3-pointers, on 38 percent shooting, while in losses, the average point total from long range falls to 11, with only a 19 percent success rate. Senior forward Lauren Dwyer offered an explanation for these extremes.
“You see someone else hitting shots and you want to get in on the action too, and when someone else on your team starts missing shots, your confidence may start to waver as well,” Dwyer said. “It’s true that those things snowball in either direction.”

“At the same time,” she added, “I think we should take responsibility for our own actions and make sure we’re all getting in the gym this week.”

No matter how long players spend in the gym practicing their technique, though, few teams are good enough to rely on something as variable as 3-point shooting to propel their offense. For Nixon, the key for his team to get back to its winning ways is through a form of production with more consistency.

“I think the biggest thing we’ve gotta improve on offensively is really finishing our layups—finishing our sure shots,” Nixon said. “When you work really hard defensively to create a break-away layup or you work really hard offensively to execute and to get the ball at point-blank range, and then not make the shot or draw the foul—it can be very deflating.”

He added that the team has to “become a little bit tougher mentally and more resilient to where we don’t let those kinds of plays deflate us—but the other factor is to not have those plays happen that often.”

Columbia will work to master that mentality and consistency, hoping to salvage what is becoming a disappointing Ivy League season for them. The coaching staff may even alter a starting lineup that only recently solidified—taking until the 10th game for all the pieces to finally settle into place. This upcoming home stand, with rematches again Penn and Princeton, will be an opportunity for this young team to show that the hustling, sharp-shooting squad that took the court at the start of Ivy play has yet another resurgence in it. It’s come back from greater struggles before.