[TheFarm07]

Agree as well, however, the continued use of the 'easy to defend' offense must be re-tooled to better take advantage of the new talent, or else you will likely see a repeat of last season.

Stanford scored 72.7 ppg last year, which was better than NCAA bound Duke and North Carolina, and was 61st out of 362 D1 teams, which is in the top quartile, and above average for our conference.  Could we have scored more?  Sure.  But offense was decidedly not the problem last year.  Considering the turnover from the year before, our “easy to defend” offense was pretty good and really only lost about 4 ppg from our 2024 offense, and was within 1 ppg scoring of our 2022 Final Four team.  

The problem was that we gave up nearly 70 ppg to our opponents, which ranked 294th out of 362 D1 teams, which is in the bottom quartile. Yet nobody here harps about our defense.

To win basketball games, you have to score more points than your opponents, and defense is equally important to offense.  Our easy to defend offense generated enough points to win most games; it was the fact that we couldn’t stop the other team from scoring more points than we did that led us to our worst season in ages.

Fortunately the coaches don’t read message boards (I don’t think), and I am confident that this year, they are focused on improving the things that will make the greatest difference on whether we win or lose.  The lowest hanging fruit is not making or offense slightly harder to defend, much as we would all like that, but in effectively defending our opponents, especially those that have hard to defend offenses.

BC

While I agree that our defense needs improvement, the 72.7 ppg average you cite includes blowout wins against overmatched opponents (Le Moyne, Morgan State, etc.). If you look at just our losses, we only scored 63.3 pts in those defeats and that is slightly skewed by the 88 points performance in the OT loss to LSU. That game, along with a loss to Cal in late January were the only two times we scored 70 or more points in a setback.

[TheFarm07]

Agree as well, however, the continued use of the 'easy to defend' offense must be re-tooled to better take advantage of the new talent, or else you will likely see a repeat of last season.

Stanford scored 72.7 ppg last year, which was better than NCAA bound Duke and North Carolina, and was 61st out of 362 D1 teams, which is in the top quartile, and above average for our conference.  Could we have scored more?  Sure.  But offense was decidedly not the problem last year.  Considering the turnover from the year before, our “easy to defend” offense was pretty good and really only lost about 4 ppg from our 2024 offense, and was within 1 ppg scoring of our 2022 Final Four team.  

The problem was that we gave up nearly 70 ppg to our opponents, which ranked 294th out of 362 D1 teams, which is in the bottom quartile. Yet nobody here harps about our defense.

To win basketball games, you have to score more points than your opponents, and defense is equally important to offense.  Our easy to defend offense generated enough points to win most games; it was the fact that we couldn’t stop the other team from scoring more points than we did that led us to our worst season in ages.

Fortunately the coaches don’t read message boards (I don’t think), and I am confident that this year, they are focused on improving the things that will make the greatest difference on whether we win or lose.  The lowest hanging fruit is not making or offense slightly harder to defend, much as we would all like that, but in effectively defending our opponents, especially those that have hard to defend offenses.

BC

While I agree that our defense needs improvement, the 72.7 ppg average you cite includes blowout wins against overmatched opponents (Le Moyne, Morgan State, etc.). If you look at just our losses, we only scored 63.3 pts in those defeats and that is slightly skewed by the 88 points performance in the OT loss to LSU. That game, along with a loss to Cal in late January were the only two times we scored 70 or more points in a setback.