Life is undoubtedly different for Penn State men’s basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry. There has been a lot of change, a lot of moving parts to get used to, a lot of names to learn and a lot of things to figure out on and off the court.
To Shrewsberry’s credit, Penn State has played admirably for the first chapters of his watch. They have given better teams a fight, won games that they should win and have avoided really any truly bad losses for a team full of new faces coached by a staff full of new faces. All in all, there’s not all that much to fault.
The challenge of course is turning those close losses into wins and making turnover-heavy, cold-shooting displays like the one the Nittany Lions had in Saturday’s loss to Iowa less and less frequent. Teams are going to have bad nights – there’s nothing you can do about that – but the frequency at which they occur is often the difference between good teams and bad ones.
Not to mention talent. A not-so-small footnote to the success of any college basketball program.
It’s in this where Shrewsberry might have experienced some of his biggest changes. It would be unfair and inaccurate to say Penn State isn’t talented, the Nittany Lions have size and length and at their best they shoot the ball well and play tenacious defense. You don’t almost beat Top 5 teams and nearly win on the road in the Big Ten because you’re bad, but you can lose because you’re not quite good enough. If nothing else, you can lose because the margin for error is much smaller when your opponents are just a bit better.
And that’s different for Shrewsberry – at least relative to his most recent coaching experiences. The Nittany Lions are talented, but they aren’t Purdue, they aren’t the Boston Celtics, they aren’t Butler. Penn State is often good enough to hang around, and good enough to occasionally win, but the kind of coaching that it takes to turn Penn State into the program it wants to be is a bit more complicated than simply putting a bunch of NBA Draft choices on the floor and telling them to roll.
“I think part of coaching is adjusting to what your team does well,” Shrewsberry said on Monday. “And that changes – that can change in terms of like this is something at the start of the year I thought we would do well, and now you play a few games you’re like okay – we’re not very good at that we need to adjust and move to something else.”
What is Penn State good at? Generally the Nittany Lions have leaned on their defense because defense is as much effort as it is anything else. You might not be able to make shots on any given night but you can always work hard for rebounds and contested shots. In turn Penn State has found itself in the Top 100 of rebounding margin (93rd) and 56th overall in adjusted defensive efficiency according to KenPom, with far less flattering figures on the offensive end of the floor.
And that’s where – in part – talent comes into play. Great teams are good for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest and most important of them all is simply being more skilled than the other guy.
“When you have good individual players like sometimes they can bail you out. Right?” Shrewsberry added. “Like, you don’t have to be perfect because you know, at the end of the day, Jason Tatum can go make a play for you – go score, you’ll always have that. Sometimes in college you don’t. You have to adjust and figure out what do we do best? And now let’s get to more of that. I think that’s where our struggles are aligned right now. We don’t do enough of what we do best – you see it in short spurts. Now it’s about continuing that throughout the whole game.”
Shrewsberry’s admission that his team is talented but not where it needs to be isn’t a new or controversial observation. Pat Chambers long lamented to — or reminded — reporters that Penn State was playing hard, but it doesn’t change the fact most teams had better players. This didn’t hold true for the entirety of Chambers’ tenure, but it certainty was true for the vast majority of it.
And that might be the biggest change for Shrewsberry, finally having to make something out of a lot less than he’s used to working with.
“I love our team, but you know if [the Big Ten had a draft] where is our first picked going? Who’s getting picked in the top tier? I don’t know. Like, I looked at it. I know there’s three dudes [in the Big Ten] who are gonna get picked in the NBA Top 10, so they’re probably going 1,2, 3 in a Big Ten draft … I could probably keep going. Like we’re not that top of the shop in terms of talent. So we need to do what we can to stay in [games].”
And so far staying in it has meant defense, not pushing the tempo too fast on offense and hoping for a splash of good shooting on any given night.
To Shrewsberry’s credit, it has worked pretty well so far.
