George Mason might need to tweak their game plan a bit before the NCAA tournament

John Mcdonnell / Washington Post

George Mason's loss to VCU in the CAA tournament ended the team's 16 game winning streak and may have opened eyes to some about how this team enters into games.  There is no overhaul that needs to be done, they had the nation's longest winning streak for a reason, but their are some minor details I think they started to overlook during the streak.  Some of which teams learned to exploit in the early goings of some of the Patriots' last few games. According to Jim Larranaga, teams started to take notice of Mason's style of play more closely in the last couple of weeks:

"Larranaga said as the regular season came to an end, teams began to adapt to the Patriots' style of play.

"[In the past few games] teams have been a little more conservative offensively against us," he said. "The games are slower paced, they're lower scoring and there are fewer possessions. It puts a premium on defensive rebounding and your shots."

Why is this such a big deal? The Patriots' thrive on high possession games. They led the CAA and are currently ranked 14th nationally in points per possession (1.13), so it's easy to see how this can throw off the team's strategy on offense if an opponent limits their touches.  With Mason having four players shooting better than 48% from the field (Long, Pearson, Hancock, and Morrison) they can be very deadly if another team trys to run and gun up and down the court against them.  However opposing teams have not been doing that lately.

The conservative play by some of Mason's recent opponents is only a small part of the story here.  Another underlying factor is the Patriots' defense in the first half of those games.  Take a look at some the first half shooting percentages from Mason 's last couple of opponents:





Aside from the game against a dreadfully bad shooting Northeastern team, Mason has yielded some pretty high shooting numbers in the beginning of their last couple of games. In the Northern Iowa and VCU games it was obvious how open they were leaving the perimeter and the two teams shredded the Patriots early on. A lack of defensive effort in these games didn't allow Mason to force the other team into playing their type of game.  They want to force turnovers, get more possessions and make the other team settle for shots they don't want to take.  We haven't seen much of that recently and the reason a loss like the one to VCU didn't come earlier was because this is team is full of clutch players and is very strong offensively.  They have the ability to storm back at any point when they are down but the point I'm trying to make is that they shouldn't be putting themselves in that position.

For Larranaga and his staff this issue really isn't something that can't be corrected very quickly. We've seen the team perform at the level they need to win in the NCAA tournament many times this season.  The loss in Richmond could end being a blessing for the Patriots as they enter into March Madness as I doubt haven't learned they need to play a whole 40 minutes and 94 feet of court in all their games.