STARKVILLE — Freshmen in college basketball frequently get off to hot starts, then hit the proverbial “wall” once defenses figure out how to guard them and struggle to keep producing at a high level.
But as Mississippi State guard Josh Hubbard’s first season in Starkville hits the stretch run, Hubbard has only continued to improve. He has had off nights here and there, but in his last three games, Hubbard has averaged nearly 30 points a night and shot a combined 19-for-37 from 3-point range.
With that scoring prowess comes extra attention from opposing defenses. Auburn was clearly keying on him in the first half on Saturday, when Hubbard was held to three points and was 1-for-6 shooting overall, with just three of those attempts coming from behind the arc. The Bulldogs (19-10, 8-8 Southeastern Conference) found better looks for Hubbard in the second half, when he was 5-for-8 from distance.
“They sped him up a little bit, which doesn’t happen very often,” MSU head coach Chris Jans said. “Josh understands the game and understands that he has to get better and he has to learn from how different people defend him. Because of his (5-foot-10-inch) stature, he has to be careful sometimes when they speed him up and he tries to get all the way to the rim when there’s a bunch of size waiting for him.”
None of the Bulldogs’ other guards played particularly well in the loss to the Tigers, but Hubbard’s continued ascension can open things up for players like Shakeel Moore and Dashawn Davis.
With defenses always keeping an eye on Hubbard, Moore broke out with a 4-for-4 shooting performance from distance at Missouri on Feb. 10, made all three of his field goal attempts the following week against Arkansas and had 12 more points on 5-for-7 shooting in a win over Ole Miss. And it’s not just the other guards who can benefit from Hubbard’s presence — even star post player Tolu Smith is seeing fewer double teams than he was a year ago.
“It creates space for all of us, forwards included,” Jans said Monday. “We’re more efficient this year than we were last year. We’re running our offense at a higher level, and hopefully it will continue to get better. Even a guy like Tolu, people aren’t auto-doubling him as much as they used to, so he has more space.”
Jans said Smith, who missed the first 12 games of his final season with a foot injury, had another scare during practice Friday before the Auburn game with “a pretty serious fall.” But he underwent immediate X-rays and survived major damage, then put up 14 points and 10 rebounds in 33 minutes of action the next day.
“He’s 100 percent okay. He may have some soreness and things of that nature, but there’s nothing wrong structurally,” Jans said. “He didn’t actually injure any major part of his body. It’s just the fall was pretty scary, pretty awkward, two big guys got tangled up and he fell. It hurt. You could tell it hurt, and so you just didn’t know. But… he didn’t complain about anything during the game and he didn’t ask to come out.”
Scouting Texas A&M
The Bulldogs’ final road game of the year takes them to College Station to face an Aggies team that has a lot in common with MSU and is in desperate need of a win to stay on the NCAA Tournament bubble.
Texas A&M (16-13, 7-9) had an up-and-down non-conference season against a challenging schedule, and after an 0-2 start to SEC play, the Aggies defeated then-No. 6 Kentucky in overtime, but followed that up with a one-point loss at Arkansas. Like the Bulldogs, Texas A&M also has a home win over a top-10 Tennessee squad, but the Aggies then turned around and lost by one at Vanderbilt three days later.
Wade Taylor IV leads Texas A&M with 18.2 points per game, and Tyrece Radford adds 15.5. But while the Aggies are 11th in the conference in scoring offense, they generate extra opportunities better than any team in the country. Texas A&M pulls down 17.5 offensive rebounds per game, the most in all of Division I men’s college basketball.
“They’re going to get after you and their prowess this year is on the backboard,” Jans said. “We’ve taken a backseat thus far to their numbers and how they get it done each and every game. They’re similar (to us) in terms of the play-hard factor, the toughness factor, what they rely on.”
The Aggies grab so many offensive boards in part because they miss so many shots — they are last in the SEC in both overall field goal percentage and 3-point percentage. But those second-chance opportunities help them get to the free throw line more than any other team in the conference except Arkansas.
Texas A&M also takes care of the ball better than anyone else in the SEC, committing just 9.7 turnovers per game.
“They’ve got such veteran guards with Radford and Taylor, and they’ve done it all. No moment has been too big for them,” Jans said. “They may not have quite the scoring around the basket, but to make up for that, they’ve unleashed their forwards to be offensive rebounding machines and creating extra possessions for their team.”
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