For some reason, BYU's offense has failed to kick itself into gear in the first half of basketball games. There is no obvious deficiency, no foundational flaw, with Kevin Young's team makeup, with an All-Conference shooting guard, a five-star point guard who specializes in opportunity creation, a pair of shot-blocking bigs, shooters filling in the corners, oh, and let's not forget AJ Dybantsa, the number one recruit in the class of 2025.
Yet against UConn, Arizona, Kansas, Clemson, and nearly every great team the Cougars have faced, the opening half has just been horrid.
A team built with the intention of competing for the Final Four in April is nothing to take lightly, after all this is a roster famously contructed on a mutli-million dollar budget. With exceptional coaching staff, facilities, and the talent to match anyone in the nation, BYU basketball is supposed to be one of the strongest squads in the land.
Pardon my cliche, but to be the best, you've got to beat the best, and all the Cougars have to show for their challenging schedule are a handful of tight wins consisting of comeback efforts that simply ran out of time to materialize into W's.
And worst of all, the reason behind the Cougars' struggles seems apparent: BYU basketball has been figured out.
Take a look at AJ Dybantsa's recent production during a recent slate of challenging contests:
@ Texas Tech: 13 points, 6-17 (0-3 3PT)
vs. Arizona: 24 points, 6-24 (1-8 3PT)
@ Kansas: 17 points, 6-12 (2-4 3PT)
Dybantsa beat Kevin Durant's freshman streak of consecutive 20-point games earlier in the season, but since the schedule's difficulty ramped up in Big 12 competition, his efficiency has been eratic, leaning more negative and inefficient than productive.
Against Utah, he erupted for 43 points, but the Utes are one of the worst teams in the league, and simply ill-equipped to irritate a player like Dybantsa in Provo.
For a player gunning for the number one draft spot in the summer, he's got to find a way to enforce his will upon the opposition, rather than relegating himself to a floating buoy in a raging sea of defenders. Be a speedboat, not a life raft. But to get to open waters, he'll need a little help from his friends.
Dybantsa is being double-teamed with every touch recently, and he's been unable to make the defense pay for their aggression. This year's offense has been isolation-heavy, ball-movement light in comparison with last season's bunch. Almost as if having fewer high-volume scorers forces a team to share the ball and take down a defense with finesse rather than brute force.
Wright, Saunders, and Dybantsa seemingly take turns having historic scoring nights. Wright posted 28 points in Lubbock, AJ notched 43 against the Utes, and Richie just scorched the Jayhawks for a career-high 33, but it's largely been 3-on-5 whenever the Cougars march the ball down the court.
Dybantsa's naturally inclined to share the basketball. He's said on multiple occasions that he's a playmaker at heart, and a scorer when he needs to be. AJ keeps receiving the ball outside his comfort zone, forcing him to put the ball on the floor to get to where he needs to be. Running very few non-screening actions off ball, the offense has been largely stagnant in recent contests.
But in the second half, something always seems to click. Perhaps Coach Young's ability to make in-game adjustments is just that good, perhaps a backed-into-the-corner feeling triggers a fight-or-flight response. It could be that the team just hasn't been making shots in the first half by pure happenstance. But from my point of view, too many isolations and too little deliberate, tactical ball movement has forced the Cougars into a rut.
The good news? This is highly correctable. The bad news? It's going to be an uphill climb to the Final Four.