I keep writing, muttering to myself while watching games, screaming, at times, to the heavens, that Isaac McKneely, he needs to be greedy.
McKneely, give his high school coach credit, he raised him right, so the second-year dead-eye shooter is, first and foremost, a team player; that’s why he fits in so well into Tony Bennett’s system, which is about as democratic as basketball, or for that matter, life, gets.
But Bennett doesn’t necessarily need McKneely to fit in.
The McKneely who took a total of four threes in the loss at Wake Forest and the home win over Virginia Tech isn’t being refreshingly deferential; the kid shooting 48.9 percent from three is hurting his team when he’s not hunting for his shot.
“I just think having a feel, he’s such a team guy, and the way he was brought up, and his high school, the way they played, he distributed, and I think some guys, you have to tone down, and some guys, you have to nudge forward. He’s more of a, give him a nudge to be more aggressive,” said Bennett, who clearly wants to see McKneely, who is averaging 11.9 points per game this season, to, yeah, be more aggressive.
Like McKneely was in Saturday’s 75-66 win at Georgia Tech.
In that one, McKneely put up a season-high 13 shots, and finished with 20 points, with six makes on his nine shots from three, a couple of which were taken from the Atlanta suburbs.
“As long as he makes it, he can shoot it whenever he wants, right? That’s what a coach should say,” said Bennett, himself a fairly good three-point shooter back in the day.
(Editor’s Note: Um, actually, Bennett is the career D1 leader in three-point percentage, hitting 49.7 percent of his shots from behind the arc in his run at Wisconsin-Green Bay from 1988-1992. Fairly good, sure.)
“No, I mean, it’s just a good shot with the right timing,” Bennett said, of his philosophy on what makes a good shot. “Obviously, in transition, some guys, we talked about, have that freedom, if it’s a really good look, to take it, but you always use shot discernment. And some guys have a little more leeway to, hey, be aggressive, look for it. But yeah, his range is, whatever, he shoots 24, 25, he had a few on the logo that I saw. A lot of it’s how you’re feeling that day. You know, sometimes you have you hit the driver off the tee, and some days you hit the three-wood, or the, or the hybrid, I should say, not the long iron anymore, the hybrid.”
Opponent scouting reports, of course, are accounting for McKneely’s abilities, as you would expect.
“He’s a guy that gets guarded, sometimes people guard him a little differently, they really face-guard, tag, make it hard to get shots,” Bennett said, speaking from, in addition to observation, personal experience. “You still have to take good shots, but we want him more on the aggressive, you know, the word we used was, you know, hunt the shot or even, hunt the catch, hunt the shot and then play from there. And I thought he just took a step in the right direction.”
So, yes, we all want McKneely to be greedy, but the deferential part to his game can work, too.
McKneely has made some nice pocket passes to cutting bigs off screens to take advantage of opponents overplaying him, for instance.
To that end, McKneely’s assist numbers are double this year what they were in his freshman campaign.
His shot attempts are also up significantly, from 5.5 attempt per game as a freshman, when he was the young guy deferring to a group of veterans, to 9.4 per game this season.
Baby steps.
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Chris Graham
