USC bench disappears in loss to Beavers
When the USC Trojans look at the film from Saturday’s loss to Oregon State, there will be plenty of things to examine. One will be the 3-point shooting, but the other will be the Trojans’ lack of bench scoring.
With Joshua Morgan and Reese Dixon-Waters still sidelined, the bench did not do its part. The Trojans reserves finished with just 3 points on the night, and Kijani Wright accounted for all of them.
Harrison Hornery, Malik Thomas, Oziyah Sellers, and Iaroslav Niagu couldn’t contribute either, and it was another disappointing outing from the bench after a tough game on Thursday against the Ducks.
The Beavers bench scored 20 points compared to USC’s 3, and even the starters struggled for the Trojans. Tre White’s Pac-12 Freshman of the Week award feels like forever ago, and he went just 1-8 on the night. Kobe Johnson went 4-11, and Boogie Ellis shot 2-9 as the big guns cooled off in Corvallis.
The good news is USC should have a decent chance to bounce back with games against Cal and Stanford, and the Trojans need to after a potential season-crushing loss.
The real problem for the USC bench is that guys got lots of minutes in the blowout loss to Oregon on Thursday. The benefit of that loss was that players with minimal playing time got to play and integrate themselves into the lineup with Morgan and Dixon-Waters out. This was supposed to have a carryover effect on Saturday, but it didn’t happen.
Notable among the reserves is Oziyah Sellers, who has been praised by Andy Enfield as a particularly good shooter. Sellers is finally getting some playing time, but he’s not able to score.
Andy Enfield has frankly done a good job with this team, not having Vince Iwuchukwu for a full number of minutes (if Iwuchukwu could play 35 minutes instead of 25, USC would surely have won a few more games) and not having had him on the floor until mid-January.
However, if there’s one area where Enfield and his staff haven’t made the grade, it’s clearly the development of the bench. Whether it’s players who don’t play often, or who don’t make a notable statistical imprint when they do play, USC hasn’t found reliable options on the bench who can inject life into the offense. The Trojans have not been able to get to the point where they have a Plan C when Plan A (Boogie Ellis) and Plan B (Drew Peterson) aren’t working.
It really bit this team in the backside on a day when it couldn’t afford to lose.
– Drew Peterson: 11 pts (5-12 FG), 8 rebs, 2 asts.
– #OregonState‘s bench outscored #USC‘s by a 20-3 margin.
– Kobe Johnson: 9 pts (4-11 FG), 5 rebs, 0 asts, 3 turnovers, 2 stls, blk.
– USC has lost 10 of last 13 games in Corvallis dating back to the 2008-09 season. pic.twitter.com/d5Bp25q3XG— Shotgun Spratling (@ShotgunSpr) February 12, 2023
