It’s weird to think George Mason got better as a team while missing their best returning player from the previous season for the first six games of this year but now is looking like the case. After the win against American at home, senior Justin Kier spoke about how the team did while he was out recovering from a stress fracture on his foot:
“It’s not always good to get hurt” Kier said “but something great came out of my injury because guys stepped up and matured; and now as you see our guys are a lot better.”
I originally thought Mason would be doomed on the scoring end against some of the teams on their early schedule without Kier but as a result we got see some young players step up. Jamal Hartwell was already poised to have an increased scoring production this year but it was nice surprise to see Xavier Johnson and Josh Oduro contributing very early on. We also saw veterans like AJ Wilson and Goanar Mar led the way in plenty of moments. Would that have been the case with Kier in the rotation getting the amount of possessions he does? Maybe, maybe not.
This year’s team was always going to be different after losing a guy like Otis Livingston II. Otis dominated a lot of the ball control and shooting attempts and set the half court offense up. Even with Kier in the lineup they still were going to have rely on a balanced scoring effort and a freshman player to step up into a serious role in the rotation. Kier being out the first six games, against lower tier teams, may have given the young guys the extra reps needed to be confident enough to play these elevated roles.
It may have done well for the team also to learn it’s identity, which so far is looking like strong defense. Getting younger players to buy into the teams’ defensive philosophy, especially Paulsen’s, isn’t always an easy thing. But freshmen and sophomores want to play and with a starter missing, there were more minutes to go around. I think this may be the biggest key to the season, if they can continue to dominate on defense late in games like we’ve been seeing. They have been pressing and playing a much more aggressive style on defense and Kier fits into that scheme nicely with his overall athleticism and versatility.
The schedule only gets more difficult from this point on so we will have to wait and see if this improvement really has the team set up for a run at being in the top 5 of the conference or not.
