What’s Wrong With Jeffrey Carroll, and How Can It Be Fixed?

Jeffrey Carroll has had a pretty strange first two months of his senior season. After sitting out the first three games, he came off the bench against Texas A&M in Brooklyn and had a lousy first game. All of this was expected. We expected him to play as a reserve to ease back into things, and we expected him to struggle against a top 10 team in his first game.

What we didn’t expect is that he would keep coming off the bench and that, though he’s shown flashes of that junior year brilliance, he would continue to struggle against the upper crust of college hoops.

Carroll has played more than 25 minutes in just one game this year and is shooting just 35 percent from the field (he shot 54 percent last year). Even worse, against (by far) the two best teams the Pokes have played, Carroll is 3-for-21 from the field (14 percent), 1-for-10 from 3-point range and has as many fouls and turnovers (7) as he does points.

So … what’s up with Clip?

For starters, his shooting has been poor. Like, really poor (see numbers below). Throw in the fact that he’s shouldering more of the load this year, and you get a picture of inefficiency. Let’s look at a few numbers.

The top numbers (possessions) show what percentage of OSU’s possessions have terminated on Carroll (either from a shot or a turnover) when he’s in the game. The second row shows what percentage of OSU’s shots he has taken when he’s in the game. And the third row shows what his true shooting percentage is when you take into account free throws and 3-pointers (in other words, what would someone need to shoot on 2-pointers to match Carroll’s efficiency).

The numbers aren’t pretty. Carroll is being relied on to take over a third of OSU’s shots when he’s in the game (compared with a fourth last year) and his true shooting percentage has dipped by nearly 20 percent. There are a few reasons why. First, he’s getting fewer good looks at the rim.

2017: 53 percent of his shots around the rim were assisted on
2018: 43 percent of his shots around the rim were assisted on

This tells me he’s having to create more on his own, and this is to be expected when you go from Jawun Evans to Kendall Smith. Also, he’s taking more 3-pointers (46 percent of his shots this year have been from deep, compared to 36 percent last year) and missing a lot more of them.

2017: 44 percent from 3-point range
2018: 23 percent from 3-point range

But why is that? Is it because he got a ton of open looks last year with Evans driving and is more smothered this time around? Maybe. I went back and looked at his attempts against Wichita State on Saturday, and he was open for the majority of them.

Obviously this is a tiny sample size, but it would appear that part of the problem is that Carroll is simply missing shots he normally makes. The bad news is, of course, that he’s missing shots, but the good news is that this doesn’t appear to be a problem that can’t be fixed.

Because of the small sample and because he hasn’t played very much this year — another story altogether — I’m willing to write off most of Carroll’s scoring woes to off games at the wrong time. If you take out A&M and WSU, his true shooting percentage number in the other four games he’s played is 59 percent (which is just under where he was at last year).

I know you can’t remove certain games to magically make a player better than he is, and Carroll needs to get to the line more against good teams (two attempts combined against A&M and Wichita State), but his statistical set is still small enough that I remain optimistic that he’ll still have a terrific senior year as long as he starts hitting from deep.

And probably even start at some point.