Five Down

It's too early to draw conclusions, but here is what's doin' so far:

 ORtg %Poss %Shots eFG% OR% DR% FTRate Ast% TO% Stl%
McCauley 117.4 24.9 25.8 54.7 9.4 23.5 50.9 8.7 11.8 3.4
Fells 128.8 19.3 23.7 60.6 1.6 9.0 25.5 13.0 11.3 1.3
Costner 101.3 29.7 25.0 42.2 10.7 20.7 73.3 13.3 19.4 0.5
T. Smith 118.2 31.0 35.6 59.3 19.0 12.7 48.1 3.5 7.4 1.1
Fergie 120.9 14.5 15.6 60.0 3.0 12.0 20.0 15.7 18.6 1.1
Horner 94.9 20.6 24.1 39.6 4.8 13.8 12.5 14.8 16.9 0.9
Gonzalez 83.0 18.6 16.5 35.7 4.7 9.7 7.1 28.7 30.0 6.6
Mays 108.6 13.8 8.0 57.1 0.0 3.2 85.7 18.8 36.0 1.0
CJ Williams 85.8 10.2 12.2 34.4 1.2 5.3 25.0 7.2 12.9 0.0

I'll say this for Tracy Smith: with his playing time limited, he's not messing around when the ball touches his hands. His in-conference numbers last season hinted at a guy who was beginning to figure things out--granted, we're talking about a small sample here, but his usage went up and and so did his efficiency, which is unusual. His 18.1 pts/40 mark was a team best.

With such an aberrant start to this season, he's become the most intriguing guy on the roster, as far as I'm concerned. It'll be interesting to see what happens once we're playing teams with pulses on a nightly basis rather than these non-conf. incompetents (Davidson excepted); he looks like a player who can handle a 20+% shots workload, but just how much he can take while staying reasonably efficient remains to be seen.

The early numbers underscore what we already know: the backcourt isn't all that interested in providing more than the occasional, opportunistic bucket. It'd be nice to get more from them come conference play, but for now, this is fine. Or maybe bearable is a better word.

Per 40 minutes:

 Pts/40 Rebs/40 Ast/40 TO/40 Fouls/40 FGA/40 
McCauley 21.1 12.9 1.6 1.9 1.6 14.5
Fells 19.3 4.3 2.6 1.4 2.8 13.3
Costner 19.4 12.2 2.8 3.8 3.4 14.1
T. Smith 28.9 11.9 0.7 1.5 3.0 20.0
Fergie 11.9 6.0 3.5 1.8 3.5 8.8
Horner 12.4 7.3 3.4 2.3 3.9 13.5
Gonzalez 6.9 5.6 6.6 3.6 3.0 9.3
Mays 9.0 1.3 4.5 3.2 0.6 4.5
CJ Williams 5.6 2.6 1.7 0.9 3.4 6.9