Johnson is the type of player that Mulkey loves. She is going to get her teammates involved, not necessarily the type that is looking to shoot first and take 10 - 15 shots a game. But she certainly has the ability to score she wants to, and at times does that also. She rebounds well for a guard and plays solid defense.
Just think about that assist stat of 13 in comparison to how many assists UCONN had as a team against Ohio State, which was 16. That tells you how good she is at distributing the ball. That is AA stuff right there but she doesn't get many looks because she doesn't score as many points as some other PGs in the country.
I think Johnson is a great PG (I like Allen at ND a lot as well.) What I find interesting is the different way Uconn plays offense compared to Baylor specifically, but many other really good teams as well. As an example in 2015:
Uconn had 828 assists, Moriah led the team with 191 or 23.1% of the total. And the four other starters all had over 100 assists each, with a sixth player with 74.
Baylor had 773 assists, Niya led with 322 or 41.7%. No one else had a 100 assist with one player coming in at 91 and the third highest player at 74.
The numbers generally hold true year after year and point to very different offensive concepts - Uconn is usually at the top of the assist per game and total assists per year numbers and Baylor is not far behind, but the Uconn record for most assist in a year is almost 100 assists fewer than Niya's total last year. In fact there have only been three player/seasons with at least 200 assists and the record is 231.
We had a discussion about position identifiers 1=PG, 2=Shooting guard, etc. and how they were becoming less relevant to how the game is played today. But it really is team specific, and the Baylor offense clearly has a player who is PG whose job is to make the pass that leads to the basket, and the stats back it up.
[This is not a criticism in any way, just an identification of variations in the way you can achieve the same result - a very good, winning basketball team.]
As far as the OSU game - the assist total points to two things I think:
1. OSU defense and defensive rotation - not very good which meant that beating a defender off the dribble led to an easy basket at the rim with little help defense to force a pass rather than the lay-up.
2. A starting lineup with five players capable of driving to the basket, no real post player currently playing, and Geno's comment that with that lineup, he is hoping for more of that style of offense. It will be interesting to see how that plays out over the year.
After all, isn't that all we are really doing here?
