How Anthony Robinson—and Missouri—Got Caught in an Offensive Squeeze

A little more than 12 minutes remained against Georgia when Missouri’s Anthony Robinson II curled around a pindown on the right block and popped out on the wing. The junior snared a ball reversal, and a blown switch gifted him time and space to line up an open three-pointer. The point guard watched the jumper gently kiss off the front of the rim.

And he wouldn’t get another opportunity the rest of the way in the Tigers’ 74-72 loss. 

Odd as it might sound, Robinson’s performance, which ended with four points on 1 of 7 shooting to go with three turnovers, was an improvement. 

At LSU, Robinson’s struggles were so pronounced that coach Dennis Gates effectively benched him just 92 seconds into the second half. A week earlier against Auburn, Robinson sank a triple at 7:57 in the first half – and didn’t shoot the rest of the night. 

Over the past five games, Robinson has averaged 5.6 points on 27.2 percent shooting, including 1 of 13 beyond the arc. Even with a stellar outing against Florida, his offensive rating has slipped to 95.1. The sole bright spot had been Robinson’s facilitating, but his past two outings started eroding that pillar. 

Thursday night offered another data point in a worrisome decline. The throughline isn’t just missed shots. As conference play has unfolded, Robinson’s offensive footprint has shrunk – and it was already modest.

Robinson’s defensive prowess remains, but MU’s prospects this season hinged on turning tantalizing moments into consistent production. The next steps in that evolution, especially shooting off the catch, would also supply a perimeter balance in tandem with Mark Mitchell. It was also a step NBA scouts were keen to see before moving Robinson, who started the season as a second-round prospect, up draft boards.

Reality has proved sobering. Gates shifted minutes to sophomore T.O. Barrett in MU’s past two tilts, while senior Jayden Stone experienced an uptick in his on-ball opportunities. Still, those are stopgaps. Reaching the NCAA Tournament likely requires Robinson to experience an upturn—and soon.

But how did Robinson wind up so wayward on what appeared to be a steady developmental pathway?

It certainly didn’t appear to be that way early on. In an exhibition against Kansas State, Robinson appeared a man in full command, finishing with 16 points, going 7 of 7 from the floor and dishing out four assists. During MU’s buffet of buy games, his touches were worth almost 1.026 points, efficiency that would rank in the 70^th percentile among high-major players. 

What looked like growth was really just insulation – a lighter schedule, perkier pace, and more forgiving shot diet. Play type data recounts a straightforward tale, too. Robinson was afforded a balanced shooting portfolio across pick-and-rolls, spot-ups, and isolations. 

Against power-conference programs, however, Robinson relies more heavily on attacking from ball-screens. Yet those touches are only worth 0.710 points, a 16 percent decline. Increasing volume has simply been a way to tread water offensively. Simultaneously, Robinson’s performance in spot-ups cratered by 40 percent to 0.563 points per possession, per Synergy Sports data.

And it’s not as if Robinson’s role as a scorer was all that expansive. 

Per Synergy, he logs 8.9 possessions per game in the half-court, ranking in the 70^th percentile among high-major players. That seems robust. Yet Robinson’s allotment only ranks 66^th out of 78 starting point guards at that level. Among SEC starters, he’s ahead of only Georgia’s Jordan Ross. Put simply, Robinson’s involvement is far more modest compared to his peers. 

Factoring in Robinson’s efficiency (0.853 PPP) further dilutes the notion that he’s made a jump. Plotting average touches and efficiency among those high-major lead guards only drives the point home.

Now, Robinson is taking more shots, averaging nearly three additional touches per game through 19 outings—an increase balanced between pull-up jumpers and catch-and-shoot attempts. Yet it’s easy to see that the greatest slippage is among the shots he takes off the bounce.

It’s also vital to understand the efficiency context around those pull-ups. 

The pace-and-space era saw teams try to banish middies to the hinterlands, but for some players, those shots remain a legitimate weapon. Robinson was a prime example last season. This campaign, his 3.0 attempts per game places him in the 76^th percentile for players in high-major leagues. And while those looks are only worth 0.84 points, that efficiency lands in the 46^th percentile. The volume has remained, but the payoff is less. In other words, Robinson has dipped from elite to merely average.

Essentially, Robinson’s raw tally of touches is a couple short of what we’d expect from a primary high-major lead guard in the half-court, while efficiency is almost 11 percent below the median for comparable players. Ironically, Robinson hitting those benchmarks would put him on par with Tre Donaldson, his former high-school teammate and close friend, who is experiencing a resurgence with Miami.

Sometimes, pull-ups are framed as an act of settling. That’s not the case with Robinson, though. They’ve long been a preferred tool, dating back to high school and grassroots days. Going back through the film can also help us make some important distinctions. 

Extracting the best return has required actions that fully space the floor, pull a big out of the paint, and effectively clear out a double gap. Consider the modest away screen, which does the straightforward job of clearing a defender of the slot gap on the left side of the floor. That modest rebalancing act allows Robinson to attack with his dominant hand.

Occasionally, the Tigers run a variation of a horns set where two guards clear out from the elbows to the baseline, while a big man sets a high ball screen. Those crisscrossing Tigers create a flat ball-screen look with a pair of emptied gaps. Robinson can read his defender and choose the line of attack that best suits him.

And while Gates has scaled back the scope of triangle-based concepts, the Tigers still break out delay sets featuring a high split cut flowing into a middle ball screen.

Again, it achieves a practical outcome of rooting out a gap and flattening out a defense. Even if a secondary action, like an empty-side pick-and-roll, is required, Robinson can work with his left hand. It also helps when screeners act like blockers and clear a path. 

On the surface, ball-screen coverages haven’t exerted influence on Robinson’s production. Opponents rarely blitz or trap to get the ball out of his hands. They opt for conservative tactics like drop coverage or switches, preferring to keep him hemmed in. And they don’t underscore a schematic weakness. 

Robinson is most at ease when he sees a clean floor and easy reads. When a play call muddies up that image or garbles the decision tree, that’s when his diet of pull-ups doesn’t offer the same sustaining nutrients. 

Since December, MU has steadily increased its use of ram screens, putting a screener’s defender in a trailing position and making it harder for them to hedge a ball screen. That matters less, though, when a defense is playing drop coverage. So, Robinson isn’t presented with an advantage to exploit, while the congestion makes it harder to hit Mitchell on short rolls. 

Remember, Robinson’s a lefty and wants to drive that way. Clearing that side of the floor matters. Yet it can also run up against other objectives MU has in mind – like shaking shooters loose. One tactic is staggered screens on the wing, which also allows a wing to set a ghost screen for Robinson. If that doesn’t pan out, he can receive a step-up screen.

But when that trigger action is run on the left side of the floor, it parks a defender in the slot. And when Robinson drives, they can stunt toward the play and provide extra help to drop coverage. And to cap it off, more opponents are sinking weak-side defenders and making it hard to read kick-out and skip options.

Even a standard horns out set gets boggy when the top of the floor – and again the left side – is cluttered with defenders. 

And what schematic root-cause analysis explains Robinson’s woes when firing off the catch?

Honestly, there’s no obvious throughline. Instead, the results appear rooted in a lack of time and space. Relying on Robinson as a floor spacer isn’t a primary or secondary goal on most possessions, but when a play call fails to put the defense in a bind and the clock winds down, there are few alternatives. For Robinson, that often means hoisting a well-guarded three late in the possession. Under cleaner circumstances, he might look far better than the 2-of-12 mark he’s posted on catch-and-shoots derived from spot-ups against high-major teams.

The focus here has been on Robinson’s half-court work, but another variable is worth addressing. Against quality opponents, he’s averaging just 1.8 transition opportunities per game—less than half of what he generated against mid- and low-major teams. 

That drop is partly by design, as MU has slowed the tempo and leaned into a more conservative defensive approach that seals off paint access. It’s a practical tradeoff, and one that’s paying dividends. The Tigers rank fourth in adjusted defensive efficiency during SEC play, including the league’s top two-point defense, per KenPom. But the cost is fewer chances for Robinson to create easy offense in space, mostly at the rim, to offset the grind of half-court possessions.

That shift shows up in the margins. Missouri sits just 10th in the SEC in steal percentage, while Robinson’s STOCK% has dipped to 3.0 from 5.5. With fewer opportunities to rip and run, he’s left without a secondary source of efficient offense to backfill for contested pull-ups and late-clock spot-ups. The safety valve that once padded his scoring profile has largely disappeared.

Mind you, this wasn’t supposed to be a source of concern. Adding Sebastian Mack in the offseason was meant to provide a complementary downhill threat to Robinson’s pull-up game, someone capable of collapsing the paint and bending coverages. Instead, early lineup decisions produced compressed spacing that blunted Mack’s effectiveness. Since Jayden Stone’s return from a hand injury, the UCLA transfer has found himself buried deeper in the rotation. 

When in rhythm, Robinson’s pull-up game can still make him a capable pick-and-roll operator. But this season has increasingly exposed the limits of his offensive profile. Questions about stationary shooting and contested finishes at the rim haven’t vanished. They’ve grown more urgent.

The miss against Georgia wasn’t damning because it clanked. It was damning because it illustrated how narrow Robinson’s pathway has become: an open look, a clean read, and then little else to follow. It’s a fitting snapshot of a Missouri team that continues to flash potential but struggles to cope with thin margins over 40 minutes, where small constraints compound and punish anything less than total precision.