Five* non-D1 basketball programs to pay attention to in 2023-24
You're going to be shocked by our metric here, which is just "do they score points"
Happy Tuesday! I’m still working out the flow of this week’s posts and am planning on doing a daily recap via a free forum soon, but we’ll get there eventually.
This post is a really simple one: if I were attempting to give someone who exclusively watches D-1 basketball a few teams outside of D-1 to take note of, who would those teams be? Naturally, I gravitate to a very simple opinion of “what teams are most fun to watch.” I know that what I deem fun - points, points, points - are not what a lot of coaches deem fun. At the same time, I’m trying to give my personal view here, which I think is the point of this blog.
So: you know Gonzaga. You know Houston. You know UConn. Do you know these five, plus a bonus perennial entrant at the end?
MAYVILLE STATE (NAIA)
Location: Mayville, ND
2022-23: 92.8 PPG (#1 in NAIA)
Key stats: #4 eFG% in NAIA, #1 2PT%, #4 in rebound margin
Key plays: Transition (95th-percentile), Cut (95th-percentile)
Located in North Dakota, this team plays to an average crowd of…128 people. 128! Man, that makes me sad. Alas, that is probably the fate of a lot of really small colleges out there. Mayville State plies their trade at a school of just 1,184 students (per Wikipedia) and plays to essentially no crowds at all, which is a bummer for a team that won 25 games last year and led the whole NAIA (both men and women) in points per game.
There are teams out there that play at hyper-frenetic paces (one of which will be covered in this post), but Mayville’s is more of an organized chaos. I’ve got them at 80.4 possessions per game, which would have easily led Division I last year. Like a lot of teams that run Mayville’s style of ball - primary break first, everything else later - they generate a good amount of their points on the defensive end. 29.2% of their points came on the fastbreak last year, per Synergy.
Still, as evidenced by 25 wins, it’s not a gimmick. The formula is simple: attack the rim in transition, attack the paint in half-court for wide-open kickouts. They weren’t a great shooting team last year and aren’t this year, but their main lineup of four guards/wings and a 6’10” center (Jesse Bergh) creates a lot of open driving lanes for basically everybody to have success on offense. Their constant off-ball motion also creates a ton of space for backdoor cuts, perhaps why they ranked in the 95th-percentile in usage and efficiency.
The NAIA is not on national TV much, of course, but the schools themselves are pretty good at streaming their games. Most of them are free! I recommend giving it a shot sometime, especially when you have what is functionally Daytona Bellarmine at the wheel.
Recommended game: vs. Jamestown (ND), November 8 (Wednesday), 7:30 PM ET, streaming here.
To read the remaining five teams, you need to be a paid subscriber. Sign up below!