Mailbags by Will, vol. 1: Giving me the keys is a mistake
Jamming the accelerator like a kid in driver's training
With any luck, this will be no more than a quarterly thing I do, and preferably less than that, but occasionally you’re starved for some posts. I’ve tried to answer the questions I got on Twitter at statsbywill or via text from personal friends. They’re broken up into two sections: Tennessee and not-Tennessee. Enjoy!
Tennessee-specific
What do you think our guard rotation looks like this year? Vescovi played better offensively at point, so will we see more of that regardless of Zeiglers return? - via jessegbo
Again, very far off, but an early guess is that Tennessee runs a lot of three-guard sets with three of Zeigler/Vescovi/Mashack/Knecht/Dillione and likely a couple four-guard sets with those. Gainey will be in the mix as will for playing time, but someone is going to get shuffled out of the rotation at some point. Tennessee has 12 or even 13 (depending on your feelings about D.J. Jefferson or Cade Phillips) playable guys, but you cannot play 12 or 13 guys in March. You play nine at most.
Who is/are the other PGs/ball handlers other than ZZ? Gainey or Knecht? Is the freshman Carr going to be ready? DJ didn't seem like a PG out of high school. Vescovi doesn't need to be at PG. - via KingoftheSEC
Based on the offseason buzz (aka, all of one month’s worth), I have it on fairly reliable word that Freddie Dillione (the 5-star freshman) will be handling any primary ball-handling duties while Zeigler is out, whether by injury or by in-game rest. Knecht is more like a secondary ball-handler: he can get his own buckets with the ball in his hands, obviously, but he offers equal if not greater powers as an off-ball threat. He’s the most versatile wing Tennessee’s had since Admiral Schofield offensively, though obviously not as thickly-built.
We’re still five months out from serious talks here, so take all of this with appropriate restraint, but Tennessee has more ball-handling options on paper than they did a year ago. For instance, all of Gainey/Knecht/Dillione/potentially Mashack can both score and distribute in the paint with the ball in their hands. Are the first two high-major defenders? We’ll see, but offensively there’s more promise.
So it appears that next year’s Tennessee team will not have any 5⭐️ recruits on the roster so what does the data say about this good or bad? And is Coach Barnes starting to fall behind as a recruiter? - via RandallG77
Not sure I understand this take very much. Barnes and staff have gotten eight of the program’s 11 highest-rated recruits in 247’s 20+ year history since 2019. Dillione is, or was, a borderline five-star. I would argue that not having obvious NBA guys (beyond Dillione or potentially Aidoo with a huge year) on the roster does potentially limit the ceiling, but Tennessee’s floor is perennially higher than just about anyone’s. KenPom finishes are far from everything - ask every fan who yelled about how evil advanced metrics were this year - but Tennessee has four top-15 finishes in the last six seasons and just one outside of the top 30. Only four other programs can say the same: Houston, Purdue, Gonzaga, and Kansas.
If Tennessee can’t continue getting top-50 guys (which they should with Ahmad Nowell likely on the board) then we can have The Talk but this isn’t the aspect of the Barnes regime I have much issue with.
Non-Tennessee
Best offseason head coaching hire so far? - Chase T.
Judging these before any games are played is silly, but the clear winner of the bunch is Mark Madsen at California. Not only does Cal pluck a Stanford alum - one Stanford should’ve fired their current coach to hire - they hire the literal biggest overperformer of 2022-23.
Year-to-year can be volatile, but the actual offseason work Madsen has done is pretty remarkable. Cal closed last season 3-29 overall and 265th in Torvik’s ratings; they’re currently projected 70th, which is a 195-spot jump. If Madsen actually does that, you’re looking at something like a 13 or 14-win improvement from one year to the next, which is honestly Coach of the Year material to me. I’m a tiny bit lower than that on their roster as of now, but they should go from utter incompetence to at least being a solid, respectable team overnight. It would be like taking over the 70th-best team in the nation and turning them into a top-10 unit. I’m a believer.
What’s the most overhyped offseason team? - John K.
Scanning ESPN’s Way Too Early clickbait, I’m afraid that I’m going to stick my neck out there and say something very stupid: Arkansas. Once you hit March, all bets are off, but getting there will be the interesting thing. Assuming they add Ron Holland, I do think they’ll have a top-20 roster…which still doesn’t make them tracking as a preseason top-10 team work for me.
The constant battle of the Musselman era is between Musselman’s elite recruiting ability/defensive teaching and Musselman’s complete lack of interest in recruiting quality shooting. None of the players on Arkansas’s 2023-24 roster, as projected, have a career hit rate of better than 35% from three. Even Tennessee, a much-maligned shooting roster, has three players with better career marks than what Arkansas is able to manage. Ron Holland absolutely could make that not matter, as his shot has improved a lot in the last year, but I feel like everyone had that same belief with Arkansas last year and it very much did not work. I need to be convinced.
If you were a high major coach, how would you run your program? What sort of system would you play on the court and what would your ideal roster construction look like (transfer heavy or emphasis on freshmen?) - Kevin P.
Well, for starters, I think I would get fired within one year because there’s a reason writers are writers and coaches are coaches. They’ve a certain fire in their bellies and an ability to motivate that I simply don’t have. My experience coaching at youth camps has largely consisted of asking an 11-year-old to do something then watching them not do that thing. If a 21-year-old did it to me I’m not sure if it would make me more or less annoyed.
I’ve also talked to enough coaches to know that what I do - explaining stats in layman’s terms - more or less goes over a player’s head. Not because they’re too dumb to get it or whatever, but they’d rather hoop by feel. They listen to stats and some apply it pretty well but very few are treating them as their Bible.
But! I will happily advise someone how to run a program like a high-major coach. Using Bart Torvik’s rankings sorted from Nov. 2018 to present, I’m picking an average high-major program, which happens to be Rutgers in the real world but could be anyone in our fake one. If you don’t want Rutgers, we can say Providence, Oklahoma State, or Xavier. You’re getting the general vision: a program that has occasional great years, occasional awful ones, but mostly resides as a mid-pack team that makes the NCAA Tournament every other year or so.
A few obvious off-court upsides of being at your average high-major program:
While it may not feel like it compared to some conference opponents, your budget is 350% higher than the national median. This isn’t even including NIL opportunities and whatnot, just the school’s money itself.
You’re nearly guaranteed to have high-quality facilities, ranging from an arena that seats 13 or 14,000 to a relatively new practice facility a famous donor (we won’t specify where he got his funds, no one needs to know!) covered the bill for.
Your fan support is solid if not elite; you average 10-11K fans per game, with big games against better opponents generally being sellouts or close to them.
Every single game - every single one - will be on either cable TV or ESPN+, with the significant majority being on the former. For comparison, KenPom’s #46 and #47 teams this year were Oklahoma State (Big 12) and UAB (Conference USA). 24 of Oklahoma State’s 36 games (67%) were available to any viewer with the appropriate cable TV subscription. UAB: 14 of 39 (36%).
All of those matter heavily in recruiting, which will establish you with a fairly high floor of talent. Per Bart Torvik’s Roster Talent metric, 45 of the 46 most talented (on paper, of course) rosters in college basketball last season belonged to the top 7 conferences. The lone exception was Gonzaga, who is a high-major by any other name. You’ve got to get down to 47th-place Dayton to find the first true mid-major.
I wanted to list the off-court advantages first because it absolutely plays into your on-court roster. You’re going to be able to ply your players from a wide pool of prospective talent. Are you likely to get 5-stars unless you’ve got a huge NIL game or they grew up in your backyard? No, but a school of your status is going to consistently sign quality four-stars that aren’t single-year players.
This will enable you to have your own system, but because of the huge talent advantages, you generally won’t have to take too many systematic risks against most of your non-conference opponents (and even a couple of your conference opponents, generally) because you’re a lot better than they are. In an equal-ish game, all things considered, this is finally how I’d go about building my ‘system’ of sorts. Why not lean into the hypothetical.
OFFENSIVELY,
We’re going to play fast. There is no statistical evidence, despite legions on Twitter begging you to believe otherwise, that playing faster means being more efficient. But above all else, basketball is a game meant to entertain, and if I’m going to potentially suck as a coach, we’re going to suck in an entertaining way. By playing fast, I mean that I’m aiming to play every evenly-matched game in the 80s at minimum. As a nerdy coach, my target is 75+ possessions a game. After every missed basket, we’re going to push the ball up the court. If we have a numbers advantage, we break for the rim and either get a layup or kick out for a three. If we don’t, we settle into half-court.
Our half-court offense is going to look a lot like Indiana State’s. If you haven’t seen Indiana State play, they are coached by my friend Josh Schertz, formerly of Lincoln Memorial. It’s a delight: they use ball screens to set stuff up, but it’s not the primary action. Instead, we want to get shooters and drivers moving off the ball with a variety of dribble hand-off actions and backdoor cuts. The more the defense has to move, the more we can potentially flex a stamina advantage. Hopefully.
Other aspects: our shot selection goal is 40% of attempts at the rim, 15% from midrange, and 45% from three. Is this based on stats? I mean, kind of, but I’ve yet to be convinced by my studies that shot selection is everything. It’s just one of several key pieces in the puzzle. We’re still gonna taken an open 13-footer if it’s there, though. We want to crash the boards, but we have to strike a balance between overdoing it and underdoing it. Crash too hard and you give up a lot of transition buckets. Crash too little and you don’t have an answer for the question of “what if we’re off?” Oh, and we will never play two non-shooters together at the same time. For any reason. Ever. I want that floor spaced and I want the game paced, dadgummit!
DEFENSIVELY,
Let’s keep this one shorter, because frankly I know a good bit more about offensive structure and why it does/doesn’t work than I do defense. (Still learning.) My initial take is that we’re going to run a basic man-to-man defense because I genuinely hate running zone even at youth levels, but some amount of basic zone defense principles/knowledge is necessary for our good-not-great roster. We need some junk to throw in there, and my preferred junk of choice is a 1-2-2 defense is a roving guard at the top. We can extend that into a press where necessary. My only general goals on defense are to force the opponent to use 20+ seconds of shot clock and to run shooters off the line, even if it results in more paint points allowed. We’ll switch most ball screens within reason, because I’m betting on the average opposing guard not being an NBA-level ISO scorer to exploit it.
Now, to run all of this, you need a roster. My general theory on roster construction is as follows.
Transfers are overrated, though necessary. Such is life in 2023. The average transfer underperforms their projected value by a small-though-notable amount, and while some schools have been better at implementing them than others, the general trend has held fairly steady. You’ll need them, though, because it’s impossible to build a roster without them. What I’m looking for, without getting overly specific, are players that showcase solid offensive and defensive ability while having a high-major build. I frankly don’t want a skinny guard who’s going to get rocked at the rim, and I don’t want a 6’10”, 270 pound center who used his size advantage against MAAC schools but won’t be able to do that against the Big Ten.
Hunt some general recruiting inefficiencies. As noted, we’re probably not going to get top 10-20 recruits unless we have an ‘in’ or we have a really strong NIL game, in which case we probably aren’t an average high-major. So: we go bargain hunting, which means we’re going outside the top 75. Why? Because Evan Miyakawa’s research has convinced me.
If we’re able to find some overlooked-ish guys in that 76-150 range - high three-stars who maybe blossomed a little late, or low four-stars - then we could be in business. What I’ve found is that high school stats of a certain type (EYBL, AAU, etc.) are actually fairly indicative of upper-level success. If you show off against the best in your class, there’s something there.
The guards. Unlike Louisville, we want a team with a true point guard. Really, I want multiple true point guards on the roster. Your average point guard at the high-major level is about 6’1”, but I want to hunt for a 6’3”/6’4” guard to start alongside him that can handle the ball just as well. Both should be quality shooters, both in spot-up situations and off-the-dribble. I need one of them to be a quality finisher down low; both would simply be a luxury, but at least one of them needs to provide real paint pressure. What this does, offensively, is give me two starting guards that can shoot, pass, and penetrate the paint. It’s not that hard of an ask, really. Watch Miami.
The wings. We want two guys, somewhere in the 6’5”-6’8” range, that are legitimately scary shooters. Ideally I want one of these guys to just run off screens and handoffs and whatnot, while the other is more of a slasher type. People make fun of Just A Shooters a lot but when you have a Just A Shooter on your team it is extremely, extremely fun to watch, particularly when said shooter is cooking and the opponent expresses serious frustration that they can’t stop a guy who never takes two-pointers.
The center. Just one. I don’t want a true power forward that posts up half the time. I’m even hesitant to declare that I want a non-shooting center. Ideally, our center is obviously tall (we’ll say 6’10” or so), but I do not want a stiff. He needs to be able to set screens at the perimeter, he needs to recover in time to get back down low, he needs to be able to post up, but he also needs to be able to hit some midrange jumpers from time to time and the occasional three. I don’t need five shooters out there, but I want a fifth player who isn’t a total zero from a jumper perspective.
Well! That was exhaustive. I enjoyed answering these; if you’re up for more questions, send them in.