Show Me My Opponent, 2022-23: Colorado
not about the Stephen Stills song!
EDITOR’S NOTE: All of this was written before Colorado took a historic loss to Grambling State on Friday night. Probably worth viewing the opponent through a 5% less-rosy lens.
On December 4, 2020, Tennessee faced a problem. Multiple games had been cancelled due to COVID-19; an emergency opponent, Tennessee-Martin, had just cancelled their replacement game. Someone at Tennessee - likely Mary-Carter Eggert - made calls. Colorado answered. They signed a quick contract, played four days later in Knoxville, and the rest was somewhat-remembered history.
This is the third and final game of that contract: one home, one away, one at a “neutral” site in Nashville that might as well be a second home game. When you’re attempting to play basketball in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, you do some weird things. Given Colorado’s level of success and standing as a Pretty Good opponent, this probably isn’t as weird as it felt at the time. Now, if someone can provide a satisfying explanation for why this is on a Sunday at the same time as a Titans game.
BELOW THE LINE ($): Big beefy Buffaloes (sorta)
Colorado’s offense
Well, it’s certainly a Colorado offense. For the uninitiated, Tad Boyle’s offenses have looked pretty similar to one another for years: lots of offensive rebounds, lots of free throw attempts, relatively few threes, an emphasis on transition basketball, and…well, frankly, not much exciting going on in the half-court. It’s just fine to watch. Only one Colorado offense has been truly excellent over the last decade; only two have been truly bad. They exist in a state of constantly being ranked 100th.
This year’s version, through the one game I was able to watch prior to publishing (Monday’s battle with UC Riverside), appears to be more of the same. However: two interesting things stand out from that graphic above.
Colorado’s average possession length was 13.3 seconds, the seventh-fastest of any team;
41 of Colorado’s 64 field goal attempts came at the rim.
The first is somewhat less surprising. Colorado doesn’t run as often as they’d probably like, but they’ve always been ahead of the curve in this regard. I don’t think they’ll play that fast all year - honestly, UC Riverside did a poor job of getting back a good amount of the game - but it’s something to watch.
The other is easier to explain: UC Riverside ended 2021-22 dead last in the entire nation in blocks. Literally! They ranked 358th of 358. Colorado, seeing this, decided to hammer the rim for a full 40 minutes, resulting in more than an attempt per minute.
The problem with this is that Torvik has them going 20-for-41 at the rim, which is an abysmal hit rate. Synergy is more favorable - 19-for-33 - but it’s a pretty forgettable output against a team that has nothing in the way of rim protection. Colorado may well force the issue at the rim against Tennessee, but I think it’s fair to assume Tennessee is a bit more stout down low than UC Riverside.
Anyway, the two main guys that I can confirm are at the top of most scouting reports are Tristan da Silva (9.4 PPG, 3.5 RPG ‘21-22) and K.J. Simpson (7.4 PPG ‘21-22). da Silva played the most minutes of anyone on the roster against Riverside; while I don’t think he’ll shoot as much as Simpson, da Silva is good at cutting at the right time down low and uses his size well in the post. However, the area he may test Tennessee the most is on the perimeter. da Silva is a 4 in Colorado’s offense and the backup 5, but he shot 37.3% on 75 threes last year (47.7% in Pac-12 play) and went 2-for-2 on Monday.
Simpson, meanwhile, runs the offense and will spend most of the game at point. Colorado doesn’t run a ton of ball screens, but Simpson likes to hunt his own shot off of them, generating a significant amount of looks at the rim. Almost half of Simpson’s shots a year ago were at the rim, per Hoop-Math; he shot 24% from deep last year and doesn’t often seem interested in jumpers, only taking two or three a game. He’ll take a bunch of runners as well.
The third guy - and the one that’s a true wild card - is J’Vonne Hadley, who was at Indian Hills Community College last season. Hadley was an NJCAA First-Team All-American, which certainly counts for something but also isn’t typically a type of guy you see on Big Six rosters. Hadley rotated between the 3 and a small-ball 4 on Monday. He’s an interesting piece: a guy who can post up and serve as a screener in Colorado’s motion offense, but also a guy that flashed some shooting skill in JUCO (38% from deep, per Synergy) and absolutely loved creating his own shot at the rim.
Together, those three combined for 42 of Colorado’s 82 in the opener, and it likely would’ve been more had Colorado not opened up a 20+ point lead with eight minutes left. The two other starters - Nique Clifford and Lawson Lovering - mostly serve as Just There guys on offense. Clifford shot 40% from three a year ago but rarely shoots in general; Lovering is a 7’1” guy who was horrendous on offense a year ago and went 1-for-7 on layups and hook shots on Monday.
A note that has to be shared somewhere: playing Away-From-Home Colorado is a lot different than playing Home Colorado. Here’s why.
2018-22 Colorado at home: 111.2 Opponent-Adjusted Offensive Rating (32nd), 54.1% eFG%
2018-22 Colorado, not at home: 105.2 ORTG (102nd), 48.3% eFG%
Consistently, year over year, this is the case. All other data - offensive rebounds, turnovers, even free throw attempts to an extent - is pretty stable regardless of location. The shooting doesn’t travel. This is in part because Colorado’s ability to get to the rim craters. 2021-22’s roster, which shares half the minutes/production with 2022-23, outlines this well:
2021-22 Colorado at home: 40.4% of all shot attempts at the rim
2021-22 Colorado, not at home: 34.2%
When robbed of home-court advantage, Colorado defaults to a laundry list of runners and mid-range jumpers. Tennessee’s got to make them take as many as possible.
CHART! As a refresher: “Yes” means “yes AND at least somewhat efficiently”; “Somewhat” means “can, but not efficiently” or “sometimes”; “No” means “no.” FT% are career, not 2022-23.
Colorado’s defense
Sort of similar to the offense, you often know what you’re getting with Colorado’s defense. This is a unit that plays man-to-man, occasionally presses, battles through screens, and often forces tough twos and one-on-one possessions. Tennessee finally broke them late in last year’s game but it took 30 minutes to get there. The interesting aspect is that Colorado allows a lot of rim attempts, but rarely of the good variety; they’re happy to give up hook shots or tough layups instead of open shots.
Two consistent things year-over-year is that they’re happy to run you off the three-point line and to make you finish one-on-one. UC Riverside got to the rim a lot on Monday because they weren’t getting many open looks from deep thanks to that aggressiveness, but Riverside lacked the proper speed and length to finish against a pretty limbs-y side.
Colorado’s not likely to block a ton of shots, but they use their length in an interesting way. Some teams can’t shoot over the top of them because their wings are so tall. Some teams can’t finish at the rim because their centers are either bowling balls or tall boys. When you’re playing at Colorado - which is really, really hard for many good teams - this problem becomes more emphasized.
At a neutral site, devoid of any elevation advantage and in a different state, it would be a little surprising if Tennessee doesn’t find some amount of success both outside and inside. You are required to score in a basketball game, obviously, but I think this sets up for Tennessee to have an okay day. UC Riverside barely got to the rim at all a year ago (29.7% of all shots), but generated 38 (!) attempts at the rim with five players getting at least four layup/dunk attempts.
On the perimeter, Colorado did a great job of forcing tough threes and bad long twos - 15 Guarded, 6 Unguarded catch-and-shoot threes per Synergy - but that aggression can only go so far against quality opponents. Against top-80 teams last season, Colorado gave up an 8% worse hit rate at the rim and a 2% worse hit rate on threes (adjusted for shooting luck). On the whole, top-80 opponents posted an eFG% that was 6% better than the non-top-80 opponents. Is a good bit of that the virtue of playing better teams? Sure. At the same time, this is a tougher test than UC Riverside.
How Tennessee matches up
My basic read here is that this is a good-not-great Colorado team that could reasonably be on the NCAA Tournament bubble come March and can be frisky at home in conference play. Part of me wants to say that Tennessee has played this team tens of times in the Barnes era - high-majors ranked somewhere around 60-90 in the metrics - and wins basically every time. (To boot: Tennessee is 16-3 since 2017-18 in home/neutral games against Quadrant 2 opponents. Two of those three losses came in the COVID year, while the third came in 2019-20.)
But Colorado is no pushover. Even if their offense doesn’t travel very well, they’ll still be able to score, and the defense is generally pretty solid no matter where they play. The area where Tennessee can strike here is two-fold: 1. Colorado’s transition defense has been alarmingly bad for several years now, per one measure, and 2. They struggle in defending off-ball screens, which is…sort of Tennessee’s whole deal. Anyway.
Something worth noting up front is the difference between a grading site (Synergy) and the stats themselves (Hoop-Math). Synergy has believed for seven years running that Colorado’s transition defense is somewhere between average and abysmal, while Hoop-Math consistently ranks it above-average and even had it as good a couple times. The difference here: Synergy marks transition possessions as actual non half-court possessions, while Hoop-Math marks any possession lasting 10 seconds or fewer as transition.
I don’t think you came here for a dissertation, but you got one. The point is that Colorado is generally very beefy and tall, which lends itself well to half-court defense and mucking around but not so much to the aspect of the game where you run 94 feet in one direction quickly. If Tennessee acts quickly off of a missed basket or, obviously, a turnover, they should be able to experience a significant amount of success that could provide the edge. In particular, Zakai Zeigler was a tremendous transition scorer a year ago and unsurprisingly picked up a couple easy buckets in transition on Monday.
The other aspect of this: the off-ball screens. Colorado’s defense gave up the seventh-most points of anyone in college basketball a year ago on off-ball screens, per Synergy. This came after a season in which they gave up the sixth-most. It’s a real trend and a real problem. Tennessee runs more off-ball screens than almost anyone in college basketball, ranking in the 92nd-percentile or higher for usage four seasons in a row. On a night where Tennessee was kind of off from deep, they consistently got open look after open look against Tennessee Tech with these screens.
It goes without saying that I expect Tyreke Key to be very important to the outcome of this game.
Defensively, Colorado will run their own amount of off-ball screens to shake loose shooters, but it’s more of the traditional inside-out offense that works the ball to guys like da Silva or Lovering in an attempt to free up said shooters. They’ll try and play fast to get easy points, but in half-court, it’s a lot of drive and kick with off-ball cuts and your usual diet of post-ups.
The most similar thing to it Tennessee has played - and I’m not being a troll, promise - is Mike White’s motion offense at Florida. Tennessee routinely roughed Mike White up while he was there, but the most interesting thing about it was how quickly Florida would default to bombing away from three in an attempt to keep up. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see Colorado test Tennessee’s interior grouping early with da Silva and Simpson (and Hadley), but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see them take significantly more threes than the 13 they took against UC Riverside, just as a means of variance if nothing else. Colorado has shooters; Tennessee must be prepared to guard them as well as they did on Monday.
I think in general, Tennessee’s advantage is going to be more pronounced when Colorado has the ball. This is of no surprise to anyone who has watched Tennessee basketball under Rick Barnes, but the level of lineup versatility Tennessee’s offered in the Gonzaga exhibition and the opener is genuinely unlike anything they’ve had post 2018-19. They’ll be able to switch as much as they’re comfortable with. The main question then becomes if Colorado’s able to shoot with them to keep up, and I can’t say I’m expecting it.
Expected starters
Via Tennessee’s game notes. Once the Battle 4 Atlantis here, the more detailed charts from last year will return since there will be more than a couple games worth of stats to implement.
Key matchups
Zakai Zeigler vs. K.J. Simpson. This is Zeigler’s first real test as the starter at point against an inefficient opponent who nonetheless loves to get to the rim. Can he hold up?
Olivier Nkamhoua vs. Tristan da Silva. This may well be multiple guys, but Nkamhoua matches up best physically. da Silva can test Tennessee from all three levels and may be Colorado’s best hope at hanging around. Nkamhoua is an underrated defender, so I want to see how he hangs in here.
Josiah-Jordan James vs. J’Vonne Hadley. James may start this one, we’ll see. Either way, Hadley has a lot of potential as a JUCO prospect. James is better than anyone he’s played at JUCO or in college.
Three things to watch for
Is this a turnover whoopin’? Colorado’s program history shows a team that’s not terribly good at controlling the ball on either side; Tennessee has been a defensive turnover machine for two straight seasons. Tennessee should be looking at a turnover margin no lower than +4.
What about a rim whoopin’? I mean, sorry, but going 20-for-41 at the rim against a team that blocked a total of 37 shots last year does not exactly inspire confidence. Meanwhile, Tennessee went 9-for-10 against a team that packed the paint.
Can Tennessee avoid foul trouble? Colorado committed 3.1 fewer fouls per game than their opponents last year and routinely has one of the bigger foul splits in the sport. Given certain players - hi, Uros Plavsic and Jonas Aidoo - and their penchant for bad fouls, this would be an ideal game to not do such a thing.
Three predictions
Tyreke Key scores 18+;
Tennessee gets 20+ attempts at the rim;
Tennessee 76, Colorado 63.