The 2025 portal: a slasher film
Is the cure to male loneliness (or at least a starting lineup) a 6'7" wing that can drive *and* pass?
There is no perfect way to build a basketball team. If there was, we would all agree on it, and there wouldn’t be such different types of recent national champions in men’s college basketball.
2024-25: A Florida team that always played with two bigs, only one of which (Thomas Haugh) attempted more than 22% of his shots from deep, and started a three-pronged backcourt, all of whom could handle the ball and shoot off the dribble.
2023-24: A UConn team with a giant 7’3” center, two ball-handling guards, and two wings at most times of a game.
2022-23: A UConn team with a center who shot threes 11% of the time, one ball-handling guard, and three off-ball wings/guards.
2021-22: A Kansas team that alternated point guards with three wings and a non-shooting center.
2020-21: A Baylor team that started two bigs with zero combined made threes on the year, two ball-handling (and alternating) point guards, and one wing.
You’ll notice that all five of those are very different from the other, and it doesn’t include the runners-up (Houston was a coin-flip away from everyone adapting basketball-as-WWE) or other deep runs from favorite contenders (see: the widespread adapting of no-middle defense after Texas Tech’s run in 2018-19). If someone had truly solved basketball by this point, I think we’d have the exact same style of team win the championship every year. Not the case!
And yet: I do notice some minor commonalities. Of this year’s top 15 offenses, 12 started four or more players with an Assist% of 10% or higher. (The three that didn’t: Missouri, Purdue, Houston, the latter two of which had ball-dominant PGs that generated most of the assists.) After a long falloff from the heyday of the late 1990s through mid 2000s of high assist rates across college basketball, the D1 average has stumbled from a peak of 55.8% on all made baskets in 1999-2000 to a nadir of 50.7% last season.
You can hear the cries of traditionalists across our lands. Ballhog mentality is back. Wait, sorry: it’s not ballhog anymore, it’s heliocentric. Kids these days watch too much highlights and not enough full games. Get off’a my lawn!
Never mind that offensive efficiency has increased five straight seasons and reached an all-time peak of 106.2 points per 100 possessions this year, or that by pure PPG (72.8) this was the second-highest scoring season (73.6, 2017-18) since 1994-95. Or, heck, many other things: a record-high FT% (72.1%), a record-high 2PT% (51%), even the highest OREB% (29.8%) since 2014-15. Just ask our future presidential candidate, Stephen A. Smith, who will surely follow through this time and isn’t doing this for attention.
But! I have something to tell you that’s not about the future of the sport, if parity is eliminated, if it isn’t, if Stephen A. can get more than 5% of a primary vote. It is a mere fact: Assist% went up for the first time in four seasons. At 51.9%, it’s the highest recorded in an individual season since 2017-18. When combined with the second-lowest TO% ever, this season had the highest A/TO ratio I can find in basketball history, or at least as long as we’ve had stable turnover stats tracked (1996-97 to now).
Obviously, we know the plurality (if not majority) of these assists come from point guards, with assistance from combo guards. We know that centers, in general, will have lower Assist% and higher rebound numbers. But what about that toughest position to define, the wing? What do they do?
Over the last four seasons, just one of the top 15 players by Box Plus-Minus in college hoops (Tari Eason) was classified as a wing. Sort by Torvik’s PRPG! (more or less Points Above Replacement) and just five of the top 35 are wings. At the mid-major level, point guards (19 of the top 50) are the dominant force. Among high-majors, it’s players classified as centers or, at worst, PF/Cs (18 of 50). Taller wings - those between 6’5” and 6’9” and noted as Wing Forwards - make up just 3 of the top 50.
Yet the versions of wings (or, fine, taller off-ball guards) who can attack and kick, even just a little bit, are the connective tissue that makes great offenses go. Seriously: I looked into it. Of those 24 wings that did crack the top 100 since 2021, all but three had the same thing in common: they had above-average (11% or higher) assist percentages for their position. Here’s what I found, after the paywall break.