The catenaccio of Omaha
As his career nears its end, an appreciation of Creighton's Ryan Kalkbrenner as the Middle America door-bolt
Bad news for you and your soccer-hating friends: I started playing Football Manager again recently. Last summer I fell down the rabbit hole of playing three games a day as the manager of Malaga in Spain, a third-division (now second) club which was pretty good when I was younger but has fallen on hard times. In the first season, all we did was fail to record a single loss in league play, go 30-8-0 (98 points), and secure automatic promotion to La Liga 2.
Football Manager rules because you can make it as complex or simple as you’d like. You can pick any club in the world to take over on the desktop version. You can craft whatever tactics you’d like. (Modified 4-1-2-2-1 Gegenpress thank me later.) It’s my favorite game in the world, because every time I load the game up, I learn something new. As a newer viewer of the sport (intrigued by it since age 8, actual fan since 26), important passwords and birthdays are regularly shoved out of my brain to learn about an upgrade at ball-winning midfielder because Alaves bought my previous one.
But above all that, it’s like a history lesson. I find myself interested in a specific tactical style, so I start researching said style to learn more. An hour later, I have developed strong opinions on the work of Arrigo Saachi at AC Milan. But because I just got promoted, my new goal is to not get bounced back down. I have a pretty good roster but I’m having to go quite conservative in the final 15 minutes of games to not blow my 1-0 or 2-1 leads. As such, I am a newfound fan of the Catenaccio.
If you want the actual history lesson on it, I figure this suffices, but you’re not here to learn about soccer/football history. You are here because I am a basketball writer and supposedly I write about basketball. The hinge piece of the catenaccio (Italian for door-bolt), as traditionally designed, is the libero. Translating to ‘free’ in Italian, the libero plays as the last line of defense, functioning as a secondary goalkeeper. Nowadays, the libero is actually much more known for its use in volleyball than soccer, but you can spot similarities between its functions and a true rim protector in basketball.
Our general standard for rim protectors is pretty simple: do you block shots at a high rate? If so, you’re protecting the rim. We can look at guys like Anthony Davis, Jaren Jackson Jr., Dereck Lively, etc. as classic examples of the true rim protector. Better yet, how about the best collegiate rim protector of the last 15 years, statistically speaking, in Auburn’s Walker Kessler?
Blocks are not everything, of course. Take 2022-23 Vanderbilt’s Liam Robbins, for example. Robbins owns the 7th-highest Block% of the last three seasons, won SEC Defensive Player of the Year, and was a critical piece of the Vandy team that tricked people into thinking Jerry Stackhouse might be a good basketball coach. Yet while Robbins piled up amazing stats, Vandy’s defense ranked #143 in the nation and gave up a 65.6% hit rate at the rim, per CBB Analytics.
A great rim protector is the last line of defense, playing both goalkeeper and libero on the basketball court. They can block shots, but just like we don’t expect soccer teams (or hockey, if you prefer) to put everything on the last line of defense and save them, the team attempts to funnel the right stuff to them. We can expect these guys to be Mr. Fix-It: the pressure release valve that takes care of what comes his way, both expected and unexpected. The no-nonsense defender that you can’t take out of the game, for fear your entire house of cards may collapse.
Ryan Kalkbrenner came to Creighton during the COVID season, but it was 2021-22 when he assumed the starting center role. Since that time, Creighton is 6th in 2PT% allowed, first in defensive FT Rate, 8th in eFG%, 35th in DREB%, and 13th in defensive efficiency. In the six seasons prior to Kalkbrenner’s arrival, Creighton had ranked that highly in any of those five stats exactly one time (DREB%, 29th, 2017-18). It was a program much more known for its offensive excellence than anything it had ever accomplished on the other end.
With a five-year career winding down over the next month, now seems like a good time to take stock of a 7’1” center who is a lot of things: the best defensive player in Creighton history, the best four-year defensive player in the Big East in a decade, and the architect of the Creighton catenaccio. His current 2024-25 season drives home a key point: the KalkDrop has irreversibly changed Creighton basketball. Could a system like it, with a Kalk Clone as the libero, do the same for others in the sport?
BEHIND THE WALL ($): Less soccer references, I promise, stop yelling