In the past I’ve done these “here’s how the local team is doing” articles around 6-8 games into the season, but I figured it might be useful to wait until the end of non-conference play to toss a new one in. My aim for these is to create a mini-syllabus of sorts for people who haven’t been quite as invested in the season as true sickos like myself have been. This contains three key points about the offense (could be good, isn’t yet) and the defense (is amazing, will continue to be pretty amazing) each.
The next one of these should come out after the Texas game in January, with any luck. I’ve committed to these projects in the past but haven’t followed through; hopefully with a paying base of subscribers and more readers than I’ve had in previous seasons, we’ll get this to the finish line. This is a free post!
Onward.
OFFENSE
Shot selection vs. shot efficiency
Something we’ve been looking for basically every year under Rick Barnes is what the team’s shot selection is going to look like. For the first six seasons, it was…more or less the exact same. I profiled during the frustrating 2020-21 season Tennessee’s tradition of hammering in that they could and should score at all three levels; in precisely one of those six seasons could they genuinely do so.
In 2021-22, Barnes and staff made one of the more sudden and surprising shifts in the entire sport (all numbers in this section via Hoop-Explorer):
2020-21: 34.6% 3PA, 33.7% Non-Rim Twos, 31.7% Rim
2021-22: 40.3% 3PA, 25% Non-Rim Twos, 34.7% Rim
For the first time ever - at least on KenPom, dating back to 1997 - a Rick Barnes-coached basketball team had more than 40% of their field goal attempts come from behind the three-point line. Of course, it helped that Tennessee also had their best 3PT% (36%) in a few years, but Barnes and company recruited and built a roster that could shoot and asked them to do so. They did, and over the final two months of the season, these guys were hitting nearly 40% of their threes, the second-best hit rate by a high-major program in America behind Gonzaga.
Flash forward to 2022-23 and after an alarming overreliance on it in the first couple of games, things are more or less as you remember them, with one final, significant shift to go.
2021-22: 40.3% 3PA, 25% Non-Rim Twos, 34.7% Rim
2022-23: 41.9% 3PA, 19.4% Non-Rim Twos, 38.7% Rim
Tennessee - a program that briefly led all of Division I in mid-range jumper attempts during the COVID-riddled 2020-21 season - now takes fewer mid-range jumpers than 87% of Division I basketball programs, per Synergy. That’s a two-year shift that’s well beyond what anyone could have imagined or dreamed of in that summer of 2021.
Of course, this shift has not been perfect. Tennessee sits at a 48.7% eFG% through 12 games, below the national average and an eFG% that would be their worst in a full season since 2016-17 if it held. What’s interesting about this is looking at the shot efficiency from 2020-21 to now, again via Hoop-Explorer:
2020-21: 33.1% 3PT%, 37.3% FG% Mid, 62.7% FG% Rim, 49.6% eFG%
2021-22: 36% 3PT%, 32.7% Mid, 59.8% Rim, 50.7% eFG%
2022-23: 33% 3PT%, 32.4% Mid, 56.1% Rim, 48.7% eFG%
We’ll get to if this’ll hold later, but both the shot selection and the eFG% are important here. If Tennessee had those same figures with the 2020-21 shot selection, they’d be far, far worse in eFG%, sitting at 45.6% or 322nd nationally at the time of writing. Their current eFG% of 48.7% is still in the 220s-230s, but that’s nearly 100 spots higher despite not changing the hit rate of the shots themselves.
That is why shot selection, even without the shooting efficiency so far (and I have reason to believe it’ll come, as we’ll explore), is so important. Tennessee is largely taking very good shots. I trust Simon Gerszberg’s work at Shot Quality; Tennessee would not rank in the top 5 offenses in shot quality for no reason or for completely bad analytics. There’s at least some amount of truth there.
Tennessee’s identity so far: off-ball screens, extra passes, and catch-and-shoot threes
This is probably the one area where, if you haven’t watched a Tennessee basketball game yet this season, you would experience essentially no surprise. Tennessee ranks 2nd in off-ball screen usage in all of CBB, per Synergy, and they rank 6th in cuts, 17th in catch-and-shoot three-point attempts, and 62nd in post-ups. While the post usage is up a bit from last year, everything else is more or less what it was in 2021-22, with the preferred play types emphasized and ones the team doesn’t like almost entirely unused.
Per Synergy, no team in America combines for more off-ball screens or basket cuts than Tennessee. That lines up pretty well with what you remember, obviously, but it’s also notable because they’re using two sources of inspiration here: Davidson (where longtime Barnes pal and mentor Bob McKillop just retired) and - no, I promise I’m not joking - the NBA, particularly the Golden State Warriors, who run a billion off-ball cuts for their guards and frontcourt members.
Davidson’s influence on this offense is pretty easy to spot. Only the Wildcats have the same track record in college hoops of running the volume of off-ball screens and cuts that Tennessee uses. Davidson was first to gravitate towards the three-point line, but Tennessee’s finally caught up. This set Davidson ran in the 2018 Atlantic 10 semifinal for Peyton Aldridge:
Is pretty darn similar to one Tennessee ran against Butler in the 2022 Battle 4 Atlantis quarterfinal.
The NBA influence is more seen in shot selection, and has been laid out by coaches many times before, there’s a significant difference between what NBA teams can run and what college basketball teams are able to run. Still, the basics at each level are fairly similar, despite the shot clock and talent differential. Barnes bringing in Ken McDonald (former WKU and G-League coach) and Gregg Polinsky (former Detroit Pistons personnel guy) as NBA ball knowers was…pretty big.
The shot selection is the key, but I think there’s some real differences between the 2018-19 team, for example, and this one. That 2018-19 team got a lot of points off of off-ball and basket cuts, but the vast majority were afforded to the frontcourt as extra-pass recipients. Tennessee still has that extra pass mentality in 2022, but the guy who leads Tennessee in points off of cuts isn’t a power forward or center. It’s 6’8” Julian Phillips, who spends most of his time outside of the paint.
The catch-and-shoot threes, of course, stood to be the biggest story as the season began. Tennessee attempted 128 shots in their first two games; an astounding 81 were from three. Two of Tennessee’s four highest three-point attempt rates ever came in the first two games of this season. Rick Barnes cautioned against telling guys not to shoot it, a statement that I’d agree with in general, but presumably, everyone wanted more in-the-paint action.
The players have obliged. Since those first two games, Tennessee has posted a three-point attempt rate of 37.1%, which is actually below the national average. It hasn’t resulted in a huge uptick in mid-range attempts, either; for all of the clamoring for more attempts down low, UT sits at a 42.4% rim attempt rate over the last 10 games. Against good-ish defenses - basically six of their 12 opponents - it’s a 39.9%/23.4%/36.6% split. That’s still pretty nice.
But we’re here for the threes. In the future - likely for Volunteer Quarterly #2 - I’ll spend time exploring how paint touches and ball reversals affect the quality of shots, but here, we’ve got the data Synergy offers. Tennessee generates more open catch-and-shoot three-point attempts per game than all but 12 Division I teams. That’s good. What’s less good is they’re shooting 30.7% on these largely wide-open attempts. I mean, here’s a guy who shot 42% on open threes last year missing one of his five most open shots of the year.
Considering that the last two teams Tennessee’s had have shot 37% on open threes, I highly doubt that 31% figure will hold. If you want the upside, consider that potential positive regression. If you want the downside, consider that “just hit open threes” was the exact same thing we said in March 2021 and March 2022.
Tennessee doesn’t have The Guy, but they have The Hedge (for now)
Here’s the top Usage Rates - i.e., what percentage of possessions you’re using when you’re on the court - for KenPom’s top ten teams. This is the #1 guy for each squad, minimum of 20 minutes per game:
26.9%, 27.8%, 22.6%, 25.7%, 30.3%, 26.7%, 30.9%, 27.1%, 23.4%, 24.4%
Do you prefer points per game? Same teams, same order, top scorer.
16.0, 18.6, 11.8, 17.0, 21.1, 15.7, 22.6, 20.1, 18.3, 15.0
Notice the pretty obvious outlier there? #3 overall in KenPom is Tennessee, largely on the strength of their hilarious defense (more on this later), but despite 12 games and multiple returning All-SEC players, the two leading scorers (both at 11.8) are Santiago Vescovi and Olivier Nkamhoua. Vescovi’s never really been a go-to guy and is largely at #1 on volume more than efficiency at the moment, while Nkamhoua meets the qualifications of, like, a solid third option.
Tennessee has five scorers of double-digit points per game, which is nice, to be certain. Only one other SEC team, Missouri, is able to say the same. Still, it’s a pretty real problem that Tennessee needs a fix for at some point before March. No Final Four team a year ago had a leading scorer below 15.5 PPG (Villanova), and the last Final Four team to get there with a leading scorer below 14 PPG was the God-aided Loyola Chicago squad of 2018. The last team to be in Tennessee’s aura in this regard was, uh, 38-1 Kentucky.
Unsurprisingly, we don’t have a ton of data on how Tennessee performs in close games against quality competition just yet. Hoop-Explorer provides 89 possessions against good defenses in the final 8 minutes of a game; Synergy has 49 field goal attempts logged in that same time span with the extremely loose restriction of “is within 10 points.” The Hoop-Explorer data is…not ideal, in that Tennessee shoots 11% better on twos in all other parts of the game. Your leading possession users: Tyreke Key and Zakai Zeigler. They’re also the leading scorers.
More interesting, to me, is how Tennessee’s choosing to use these possessions. Here’s Tennessee’s normal possession split across a full game:
And here’s Tennessee’s splits in the final eight minutes of a reasonably close game.
Transition play dropping off heavily in the final minutes of close games is nothing new, so I see no real concern there. What’s interesting to me is that Tennessee becomes more reliant on threes, doesn’t get to the rim, and doesn’t go to the post nearly as often as you would anticipate. Late-game possessions have often resulted in a Zakai Zeigler three, for example.
Tennessee’s path forward here is pretty fascinating. All of this data comes with the asterisk of Josiah-Jordan James not being fully available, of course, but the minutes split of who’s scoring the most in each 10-minute block is of note:
1H, 20:00-10:00: Tyreke Key, 32 points
1H, 10:00-0:00: Olivier Nkamhoua, 36 points
2H, 20:00-10:00: Olivier Nkamhoua, 44 points
2H, 10:00-0:00: Zakai Zeigler, 36 points
So: who’s The Guy in a late-game situation, or just in any tough game? Is it Key? Is it Zeigler? Is it really Nkamhoua? Or is it Vescovi, Phillips, or the aforementioned James? Tennessee’s adopted this score-by-committee approach for a while now, a very democracy-friendly basketball that doesn’t have a tremendous March track record. We’ll see if that changes.
However, while they may not have The Guy, they have The Hedge, or at least a more pronounced hedge than they’ve had in many recent years. What I’m defining as The Hedge is what I used to define as shot volume: when your shots aren’t going in as often as you’d like them to, what’s your backup plan? A significant part of Tennessee’s plan is defense, as it always has been, but there’s a new wrinkle this year.
Tennessee, 2017-18 to 2021-22: 31.9% OREB%, 33.7% FT Rate
Tennessee, 2022-23: 39.9% OREB%, 38.3% FT Rate
Some of this is schedule-inflated, obviously. Even so, Bart Torvik’s adjust-for-schedule tool actually increases Tennessee’s Free Throw Rate while only hacking off about 2-3% off of the OREB%. Now, when everyone not named a certain player is off the court, Tennessee’s OREB% sits at 36% overall and 32.8% against the higher-end portion of the schedule. The game changes when said certain player enters the fray. That guy is Tobe Awaka.
When Awaka is on the court, Tennessee’s rebounding a hilarious 57.7% of its missed shots. Even against quality competition with garbage time removed, it’s at 52%. I mean, it’s not like Tennessee added Zach Edey in the offseason. They added a 6’8”, 240 pound guy who led the EYBL in rebounds and appears to be 2020s Dennis Rodman. Can Awaka do much other than rebound at the moment? Uh…kinda? But rebounding’s the obvious specialty, and that alone gives a real reason to be playing a guy I figured Tennessee might potentially redshirt.
The Free Throw Rate lies hand-in-hand with the significant uptick in getting to the rim, even against quality opponents. Julian Phillips has not yet figured out the rim efficiency aspect of scoring the basketball, but he has absolutely figured out the get to the rim aspect of scoring the basketball. Phillips has 44 points on made field goal attempts at the rim. He has an additional 44 points on made free throws coming from shots within four feet of the basket.
The most telling stat of all is that Phillips has 70 free throw attempts this season. Last year’s leader was Kennedy Chandler, who had 29. Assuming Phillips can somehow find 30 free throw attempts in the next 20 games, I’m guessing he’ll beat that. That’s how you continue to overcome some bad shooting nights before the positive regression and good shooting variance nights hit.
DEFENSE
Is this really the best Tennessee defense ever, or is it just shooting luck?
Uh…can I cop out and say both? Tennessee’s doing a lot of things to make their own luck, but no team’s ever going to allow opponents to shoot 20.1% from three for an entire season. (The lowest in a non-COVID year since 2010 is 26.5% by UC Irvine.) Still, what Tennessee’s doing is clearly very good, starting with their work at the rim.
The shooting aspect you can control the most is what your opponents shoot from two; Tennessee is allowing the 11th-lowest FG% from two at 42.1%. That’s pretty good! That’s despite playing four top-50 2PT% teams. The only team to get above 54% from two against them is Arizona, who has the best offense in college basketball. This is despite not having Yves Pons anymore and having no one who qualifies for the top 150 in KenPom’s Block Rate.
Some of this can be traced back to a semi-shift in what Tennessee does systematically. Here’s Tennessee’s percentile ranks, per Synergy, in a few different things over the last five seasons.
2018-19: 27th-percentile catch-and-shoots (C&S) allowed, 49th-percentile dribble jumpers (DJ) allowed, 68th-percentile rim allowed
2019-20: 7th-percentile C&S, 92nd-percentile DJ, 92nd-percentile rim
2020-21: 22nd-percentile C&S, 80th-percentile DJ, 62nd-percentile rim
2021-22: 31st-percentile C&S, 72nd-percentile DJ, 41st-percentile rim
2022-23: 24th-percentile C&S, 72nd-percentile DJ, 17th-percentile rim
That’s a lot of numbers. Here’s a summary.
Tennessee has gone from allowing an above-average amount of rim attempts to restricting them better than almost anyone in the SEC. Only Mississippi State ranks out better in this regard, and that’s notable because Tennessee has played a harder schedule. They’ll certainly be tested in this regard in games to come, but even against Arizona, Tennessee held the Wildcats to just 18 attempts at the rim on 55 shots (per Synergy), their third-lowest rim rate of the season. That’s pretty real to me.
Tennessee still forces a lot of pull-up jumpers and allows relatively few catch-and-shoot threes. Jump shots in any aspect are a bit of a lottery depending on your opponent and their shooting quality, but Tennessee’s done a good job of making the jumpers difficult by tilting opponents towards shots that are less analytically-friendly. Even with that massive 3PT% regression coming, Tennessee still ranks out as the 9th-best defense on Shot Quality.
The open catch-and-shoots Tennessee allows are generally not to great shooters. So: Tennessee has a slightly below average Guarded/Unguarded rate, per Synergy. This would maybe be more worrying if the collective 3PT% by the six quality opponents on the open attempts were higher than 29.4%. That’s still low, but Tennessee’s poor rate is largely driven by one awful game (Colorado) and a lot of fine performances elsewhere. Also, Tennessee’s mostly parked the bus against their buy-game opponents and has nailed down the real shooters. Courtney Ramey got off three open threes against Tennessee and made all of them, but Gradey Dick attempted just one and Simas Lukosius just two. This feeds into the next point, which is
Tennessee’s ability to take away your best scorer/shooter
This is not an unusual thing for a team to desire to do, of course, but very few teams seem to do it quite as well as Tennessee. The cumulative stats of the best scorer on each team Tennessee has played: 15.2 PPG, 48.8% 2PT%, 35.7% 3PT%. Against Tennessee: 11.4 PPG, 43.9% 2PT%, 17% 3PT%.
Every game is its own unique story, of course. K.J. Simpson and Boogie Ellis - two quicker, smaller guards - were able to score 20+ on Tennessee, the only two players to do so this season. Simpson’s was via several drive-bys to the rim; Ellis simply hit several really tough shots. Everyone else, for the most part, has struggled to get their own. Even Azuolas Tubelis, who scored 19 against Tennessee, still committed multiple turnovers and had his second-lowest Usage Rate of the season.
Tennessee’s system - itself a combination of what Baylor, Texas Tech, and others have run in previous seasons - is based on a belief that they can stuff or entirely stop your best player and force someone else to beat them. It nearly worked against Arizona and probably would have without a hot shooting streak from Courtney Ramey; it’s worked against everyone else. Jalen Wilson, a legitimate Player of the Year candidate, was forced to take almost half of his shots as jumpers, which is far less efficient than him getting to the rim.
Is it hilariously good luck that those 12 players have combined to shoot 17% from deep? Of course it is. Even so, you can watch the games and see where the poor shooting is coming from; rare is it that the opponent’s best shooter gets off a clean look from deep. A rare (for Tennessee) combination of length, skill, athleticism, and seniority is helping create a tough-to-tackle system.
Mashacklemore and the ceiling cannot hold him
There’s two types of turnovers: the steal and the non-steal. The steal is pretty easy to explain; the non-steal is any self-inflicted turnover that required no real work on the part of the defense. Overthrown basketballs sent into the first row, travels (debatable?), offensive fouls, etc. are all considered non-steal events.
Obviously, the thought here is that you’re less in control of the non-steal events than you are the steals. The offense still holds culpability on bad passes or dribbles that end up being steals, but the defense has to put forth more effort to actually turn those into turnovers. This is a long way of telling you that Tennessee’s third-best TO% is likely pretty legitimate and may well stay a top-10 stat even after conference play.
That’s Jahmai Mashack picking off that transition pass. Mashack’s emergence in Year 2, even with plenty of work still to go on the offensive end, has added a new dimension to Tennessee’s defense. Mashack’s Steal Percentage of 5.9% is sixth-highest among all college basketball players. When Mashack is on the floor, Tennessee is forcing turnovers on an absurd 32.3% of opponent possessions. Against quality competition (top 100 teams), it’s actually better at 32.9%.
That’s why, in a year where he could’ve reasonably fallen out of the rotation, Mashack has hammer-locked himself into it and projects to be no worse than the seventh man if/when Josiah-Jordan James returns. He’s earned a few starts - the first of his college career - and every time he’s on the court, it feels like something exciting is bound to happen on the defensive end.
While Mashack is arguably Tennessee’s worst (for now) offensive player in the rotation simply because someone has to be, he cannot be taken off the floor for many long stretches of time. An example of what we’re looking at this season is a play from the Butler game. Jayden Taylor, a skilled scorer in his own right, attempts to go right at Mashack for…reasons. Taylor’s initial burst to the basket is stuffed. He loses his dribble, Mashack swallows him up, and Vescovi comes over to merely finish the play by taking the ball away. It’s an amazing sequence for any player; for a second-year guy who barely played a season ago, it’s borderline miraculous.
Is some of this hyperbole because I’ve watched every second this team has played in 2022-23? Sure. But I really do believe you’re seeing the emergence of a guy in Mashack who genuinely has SEC Defensive Player of the Year potential. After all, it was Yves Pons’ second season in orange where he began to flash what he could do defensively.
The overall opinion I hold of this team is that they’re likely one of the 5-7 best in America. They may well be one of the three best, to be honest. This isn’t a year with an obvious Great Team - Connecticut or Houston honestly might be closest to it - which bodes well for a flawed-yet-extremely-good team to make hay. Tennessee’s going to enter SEC play as the favorite in all 19 of their remaining games (18 SEC + 1 Texas) and sits as the favorite to win the SEC in the regular season.
Still, I’m sure this will fail to satisfy some amount of people, as everything I’ve mentioned takes place before the postseason begins. If Tennessee gets to 25-6 and 14-4 in the SEC, as KenPom projects, that’s a wildly successful season worth celebrating. It would be just the fourth time in program history they’ve won 14+ games in conference play. Three of those have come in the last five seasons. As some have said, these are the Good Old Days.
Tennessee’s got room to improve on offense, but the shooting data and quality of their shots suggests that positive regression is coming down the pipe. (Plus, given the overall quality of offenses beyond the top 10-15, it’s not going to be very hard to rise in the rankings with a few good games.) Tennessee’s defense is historically amazing, certainly due for huge shooting regression from deep, but still likely to be no worse than one of the five best units in America and odds-on to be a top-three unit.
I’ve enjoyed this team so far despite all the slop and wallowing. They play a style of defense I’d best describe as Death Metal and an offensive style that creates good shots that simply have to go in. We’ll see if the next Volunteer’s Quarterly is this rosy.