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UConn's 97-51 win over South Florida last night represented the largest recorded margin of victory against a conference opponent in school history, per my database. This database might not be super official, but in about 20 minutes of searching the web and musing over our best teams in program history, I could not find one single game with a more lopsided outcome. I welcome anybody to document one. Until then, my cursory research will be referred to as a database, because technically it is.
The spread was 13 points, meaning UConn out-performed their expected margin by a staggering 33 points. That would be the equivalent of an 18-point underdog winning by 15 points. It rarely ever happens, and likely ranks among the largest aberrations in college basketball this season.
It's one data point in a sample, but that's still one more than we had yesterday at this time. If KenPom ranked the 351 teams based purely on last nights result, we'd probably be number one. And before you say, "that doesn't mean anything," it does. It means that if he ranked teams based on last night, we'd probably be number one.
Sifting through the meaningful and the meaningless is always tricky, especially against a terrible opponent. It is unclear whether our play last night represented a long-awaited graduation from sophomoric basketball, or if it was merely the result of 16 threes going in instead of 8.
20+ games in, it's probably the latter, but I posted several weeks ago about the Central Florida game potentially forecasting a sustained improvement on the offensive end, and the data since suggests that I might have been right. The numbers corroborate this, even if they're modest in depth: in the conference games before UCF (granted one of these was without Adams), we averaged 55.3 PPG, and afterwards, we have averaged (and I'll include the Georgetown game to help my argument) 73.3 PPG.
That stretch of games includes a lot of garbage time against teams that were either terrible or had taken their foot off the gas, and there were moments in Maui - where we averaged 84 points per game - where you would have thought the same thing.
But aesthetically, it's night and day, and that's before you consider the leaps that individual players have made when it comes to things like, you know, hitting shots. South Florida was made to look like the Generals by a well-synthesized scheme that, for the first time in a while, aims to dictate the terms of engagement rather than yield to them. This is an important distinction to make because it answers to the riddle of sustainability that I posed earlier; it is an attacker of the very bargaining deals that defenses are typically willing to concede for the reason that for the reason that our flaws have accentuated our strengths.
In the terms of literature, it is a nature thing and it is a language thing. It is a nature thing because when you go through life blind, you begin to hear better. Eventually, you hear so well and develop such a command of the other sensory nerves that you begin to speak a language that nobody else knows as well as you. Your disability is only a disability in the context of the architecture that shelters the non-blind.
Architecture is of course inseparable from basketball, particularly at the college level where one scheme interacts so much better with one personnel grouping than another. This is why limitation can spawn success and it's why a team, like the one we had last year, can squander so much because of its one limitation. This team, to some extent, functions better than that one did for the simple reason that they're better at generating high percentage shots against a contested defense.
This truth was born out of reluctance, but ultimately, an offense that was intended to be speared by something totally different transformed into one buoyed by Jalen Adams and Kenten Facey, the latter of whom now commands an attention that creates a dilemma that has persisted even through the sluggishness of his last two games.
This dilemma is wholly contingent on how UConn defends. By and large, this defense has been decent, especially when allowing for the curve that they must be graded on for obvious reasons. The difference between "decent" and "great," however, has always been the difference between a UConn team that is doomed to their worst season in years and one that has a chance to play into the NCAA Tournament. That is where I do not think this board has directed enough of their attention, because while we have some skill players that will keep us above water offensively (even Enoch qualifies as such if he maintains what he did last night), it is still a relatively inert unit that should fluctuate less than a defense armed with the personnel to dominate possessions.
It sounds obvious, but talent is what distinguishes this UConn team from your other run-of-the-mill 11-12 teams, and talent - the innate quality that makes it difficult to accept numerical formulas as prophecy - is what will get us to where we want to go. We have more of it than SMU and we have more of it than Cincinnati, and it will be some combination of Ollie's foresight and the players' ability to adapt to it that will determine whether that happens.
SMU and Cincinnati exposed us defensively, and they did so in a way - pulling Brimah from the basket - that is unlikely to be rectified by anything other than an overhaul in scheme. There is little reason to believe that Ollie, one of the most flexible coaches in the country, will not search far and wide for an alternative. The question, then, becomes how, specifically, the staff can apply a scheme in short order that is both conducive to the skill sets of the players and negotiable to the constraints of time.
We don't have the time to install a 2-3 zone of the likes that Syracuse played in 2013. That team, for a period of time in March, played the zone better than I have ever seen it played.
Perhaps, then, we might pick a different team from that same year - Louisville - and re-visit the anatomy of one of the most destructive defenses ever. On January 14th of 2013, that team came to Hartford and mutated us with a match-up zone (I was in the house, and that second half was as helpless as I've ever seen a UConn team look).
I'm sure you've heard the match-up zone described as a zone with man-to-man principles, but every zone has man-to-man principles, and the function - forcing the opponent into isolation moves - is the same. The prevailing belief is that a zone defense wants to force jump shots, but that's a simplified description of its real intention, which is to pack the paint in a way that alleviates the hedging responsibilities of the big men.
That is precisely the remedy for a UConn defense that is both made and broken by the abilities of their center. Against the dregs of the league, he can roam the paint, indifference to the presence of the opposing center he knows can't hurt him. Against SMU and Cincinnati, Moore and Washington eviscerate us with jump shots and well-timed passers to cutters slivering into the skin of the defense. The match-up zone, perhaps in a way that a standard zone cannot, is able to deter ball screens while also maintaining its infrastructure. Essentially, on a 1-5 ball screen, your guard becomes the hedge man instead of your big:
This is the same Napier/Daniels ball screen that destroyed college basketball for the better part of two years, but they lost four straight times against Louisville, each by double digits, for this reason right here. Siva can trail Napier the whole way, and Dieng can sag back, because Russ Smith (pictured at the elbow) assumes the role of the hedge man, slinking over to Daniels until the defense re-sets.
The danger of this defense is that it can yield mismatches. Daniels could draw Smith, and with enough patience, he could catch it in the post. But the lighthouse in Dieng remains fairly stationary the whole time, meaning every isolation is shadowed by strong side help. That's a losing formula for virtually any college team when Smith and Siva are flying around on the perimeter.
This can still be beaten with good, crisp ball movement, but that's also true of a man-to-man. In this alignment, the two wings are rovers who are supposed to shoot the gaps between shooters until there is a full recovery. If Daniels had set a screen on the opposite side, Smith would have had to help on Daniels, and Boatright would have briefly been open. That means the guy on the block (I think Behanan) has to be quick on his feet.
Ollie threw a few zones out there last night in the second half, and they worked fairly well. Against SMU and Cincinnati, it'll probably have to be a mis-mash defenses, but that's one luxury of being the hunter and not the hunted: you can afford to throw junk defenses out there that confound better teams, because you're not good enough to be stubborn about an identity (and I say this as somebody who shivers at the thought of UConn ever playing anything but man-to-man).
None of this has any baring on Saturday's match-up with Central Florida, but there are frames of the tape - even against South Florida - that can be extrapolated into a calculus that informs the future. This whole x's and o's thing is reducible to a basic game of probability at it's core - designing systems on both ends that churn out shots that come down to decimal points on a points per possession basis. Nothing is guaranteed to come from scouting or game-planning or even practicing because sometimes the ball goes in and sometimes it doesn't. Great coaches give their players a chance, though, and for all the criticism Ollie has gotten, they've been right there, all four years of his tenure, playing competitive basketball at the end. This time, maybe that means he's playing catch-up, trying to bridge the gap in skill and experience.
Well, we have a lot of experience shooting contested layups and turn-around's from the post. Maybe by March, they're doing the same thing with worse players, speaking our language, in front of a crowd that's ready to devour them whole. Maybe the match-up zone gets us there, maybe it's something else. Maybe I need to get a life. Until next time.
The spread was 13 points, meaning UConn out-performed their expected margin by a staggering 33 points. That would be the equivalent of an 18-point underdog winning by 15 points. It rarely ever happens, and likely ranks among the largest aberrations in college basketball this season.
It's one data point in a sample, but that's still one more than we had yesterday at this time. If KenPom ranked the 351 teams based purely on last nights result, we'd probably be number one. And before you say, "that doesn't mean anything," it does. It means that if he ranked teams based on last night, we'd probably be number one.
Sifting through the meaningful and the meaningless is always tricky, especially against a terrible opponent. It is unclear whether our play last night represented a long-awaited graduation from sophomoric basketball, or if it was merely the result of 16 threes going in instead of 8.
20+ games in, it's probably the latter, but I posted several weeks ago about the Central Florida game potentially forecasting a sustained improvement on the offensive end, and the data since suggests that I might have been right. The numbers corroborate this, even if they're modest in depth: in the conference games before UCF (granted one of these was without Adams), we averaged 55.3 PPG, and afterwards, we have averaged (and I'll include the Georgetown game to help my argument) 73.3 PPG.
That stretch of games includes a lot of garbage time against teams that were either terrible or had taken their foot off the gas, and there were moments in Maui - where we averaged 84 points per game - where you would have thought the same thing.
But aesthetically, it's night and day, and that's before you consider the leaps that individual players have made when it comes to things like, you know, hitting shots. South Florida was made to look like the Generals by a well-synthesized scheme that, for the first time in a while, aims to dictate the terms of engagement rather than yield to them. This is an important distinction to make because it answers to the riddle of sustainability that I posed earlier; it is an attacker of the very bargaining deals that defenses are typically willing to concede for the reason that for the reason that our flaws have accentuated our strengths.
In the terms of literature, it is a nature thing and it is a language thing. It is a nature thing because when you go through life blind, you begin to hear better. Eventually, you hear so well and develop such a command of the other sensory nerves that you begin to speak a language that nobody else knows as well as you. Your disability is only a disability in the context of the architecture that shelters the non-blind.
Architecture is of course inseparable from basketball, particularly at the college level where one scheme interacts so much better with one personnel grouping than another. This is why limitation can spawn success and it's why a team, like the one we had last year, can squander so much because of its one limitation. This team, to some extent, functions better than that one did for the simple reason that they're better at generating high percentage shots against a contested defense.
This truth was born out of reluctance, but ultimately, an offense that was intended to be speared by something totally different transformed into one buoyed by Jalen Adams and Kenten Facey, the latter of whom now commands an attention that creates a dilemma that has persisted even through the sluggishness of his last two games.
This dilemma is wholly contingent on how UConn defends. By and large, this defense has been decent, especially when allowing for the curve that they must be graded on for obvious reasons. The difference between "decent" and "great," however, has always been the difference between a UConn team that is doomed to their worst season in years and one that has a chance to play into the NCAA Tournament. That is where I do not think this board has directed enough of their attention, because while we have some skill players that will keep us above water offensively (even Enoch qualifies as such if he maintains what he did last night), it is still a relatively inert unit that should fluctuate less than a defense armed with the personnel to dominate possessions.
It sounds obvious, but talent is what distinguishes this UConn team from your other run-of-the-mill 11-12 teams, and talent - the innate quality that makes it difficult to accept numerical formulas as prophecy - is what will get us to where we want to go. We have more of it than SMU and we have more of it than Cincinnati, and it will be some combination of Ollie's foresight and the players' ability to adapt to it that will determine whether that happens.
SMU and Cincinnati exposed us defensively, and they did so in a way - pulling Brimah from the basket - that is unlikely to be rectified by anything other than an overhaul in scheme. There is little reason to believe that Ollie, one of the most flexible coaches in the country, will not search far and wide for an alternative. The question, then, becomes how, specifically, the staff can apply a scheme in short order that is both conducive to the skill sets of the players and negotiable to the constraints of time.
We don't have the time to install a 2-3 zone of the likes that Syracuse played in 2013. That team, for a period of time in March, played the zone better than I have ever seen it played.
Perhaps, then, we might pick a different team from that same year - Louisville - and re-visit the anatomy of one of the most destructive defenses ever. On January 14th of 2013, that team came to Hartford and mutated us with a match-up zone (I was in the house, and that second half was as helpless as I've ever seen a UConn team look).
I'm sure you've heard the match-up zone described as a zone with man-to-man principles, but every zone has man-to-man principles, and the function - forcing the opponent into isolation moves - is the same. The prevailing belief is that a zone defense wants to force jump shots, but that's a simplified description of its real intention, which is to pack the paint in a way that alleviates the hedging responsibilities of the big men.
That is precisely the remedy for a UConn defense that is both made and broken by the abilities of their center. Against the dregs of the league, he can roam the paint, indifference to the presence of the opposing center he knows can't hurt him. Against SMU and Cincinnati, Moore and Washington eviscerate us with jump shots and well-timed passers to cutters slivering into the skin of the defense. The match-up zone, perhaps in a way that a standard zone cannot, is able to deter ball screens while also maintaining its infrastructure. Essentially, on a 1-5 ball screen, your guard becomes the hedge man instead of your big:
This is the same Napier/Daniels ball screen that destroyed college basketball for the better part of two years, but they lost four straight times against Louisville, each by double digits, for this reason right here. Siva can trail Napier the whole way, and Dieng can sag back, because Russ Smith (pictured at the elbow) assumes the role of the hedge man, slinking over to Daniels until the defense re-sets.
The danger of this defense is that it can yield mismatches. Daniels could draw Smith, and with enough patience, he could catch it in the post. But the lighthouse in Dieng remains fairly stationary the whole time, meaning every isolation is shadowed by strong side help. That's a losing formula for virtually any college team when Smith and Siva are flying around on the perimeter.
This can still be beaten with good, crisp ball movement, but that's also true of a man-to-man. In this alignment, the two wings are rovers who are supposed to shoot the gaps between shooters until there is a full recovery. If Daniels had set a screen on the opposite side, Smith would have had to help on Daniels, and Boatright would have briefly been open. That means the guy on the block (I think Behanan) has to be quick on his feet.
Ollie threw a few zones out there last night in the second half, and they worked fairly well. Against SMU and Cincinnati, it'll probably have to be a mis-mash defenses, but that's one luxury of being the hunter and not the hunted: you can afford to throw junk defenses out there that confound better teams, because you're not good enough to be stubborn about an identity (and I say this as somebody who shivers at the thought of UConn ever playing anything but man-to-man).
None of this has any baring on Saturday's match-up with Central Florida, but there are frames of the tape - even against South Florida - that can be extrapolated into a calculus that informs the future. This whole x's and o's thing is reducible to a basic game of probability at it's core - designing systems on both ends that churn out shots that come down to decimal points on a points per possession basis. Nothing is guaranteed to come from scouting or game-planning or even practicing because sometimes the ball goes in and sometimes it doesn't. Great coaches give their players a chance, though, and for all the criticism Ollie has gotten, they've been right there, all four years of his tenure, playing competitive basketball at the end. This time, maybe that means he's playing catch-up, trying to bridge the gap in skill and experience.
Well, we have a lot of experience shooting contested layups and turn-around's from the post. Maybe by March, they're doing the same thing with worse players, speaking our language, in front of a crowd that's ready to devour them whole. Maybe the match-up zone gets us there, maybe it's something else. Maybe I need to get a life. Until next time.
