Hoop Vision Weekly: 1/22/22
Colorado State slice series and a new Solving Basketball podcast with Ken Pomeroy.
Welcome back to the Hoop Vision Weekly!
The Solving Basketball podcast returned this week, with Ken Pomeroy making his fourth appearance on the show. There is more on that episode down below. Also, expect another edition of the show to drop next week.
Meanwhile, in this week’s Starting Five newsletter we focused in on five mid-major offenses.
Murray State sprinting in and out of screens
Toledo zipper ball screen set
Oral Roberts pistol action
Saint Mary’s split cuts
South Dakota State zone overload
The Starting Five is a weekly newsletter exclusively for Hoop Vision PLUS subscribers. An HV+ subscription is $10/month or $100/year.
In today’s newsletter:
A recap of the podcast with Ken Pomeroy
Colorado State’s slice series
Basketball links from around the internet
Solving Basketball: Ken Pomeroy
The Solving Basketball podcast is presented by Hudl. Learn more about how teams and coaches around the world use Hudl’s technology to customize their video and data workflows by clicking/tapping here.
On Monday, we released a new episode of Solving Basketball with returning guest Ken Pomeroy (follow Ken on Twitter here).
It was the first ever mailbag edition of the podcast. We gathered questions on Twitter and used them to guide the discussion in the episode.
Some of the topics discussed include:
Why this season is currently on pace for best free throw shooting in NCAA history
AP poll voter incentives, Auburn, and Jesse Newell’s ballot
Ken’s reasoning for why he doesn’t think you should start your best five players. And how the “opener” concept in baseball could apply to basketball
Whether or not teams are shooting the right amount of threes. And how that applies to elite defenses like LSU and Texas Tech that give up a high volume of three-pointers
Providence and Wisconsin’s kenpom rankings
A listener of the pod — Eli Powell — was kind enough to share a transcript of Ken’s answer to if AP poll voters should use computer efficiency rankings to determine their poll votes.
Ken also expanded on his thoughts after the podcast was released via Twitter. He noted that preseason rankings are sometimes even more influential in human polls than in computer rankings.
Colorado State Slice Series
Back in a December edition of the HV Weekly, we covered the different elements and influences that make up Niko Medved’s offensive scheme at Colorado State. The slice series — inspired by John Beilein’s 2-Guard offense — was a major component.
This week, the slice series led to three layups for Colorado State against New Mexico. The Rams scored off of their regular slice action to start. Then they mixed in two different counters later in the game.
A short voiceover video breaking down the slice series is below.
And for even more slice content…
This tweet of Michigan-Purdue was one of my first ever X’s and O’s breakdowns to go “viral” (relatively speaking) back in December of 2018. Off the success of that tweet, I started making more short videos directly for Twitter — instead of just the longer-form YouTube videos.
In other slice news, Hoop Vision contributor Jason Fang broke down another counter option from Marquette. Instead of setting the slice screen, the Marquette screener slipped out of it and moved up to the top of the key.
Links from around the internet
Wake Forest keeps scoring off the same play
The opening possession of a UCLA-USC game from 1969
Kansas’s out of bounds execution was key down the stretch of a close game at Oklahoma
Toledo is running a familiar play
The Athletic published an article interviewing coaches on the state of college basketball recruiting and the transfer portal. To be fair, coaches being frustrated about recruiting doesn’t appear to be a new phenomenon
Todd Whitehead wrote a great article using a clustering algorithm to sort teams by offensive style of play. It’s a more sophisticated (and better) version of the newsletter we did on Visualizing Offensive Scheme