Welcome back to the Hoop Vision Weekly!
In today’s edition, we take a look at Alabama’s success under Nate Oats and how some of his approach (and opinions) can teach us more about the current landscape of college basketball and the rise of the analytically-inclined coaching.
Then we share some favorite links from around the web as we look back on a dizzying first week of March.
Before we get into it, though: a quick programming note.
As we approach the NCAA Tournament, people have been asking about whether the Hoop Vision “Tournament Bible” preview ebook would be making a return this year, or if they could pre-order.
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We’re instead using this time to beef up some of our Hoop Vision PLUS offerings (subscribe below!) and March YouTube content. To be frank, I’m still a little bit “scarred” from last year’s tournament cancellation after our team put a TON of work into building out team previews.
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There might not be a better quote in college basketball right now than Alabama head coach Nate Oats.
For better or worse, Oats calls it like he sees it — in a way that is sometimes jarring relative to how coaches normally speak. We don’t often hear coaches talk so matter-of-factly about other teams or people.
Oats — a former high school math teacher — also happens to be the current Daryl Morey of college basketball. Alabama has the highest rim-and-three rate of any team in the country.
Percentage of shots from three or at the basket this season (via Synergy):
Alabama (89%)
FIU (86%)
Furman (85%)
UC San Diego (85%)
William & Mary (84%)
Saint Joseph's (84%)
Coppin State 84%
Florida Gulf Coast 83%
Wyoming (83%)
Georgia (83%)
So when CBS’s Matt Norlander and Kyle Boone interviewed Oats for a feature on Alabama’s style of play, there were — as expected — some memorable quotes.
I have to admit, it’s fun to have a high-major coach speaking so matter-of-factly about the math behind shot selection and being so dismissive of old-school style of play.
But keep this in mind:
As I’ve written in the past, whenever a coach discusses his/her own philosophy or scheme, it’s usually not in the most intellectually honest way; the coach focuses on the strengths and ignores some of the weaknesses.
So in the following three sections, I’ll be examining Oats’ quotes from the CBS article.
Pace and defense
"I think a lot of people don't get it. Some coaches think you can't play fast and still be great on D. Well, no. You can. Offensive pace shouldn't dictate defensive effort."
If any coach has the proof to say a fast tempo and an elite defense can mix together, it’s Nate Oats — at least this season.
This season’s Alabama and Gonzaga teams are the only two teams since 2010 with:
An average offensive possession length under 15 seconds
An adjusted defensive efficiency of under 90 points per 100 possessions
A team clearly can play extremely fast and still have a great defense, but it doesn’t happen particularly often.
There have been 66 teams since 2010 with an average offensive possession length of under 15 seconds. Of those 66 teams, 46 of them (70%) have been better offensively than defensively.
Again, it is certainly possible to play fast and defend. But in the same way that playing slow means a team sacrifices potentially easy baskets in transition, it’s hard to argue that playing fast doesn’t come with its own set of sacrifices.
For Oats, one of the tradeoffs to his style of play has been defensive rebounding. His teams have never finished in the top 100 in defensive rebounding percentage.
Meanwhile, slow-paced programs like Virginia, Saint Mary’s, and Loyola Chicago have consistently dominated the defensive glass.
More on this topic in our “Should offenses play faster?” newsletter from January 2020.
Shot Selection
"I said, 'Here's the deal, we're not going to shoot very many mid-range shots. The only way it's going to be a good shot for you is if you're 50% or above,' and I gave them some of the best shooters in the NBA, some of the best mid-range shooters are still in the 40s. Most of them are.
[Jahvon] Quinerly comes in, he thinks that's his shot… OK, so we let him shoot it still. He gets one point for them, but we don't make it where you can't shoot it. Then, after a month of data in practice, we show them: Bro, you're shooting 30%, like that's 0.6 [points per possession]. We can't win games like that. The offense isn't efficient when you're doing that, and eventually you kind of break them of their bad habits."
I like the way Oats frames shot selection in the first paragraph.
For Alabama, it’s not that players are prohibited from ever shooting mid-range jumpers, but the math needs to be in their favor — and that math usually is not.
The analytics movement isn’t about some dogmatic approach to shot selection. It’s simply about taking a data-oriented approach for each specific team or player.
The other interesting part about the quote is Oats’ approach to player communication.
Given how candid Oats is with the media, maybe it’s not a surprise that he’s blunt with his players regarding shooting statistics. As the article puts it, “he does not believe in information overload.”
The question emerges: can overloading a player with numbers (especially if they’re negative) turn them into a robot or hurt confidence?
Perhaps. But I always find it ironic when a coach points that part out while also screaming at their players after every mistake.
More on this topic in our “Why the best teams don’t take the best shots” newsletter from October 2019.
Scheme
“Most people can understand the numbers behind it. It's not that complicated. But you've got to be able to have an offense that generates at the rim and open 3s. You don't want to just jack up 3s, that's bad basketball. If your offense generates a lot of mid-range 2s, but you talk about the numbers, it makes no sense. If you're going to run Bobby Knight motion, you're gonna get a lot of mid-range 2s … You've got to have an offense that generates at-the-rim 2s and kick-out 3s.”
I agree with this quote more than anything else Oats has said. Shots are the result of players plus scheme.
Coaches don’t call out “corner three” before a possession starts. They select the players on the court and the scheme those players employ. The corner three is simply the result of those selections.
As for the Bob Knight motion, the data backs up Oats’ claims. Chris Beard — the most notable Bob Knight motion offense disciple — hasn’t finished in the top 200 in three-point rate in any of his five years at Texas Tech.
This season, 22% of Texas Tech’s shots have been mid-range jumpers. That is the 20th highest mid-range rate in the country.
More from Nate Oats:
“Modern basketball, you're not catching a ball and putting it on your hip and staring at the defense for five seconds before you do anything. That's not how basketball's played anymore. But I'm sure dad, uncle, grandpa, professional skills trainer, you're gonna do all this mid-range, triple threat, all this old-fashioned garbage.”
This one feels a bit “pot calling the kettle black” to me.
In Alabama’s dribble drive offense, there is a lot of isolation basketball. They will go stretches with very little off-ball movement, allowing drivers to size up their man (sometimes by just staring at the defense for five seconds) and attack the basket.
So, in fairness, the isolations are calculated. Alabama optimizes spacing and identifies a desired mismatch before isolating. They’re not just rolling the ball out and isolating at random.
Still, many coaches and analysts fall into a trap where the perceived difference between an offense “exposing mismatches” and “resorting to hero ball” is simply whether the shots go in or not.
Links from around the internet
ESPN article from 2018 on NBA teams using a four-point line during practice
Alabama’s practice scoring system
“The Three-Point Uproar” from 1987
Creighton is now running a very familiar out of bounds play
An annual tweet
Film thread on Illinois’ deep drop coverage in the win over Michigan
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Great post! I enjoy Nate Oats’ perspective and watching his team play but suspect that he’s too readily dismissive of the “old school” tactics and strategies of coaches like Bob Knight, a point you seem to suggest as well.
Like most traditionalists, Knight often stressed the importance of assuming the “triple threat” position immediately after receiving a pass – in Oats’ description “putting the ball on your hip and staring at the defense for five seconds” – citing the tactic in the book on offensive theory he co-authored with Hall of Famer, Pete Newell. Yet, 51 pages later, he urges the exact opposite, stressing the importance of catching the ball ready to shoot. “We want our players receiving the ball,” writes Knight, “to go immediately into the shot motion. If the shot is there without excessive pressure, we want it taken. However, if the defensive man is rushing at the shooter, we want to momentarily straighten him with a good shot fake that involves the ball, the head, and the shoulders, and then get past him with a dribble penetration that will force the defense into a different kind of coverage enabling us to free someone else…”
Sounds eerily similar to what Oats and 3-point illuminaries like Vance Walberg and Villanova’s Jay Wright preach today.
More important than theory, though, is performance on the court. Oats derides Knight’s motion offense and the “inefficient” midrange jump shots it generates, but look at the numbers. During Knight’s 29 seasons at Indiana, his teams averaged 76 PPG and shot 50% from the field. During this remarkable season, Oats’ team is averaging 80 PPG on 43% shooting. A mere four-point difference in scoring despite the fact that Oats benefits from the extra point awarded for field goals beyond the 3-point arc. In Knight’s first 15 years at Indiana there was no such benefit. In fact, if we deduct the extra point awarded for 3-pointers from each club’s stats, Indiana’s scoring average over 29 seasons drops by only two points to 74 PPG while Alabama’s plummets to 69. Indiana beats Alabama by 5 and shoots significantly better from the field. And the “motion offense” is inherently inefficient?
Knight, of course, won three national titles at Indiana. Take a look at another old timer, Cincinnati’s Ed Jucker, who won two consecutive NCAA titles (and nearly a third) back in the early 1960s. He ran a simple offense based on one continuously repeated action involving two players: an off-ball screen to set up a 15’ catch-and-shoot jumper and, if denied, an immediate ball-screen leading to a drive to the basket or a drop to the roller. During those three seasons, without the 3-pointer, Cincy averaged 72 PPG on 46% from the field. Without a shot clock, they averaged the 62 FGA per game, just two fewer than Alabama averages today… and yet Cincinnati was renowned for its slow, deliberate pace.
Oats claims that in “modern basketball, you're not catching a ball and putting it on your hip and staring at the defense for five seconds before you do anything. That's not how basketball is played anymore. But I'm sure dad, uncle, grandpa, professional skills trainer, you're gonna do all this mid-range, triple threat, all this old-fashioned garbage."
It hasn’t been played that way for years. "Gravity" became a factor as soon as the jump shot emerged as a standard shooting style in the mid-1950s. It's just that in the 3-point era it's more pronounced and widely acknowledged by today's coaches.