The 5-Out Revolution (Hoop Vision Weekly: 1/15/21)
Why the “Eye Test” should be on the hot seat + a big week of coverage.
Welcome back to the Hoop Vision Weekly!
It was a big content week here at Hoop Vision headquarters.
Today, I finally finished and released a 5-out YouTube video that’s been more than three weeks in the making. Before that, we also sent out two different HV+ newsletters and recorded an episode of Solving Basketball (coming next week).
So there wasn’t much time to actually watch any of this week’s games, but I’m ready to get caught up again with a solid slate of games over the weekend.
In today’s edition of the Weekly:
An overview of “The 5-Out Revolution”
A look back at HV+ coverage from the past week
Jeff Borzello’s article on the NCAA selection process over at ESPN
Links from around the hoops world
The 5-Out Basketball Revolution
When I first started working on a long-form 5-out video (all the way back before Christmas), I figured the focus would be on the X’s and O’s — expanding on our 5-Out Concepts newsletter from last June.
To be fair, the video does explore some of the offensive details used by different teams and coaches: Backdoor cuts, split action, zoom action, and staggers away. But after more film study and research, I don’t think the X’s and O’s are the most interesting part about 5-out.
The more strictly a team chooses to adhere to 5-out spacing, the more simple the offensive action becomes. At the college level, Alabama is the best example of that. Recently, the Crimson Tide (5-0 in SEC play) have been going to 5-out iso ball — picking a mismatch and attacking 1-on-1.
So to me, the most interesting part of 5-out is simply the overall philosophy — and the associated tradeoff between spacing and the other aspects of the game.
The 13-minute voiceover video is split up into four different sections:
NBA spacing vs NCAA spacing… who started the trend?
The statistical impact of playing 5-out
The X’s and O’s of 5-out
Defending against 5-out
In the video, a bunch of teams are covered (to various extents) in a short amount of time. Including….
Alabama, BYU, Gonzaga, Kansas, Loyola Chicago, Michigan, Nebraska, Northern Iowa, Northwestern, Richmond, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Xavier.
Hoop Vision PLUS Newsletters
As we do every week during the season, we sent out The Starting Five newsletter to HV+ members on Monday.
This time, the focus was three different buzzer beating and/or game-winning set plays from Purdue, Xavier, and Santa Clara.
Here’s one of the Purdue GIFs from the newsletter, their game-winning BLOB play against Michigan State.
The newsletter also has film and analysis on Iowa’s post entry passes to Luka Garza and shot selection data from this season.
Click/tap here to read The Starting Five
But we weren’t done there with HV+ content this week.
On Wednesday, we sent out a Hoops Dictionary newsletter explaining everything you (n)ever wanted to know about “Empty” ball screens. Including…
What it means
Who uses it — and why
Why teams struggle to defend the empty ball screen
Variations off the primary looks you might see
Top examples from the 2020-21 season for inspiration
Click/tap here to read Hoops Dictionary
Do we need the eye test?
Over at ESPN, Jeff Borzello wrote about the seemingly eternal debate between the eye test and metrics — as it relates to the NCAA selection process. I was quoted a few times in the article and highly recommend checking the whole thing out here.
My argument against the eye test essentially boils down into two main points…
[1] The eye test isn’t feasible
About two years ago, Rafi Goldman and I had the (maybe not so) brilliant idea of producing an NCAA tournament guide by scouting all 68 teams in the field.
It was a grind, with an all-nighter on Selection Sunday pushing us through the finish line.
One human being can only watch so much basketball. So naturally, we had to be selective about what we did and didn’t watch. Should we only watch the team’s best games from the season? Should we watch their most average games? Or a mix of good and bad?
After the process was over, we could certainly give you a broad overview of every team’s personnel and scheme. Maybe even some thoughts on how to gameplan against each team.
But I remember thinking immediately afterwards how unqualified I (still) felt to comment on who should or shouldn’t be in the field.
[2] Even if the eye test was feasible… who cares?
Now let’s imagine a world where it was somehow feasible to have an accurate and valuable eye test of 350+ teams. I still fail to see how it’s relevant to the selection process.
The committee’s job should be to select the 68 most deserving teams. Things like style of play, offensive complexity, and execution should have nothing to do with the process — at least not directly. The game results — aka a team’s resume — are what matters.
There are a lot of different questions in college basketball that go beyond the current scope of data and analytics. I wrote about some of them here. Who belongs in the NCAA tournament is not one of those questions.
We have the tools to answer this mathematically. I just don’t see where the eye test adds value to the process.