Over the past couple of seasons, John Calipari has faced accusations that he’s fallen behind the times offensively.
Arkansas’ coach also has a ready-made rebuttal: Why overthink it? At times last season, productive offense meant giving the ball to Darius Acuff Jr. or Meleek Thomas and letting them do their thing. He could also point to the Razorbacks’ visit to Missouri as a prime example.
Acuff might have been sidelined that day, but his absence didn’t hinder the Hogs. Instead, it gave Thomas a chance to chew up any Tiger who tried to sit down and guard him.
That defeat also offered fresh evidence for a fair question leveled against Calipari’s peer on the other bench: Can MU defend consistently?
At the time, though, it wasn’t asked with the same urgency or at the same decibel level. As MU navigated the home stretch, moving off the NCAA Tournament bubble along the way, fixation fell on the offensive end.
While T.O. Barrett made a timely emergence, it only served to mitigate Anthony Robinson II’s harsh retrenchment. Despite stepping on a few mines, the Tigers’ coaching staff calibrated its eight-man rotation enough to avoid the worst lineups. But even those solutions weren’t enough to overcome a backcourt that increasingly delivered inconsistent or shrinking returns.
Seepage on the defensive end, though, returned as a familiar culprit in the Tigers’ sagging finish. This time around, those struggles were rooted in MU’s inability to hold up at the point of attack, a flaw Thomas ruthlessly exposed on the final day of the regular season.
As the Tigers close in on the start of Gates’ fifth season, grasping how MU found itself in that perilous state is vital to understand how Gates and his staff identify solutions.
By its very nature, defense is a communal and causal act. That makes it tricky sometimes to pinpoint which player is culpable for a mistake – or if the blame needs to be spread among everybody on the floor.
That said, we can take a stab at quantitatively measuring on-ball defense, which encompasses pick-and-rolls, isolations and handoffs. For a start, we can calculate how many points a team allows in those situations and the proportion of shots it allows at the rim. Why that mix? Because on-ball defense is gatekeeping. The fewer points a team allows at the point of attack, the fewer rim attempts it tends to give up.
We can even calculate it. Last season, point-of-attack defense directly explained 6.5% of opponents’ rim attempt volume for high-major programs.
As you can see in the scatter plot, roughly 34% of the shots MU allowed took place at the cup, per Synergy Sports. But it also allowed 0.862 points per possession in on-ball situations, which ranked 62nd among power-conference programs. That means Gates’ squad actually beat the numbers, suppressing downhill drives to the rim by 4.9 percentage points relative to what the model predicted.
That’s easy to explain.
Put simply, MU, the third-tallest team in Division I, owned enough backline insurance. Unsurprisingly, there’s a clear statistical relationship between effective height and how efficiently opponents score at the rim. In fact, height alone accounted for 5.8% of rim defense at high-major schools last year.
Graphing that relationship reveals MU’s rim defense easily cleared the median value for similar programs. Crucially, the Tigers sit directly on the line of best fit, indicating they fared exactly as the model predicted. But it’s also illustrative of the compromises and – eventually – the strain that overwhelmed the Tigers in the home stretch.
Play-type data is also handy because it can shed light on the type of perimeter defense a team wants to use. How often a team turns its opponent over is the best unit of measure. Better efficiency in guarding PNRs, isolations and handoffs strongly correlates with a higher turnover rate, and that point-of-attack defense alone explained almost 29.1% of turnover creation.
Reviewing Mizzou’s performance, though, makes it clear the Tigers put less emphasis on taking the ball away. They only did it 16.5% of the time, the lowest mark in Gates’ four years at the helm. Ideally, that would plop MU in the bottom-left quadrant of the chart below, along with other squads focused on containing handlers.
That didn’t occur.
Despite a more conservative approach, MU’s performance in on-ball situations still reaped results like those teams trying to ratchet up pressure. Those squads willingly accept a tradeoff. They’re fine being slightly more porous on the perimeter when the payoff is a live-ball turnover cashed in for points on the break. But that’s not what happened in Columbia. Instead, MU gladly ate all the costs but didn’t derive the full benefit.
Backline insurance can absorb some of those drives, but every rotation eventually breaches a yield point.
Fundamentally, rim defense rests on guards and wings. If we control for a team’s height and turnover rates, point-of-attack defense was the strongest predictor of an opponent’s rim finishing, explaining 16.5% of performance at high-major programs last season. Visualizing that relationship neatly illustrates the tension underlying Mizzou’s defensive performance.
On paper, the Tigers gave up 1.155 points on point-blank looks, ranking 23rd among high-major programs. But again, as the plot above shows, their weak on-ball defense places them in a quadrant with other teams whose rim protection couldn’t blunt the worst effects of guards failing to latch the door.
More frustratingly, season-long performance data obscures the issue’s true scope. To truly see the cracks in the foundations, you need to track MU’s performance against different tiers of competition.
The chart above shows how the Tigers’ on-ball performance – gauged in points per possession – ebbed and flowed throughout last season. What do you quickly spot? The situation began to degrade rapidly in late January, coinciding with the toughest stretch of the Tigers’ schedule.
Mind you, that golden line isn’t a true reflection of the situation, either.
With a non-conference slate ranked 344th nationally, the Tigers faced a slew of Quad-4 opponents that lacked the size and athleticism to tax them. In those nine outings, MU’s on-ball defense only allowed 0.621 points in on-ball situations and 0.857 points at the rim. That batch of games, in a sense, acted as grade inflation.
Once December rolled around, the step-up in competition immediately exposed that reality. For example, opponents – now mostly fellow power-conference and SEC peers – saw the value of their on-ball reps spike by 54.1%. Meanwhile, rim defense shuddered the same amount. Starting with an ill-fated trip to Alabama, the fragile balance collapsed. In MU’s final 13 games, it gave up nearly 20 on-ball possessions per game that were worth 1.050 points.
Now, look at what happened to MU’s rim defense. That curve stayed relatively flat starting in December, but it began creeping in the wrong direction around the time the Tigers faced Texas – a squad featuring three elite shot-creators in Dailyn Swain, Jordan Pope and Tramon Mark.
Nor is that result much of a surprise once we account for the fact that the volume of on-ball possessions and rim attempts started rising at the same time.
Had MU’s approach panned out, the number of shots it dealt with at the rim would – at a minimum – have remained level. Instead, the lines moved in parallel, telling us that opponents weren’t just winning at the point of attack. They were also swamping the backline.
More frustratingly, last season’s circumstances weren’t new. They were the same ills that undermined MU’s run-in two seasons ago, zapping momentum as the Tigers quickly exited the NCAA Tournament with a defeat to Drake. Tracing it, though, was easier, because MU made a tactical tweak to start automatically switching ball screens, while Josh Gray wasn’t an optimal rim deterrent.
This spring, MU seemingly responded by making a concerted effort to get bigger, longer and more physical along the frontline by coaxing Bryson Tiller and Jaylen Carey from the portal. Five-star freshman Toni Bryant is agile enough to play in space and bouncy enough to swat shots.
Retention also helped that effort. While it was only a four-game sample, Trent Burns showed optimistic hints that he could serve as a low man, particularly if the Tigers roll out their version of a mutating zone. Getting Mark Mitchell back, assuming he’s cleared for duty, supplies more positional length.
That’s well and good, but recent history and data are underlining and highlighting the fact that a stingy defense – at last – might come down to MU’s guards not becoming turnstiles.