When Division III basketball player Jack Taylor scored 138 points in a game it made national news. Well, the Sacramento Kings surely noticed. According to Yahoo Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski, the Kings hired Grinnell College assistant David Arseneault Jr. to coach their D-League team, the Reno Bighorns.
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"The Kings have reached agreement with Grinnell (Iowa) College assistant David Arseneault Jr., presumably to try and incorporate the Division III program’s well-chronicled high-scoring offensive system into the Bighorns.Arseneault Jr. has been an assistant coach and point guard under his father, David Sr., as Grinnell has routinely set scoring records on the small college level. Grinnell averaged 116 points in the 2013-14 season."
As Woj points out, the Kings are basically copying the Houston Rockets here. Houston hired Nevada Smith, who coached Division III school and not-beer Keystone College, to head their D-league squad the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. As CBS Sports’ James Herbert points out, the Vipers averaged 45.3 3-point attempts per game last season. You read that right, 45.3 attempts from beyong the arc…per game!
It’s a good move, considering the analytics movement has the league moving to shooting more and more three’s. The Rockets led the NBA last season with 26.6 three-point attempts per game, and four teams (The Rockets, Atlanta Hawks, Portland Trail Blazers and Phoenix Suns) averaged more than 25 per game. All of those teams except the Suns made the playoffs, and Phoenix was right there and among the most impressive teams in the league from where we thought they would finish.
Arseneault Jr. will replace Joel Abelson, who joined the Derek Fisher’s staff with the New York Knicks.
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