Here’s your weekly dive into what we took away from the last seven days of college hoops.
Alongside plenty of conference hoops, college basketball fans were greeted this week with the Big 12-SEC Challenge and a big-time non-conference matchup between Villanova and Virginia. Between Luke Kennard’s game-winner, Michael Buffer’s appearance in Lexington and Donte DiVincenzo’s buzzer beater, there was plenty of fun around the sport this week.
Here’s what we learned from it.
1. Kansas finds a new way to use Josh Jackson
In the midst of his team’s toughest stretch of the season — a three game gauntlet at West Virginia and Kentucky before hosting Baylor — Kansas head coach Bill Self announced the indefinite suspension of one of his most important bench players. Carlton Bragg, a former five star recruit, was expected to have a breakout season in his sophomore campaign, but now his status is uncertain.
In the short-term, that meant that the Jayhawks would face Kentucky and its imposing big man, Bam Adebayo, with just one frontcourt piece who had played significant minutes this season. Kansas would no doubt require a special performance to knock off the Wildcats at Rupp Arena.
The Jayhawks delivered. Self threw out all the stops in the team’s 79-73 win, including frequently playing a zone defense to help slow down one of the country’s top offenses by limiting post touches to Adebayo and forcing Kentucky to find shooters that it simply doesn’t have on the perimeter. Self, though, also broke out some new offensive sets.
This is the first time in Self’s career that his team has consistently played with four guards and the growing pains have been obvious at times with the Jayhawks sometimes becoming reliant on National Player of the Year candidate Frank Mason to dominate his one-on-one matchup. Against Kentucky, Mason got some help in the form of high ball screens from freshman Josh Jackson.
It started late in the first half when Jackson set a screen and popped out, confusing Wenyen Gabriel and giving Jackson an easy drive in the lane where he delivered an acrobatic finish:
Kansas went back to the well frequently to start the second half. Here are three of those possessions where the Jayhawks used Jackson either to set a ball screen directly or in dribble hand-offs:
On the first action, Adebayo has to step up to cut off Jackson’s drive. He tries to recover after the ball is dumped down to Lucas, but commits a foul. In the second instance, Jackson pops to the 3-point line and nails a catch-and-shoot jumper. He’s been improving as a 3-point shooter lately and has now made 32.7 percent of his triples this season. Finally, on the third play, Jackson drives on De’Aaron Fox before finding Lucas over the top for a dunk.
These actions put opposing defenders in a tough spot because they involve the Jayhawks’ two best players and emphasize Jackson’s ability to create offense for himself and others. If you attempt to cut Mason off as Kentucky did in the first half, Jackson gets space to operate and he can drive to the rim. If you switch, as Kentucky did in the second half, Jackson can attack the mismatch and pass over smaller players as well. Add in the option to have Mason go one-on-one against a bigger defender and you’ve got a really potent offensive attack.
Kansas’ defense may be lagging behind Self’s standards this season, but its offense has been excellent. The Mason-Jackson pick-and-roll adds another wrinkle that will make the Jayhawks tough to defend come March.
2. Duke’s offense isn’t its only problem
The Duke Blue Devils had one heck of a week. On Monday, they were upset at home by North Carolina State. On Thursday, head coach Mike Krzyzewski banned the team from its locker room and his players from wearing Duke apparel. Then, on Saturday, the Blue Devils needed 34 points and a game-winning 3-pointer from Luke Kennard to close out Wake Forest in Winston-Salem.
The tough week inspired several columns about the problems facing Duke. The team’s lack of a true point guard, its unclear roles and whether or not the players even like each other were all accurately discussed.
For as much as we’ve analyzed the Blue Devils’ offense, though, it still ranks 14th nationally in adjusted offensive efficiency and has been the second most efficient offense in ACC play. Kennard, Grayson Allen and Jayson Tatum are all effective scorers and while there are possessions where the lack of defined roles are obvious — watch the final possession against North Carolina State, for example — Duke may have other, bigger problems.
The Blue Devils defense has been quite bad since the start of conference play, giving up 1.06 points per possession to opponents. It’s obviously imperfect to compare that to non-conference play, but even against the five KenPom top 100 teams Duke played before ACC play, it gave up a much more respectable 1.00 points per possession.
ACC opponents have actively worked to exploit Duke’s pick-and-roll defense and to attack the paint. Teams have hoisted just 26.5 percent of their shots from behind the 3-point line in ACC play while converting 52.1 percent of their 2s against the Blue Devils. North Carolina State’s Dennis Smith, for example, frequently took advantage of Duke switching Amile Jefferson onto him last Monday:
Even when Smith didn’t get the switch, the Wolfpack would pull Jefferson away from the painted area. Watch here as Omer Yurtseven slowly moves towards the 3-point line, pulling Jefferson with him and giving Smith an open layup:
The move to pull him away from the rim has been reflected in Jefferson’s individual numbers as he has seen significant drops in both his rebounding and block numbers during ACC play:
Duke was at its best when Jefferson was playing like a potential All-American earlier in the season, so for all of the chatter about the Blue Devils’ offensive production, it might be time to take a look at the other end of the floor where things have changed pretty significantly.
3. Mikal Bridges is coming along nicely
Most of the top teams in college basketball have at least one player on the roster who sort of puts it all together for them. These players, colloquially referred to as a “glue guys,” always receive less notoriety than star players, but are just as important. For Villanova, nobody embodies the role as well as sophomore Mikal Bridges.
This season, Bridges is averaging 13.7 points, 6.6 rebounds, 3.2 assists and 2.1 steals per 40 minutes while playing 29.8 minutes per game. He is one of the most efficient offensive players in the country based on his 134.9 offensive rating (8th nationally) and 68.8 true shooting percentage (12th nationally). Bridges is also a defensive monster. At 6-foot-7 with a nearly 7-foot wingspan, he can defend multiple positions and often heads up the Wildcats’ press, picking up point guards as they cross mid-court.
Most importantly, though, Bridges seems to be finding another gear. This week, he averaged 17.5 points per game against Marquette and Virginia. He converted seven of his 14 3-point attempts and also grabbed 11 rebounds over the two games. Everyone already knows about Josh Hart and Kris Jenkins, but Bridges may be the next household name from the Villanova roster.
4. Kentucky’s hopes of a no. 1 seed are fading
The Kentucky Wildcats are really good. They’ve smashed their way to a no. 3 ranking in KenPom because of their talented backcourt and the frontcourt prowess of Bam Adebayo. That, though, may not be enough to get the Wildcats a no. 1 seed come Selection Sunday.
After Saturday’s 79-73 loss to Kansas, Kentucky has just four wins over teams in the RPI top 50 and only three wins against teams in the KenPom top 50. For comparison, Gonzaga — a team (erroneously) criticized for playing “nobody” — has six wins over the RPI top 50 and five over the KenPom top 50.
The Wildcats also won’t have a lot of additional opportunities to find the quality wins necessary to get themselves on the top line. Kentucky plays Florida twice and Tennessee once more during the regular season, but otherwise won’t get any more cracks at quality opponents until the SEC conference tournament.
This is the downside of playing in a league without many good teams. If Kentucky were in the ACC, the Big 12 or the Big East, there would be plenty of opportunities left to pick up resume-building victories. In the SEC, though, those chances are scarce.
John Calipari’s squad is certainly good enough to make it to Phoenix for the Final Four. The Wildcats’ adjusted efficiency margin is fantastic, the young guys are still learning and Calipari has a history of getting the best out of his team in March. They just may need to do it without having the benefit of a no. 1 seed.
5. Let’s play more non-conference games in January
The unfortunate reality of college basketball is that it will (most likely) always play second fiddle to football in the fall. Casual fans simply don’t believe the early games mean enough and don’t have the time to invest in following both. The Big 12 and the SEC have attempted to solve some of that by playing the challenge games between the two leagues on the weekend in between the NFL’s conference title games and the Super Bowl.
It’s a worthy strategy and punctuating it with a high profile matchup like Kansas against Kentucky is one way to draw more eyeballs to the sport. The fact that Villanova and Virginia also played a non-conference game this weekend gives us a bit more of a sample to work with. The conclusion seems obvious: when good college basketball teams play in January, there will be plenty of people watching.
Next: 3 things we learned in Kansas' win at Kentucky
College basketball is an excellent sport. Yes, the basketball isn’t as good as the NBA, but there’s plenty of variability, new stars to watch each year and the connection that each program has to its locale is unique. Doing whatever we can to draw more attention to it is worthwhile and if that means interrupting conference play for some high profile contests, then we should do it because those games were awesome.