The Next Generation: Rori Harmon is in the middle of everything for Texas

Ferocious defense, elite mid-range shooting and heady passing have made Rori Harmon one of the most important young point guards in college basketball.

The first time I saw Rori Harmon play basketball, she was a junior in high school. Her team — the Cypress Creek Cougars — were playing in a tournament that was being broadcast online and I’d heard talk about how good the team was, which had both Harmon and her current Texas Longhorns teammate Kyndall Hunter, so I fired up the stream. And immediately, I was fascinated with the way that Rori Harmon played basketball.

Despite being a high school junior, she was controlling the game like a seasoned veteran, the same way that she did as a freshman at the University of Texas, when she came to Austin and immediately looked like she’d been playing point guard in college for decades. There’s just something about the way Harmon plays basketball that really steadies her team.

I got to see that impact firsthand a few months after that when I covered the high school state championships in Texas. Cy Creek made the final, but Harmon wasn’t available for the game. Without Harmon, the team was good — it still had Hunter plus current Texas State big Morgan Hill — but they lacked that top-end gear, leading to the team losing to a Duncanville squad led by current UNC guard Deja Kelly. It was almost like you most saw how important Harmon was when you didn’t actually see her; just like this year’s Texas team, her absence loomed large, and the team struggled to get things going without her.

This season, Harmon missed some games early in the season for Texas, and the offense looked lost. Per CBB Analytics, the Longhorns had an offensive rating of 96.6 over the first seven games of the season, which ranked in the 64th percentile. Over the remainder of the season with Harmon back in the lineup, that offensive rating leaped to 107.9, good for the 95th percentile. Harmon’s importance became magnified by how poorly the team looked without her.

Harmon’s presence was a steadying force for the Longhorns. She helped to make sense of a team that was trying to fit in a lot of new parts — the players who were second and third on the team in minutes per game were transfers.

Rori Harmon is an impact defender

Of course, to really talk about Harmon, we have to focus on her defense. The sophomore guard was named Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year this season:

Harmon helped the Longhorns have one of the nation’s best defenses. The team’s defensive rating — a measure of how many points were allowed per 100 possessions — was 82.1, the best mark in the Big 12 and the 14th-best mark in the nation. Among major conference teams, only South Carolina, Duke, LSU and USC had better defensive ratings.

And a lot of that success was because of Harmon.

The Longhorns had a defensive rating of 89.0 in the 310 minutes that Harmon was off the floor. That’s still a really solid number — it would rank in the top 100 nationally still — but it pales in comparison to how the team performed with Harmon on the floor, with the Horns posting a 78.9 defensive rating in Harmon’s 930 minutes. That would be tied with East Carolina for the fourth-best defensive rating in the country. Obviously, some caveats here — you can’t just take a 930 minute sample and say it’d be consistent over an extra 310 minutes — but it still highlights how much Harmon’s meant to this defense.

If you’re looking for a more traditional sign of what Harmon does defensively, her 2.3 steals per game rank 61st in the country. Her 3.7 percent steal rate ranks in the 93rd percentile in the country.

Rori Harmon can score too

While her defense and her playmaking skills are what get the most attention with Harmon, she can also score some buckets:

Harmon’s actually struggled somewhat at the rim — despite what you see from the acrobatic finish above — as she shot 55.0 percent there, the second-worst mark on the Longhorns team. But she makes up for that by being an exceptional finisher in the mid-range.

Harmon shoots 43.3 percent on her mid-range twos per CBB Analytics, which ranks in the 87th percentile nationally and is tied for the team lead with Sonya Morris. Texas has players who can finish at the basket, often because Harmon’s able to set those players in a position to score.

What Harmon brings them is someone who can create her own looks off the dribble, adding another dimension to the Texas offense. when you have DeYona Gaston and Taylor Jones finishing at the bucket and Shay Holle shooting 38.9 percent on above-the-break 3s and Sonya Morris knocking down 48.6 percent of her corner 3s plus you have Harmon able to split the defense and get baskets in the middle of the floor…well, how do other teams defend that?

And then there’s Harmon’s passing.

She can make routine passes. She can make flashy passes. She can do all this while maintaining a 2.33 assist-to-turnover ratio, which ranks in the 98th percentile nationally. The biggest thing you could see on the eye test when Harmon was out was that Texas couldn’t consistently get the ball up the floor to initiate the offense how the Horns wanted to. That issue was fixed immediately upon Harmon’s return.

Just check the numbers. In those first seven games without her, the Longhorns had a turnover percentage of 22.1 percent, which ranked in the 16th percentile nationally. There’s not really a good way to slice that — they turned the ball over at a really high rate.

Since then — 16.9 percent, which ranks in the 84th percentile. That’s how important Harmon’s been to this offense. She’s able to dribble the ball up the floor and set the entire offense up. She plays like a savvy veteran, and that’s what’s going to give her a long career in women’s basketball.

Rori Harmon is someone you need to pay attention to

There’s a changing of the guard at point guard in women’s basketball right now. Sue Bird retired after the 2022 season. Diana Taurasi and Courtney Vandersloot aren’t too far behind. There are teams that don’t really have true point guards on their roster right now in the WNBA, creating a need for talented young point guards in the game.

And hey — this also happens to be a time when there are some really talented lead guards in the college ranks. Harmon, plus players like Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and Notre Dame’s Olivia Miles, are part of a new wave of talented point guards. All are unique in different ways — Harmon definitely will be more a facilitator/on-ball defender in the WNBA than Clark will be — but all have a definite spot in the future of women’s basketball.

So, there’s a long-term reason to pay attention to Harmon. A shorter-term one: Texas is a fascinating team. After starting the season 1-3 with Harmon out, they went 22-5 after that in the regular season. While the Horns lost to Iowa State in the Big 12 Tournament final, the team still landed a top-16 seed and the right to host in the first- and second-round. And Texas got a pretty good draw — East Carolina in the first round, followed by the winner of Louisville/Drake.

With Harmon at the helm, Texas can make games ugly, pressuring the other team all over the floor. If you like to watch defense, then you need to tune in and catch Harmon playing during the NCAA Tournament.

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