“The NCAA Tournament is a loser machine” is the title of a YouTube video by Secret Base, one of my favorite channels. It’s an 8-minute video that drives home a simple point: 68 teams enter the bracket, and 67 of them will end their season with a loss.
Bowl season is different. Arkansas football had a disappointing year but ended it on a high note with a Liberty Bowl win over Kansas. There is no “ending on a high note” in college basketball. Arkansas’ season ends with a thorough whipping by a superior UConn team, a team with a very good chance to cut down the nets next week.
Because of the nature of the tournament, you can’t really dwell on the last loss. There are 66 other teams in the tournament that are also ending with a loss; by the time the Hogs-Huskies score went final, 51 of them had already been eliminated: 50 in the first weekend, plus Michigan State in the earlier game.
So we won’t spend too much time on this one, though it is worth noting what the Hogs can learn from it if they encounter a team like UConn in a future tournament.
Team Stats
Nothing went right, but Arkansas getting dominated in transition was unfortunate. The Hogs were also dominated in halfcourt, but there’s no reason that a team with Arkansas’ athleticism should be that bad in transition. UConn just looked more confident and decisive at both ends.
The Hogs scrapped all game, posting a 108.3 EPR, but when you lose the shooting battle 68%-42% it’s pretty meaningless. Dominating turnovers was one of our keys, but that ended up playing a pretty minor role. The Hogs were +5 on the offensive boards, but UConn didn’t miss many shots, so their 11 offensive boards amounted to almost half their misses.
Arkansas couldn’t get to the rim, didn’t finish well at all, took too many midrange jumpers, and didn’t hit from there. Nothing went right. And UConn dominated around the rim and shot well from 3 to boot.
Defensively, UConn did exactly what I feared they would: they went under or dropped on every ballscreen. Opponents have struggled to consistently do that, even though the scouting report says that Arkansas is bad if you cut off their paths to the rim. Kansas repeatedly went over ballscreens, which left paths to the baskets. But UConn is very well-coached, and they executed a simple plan well. Constant dropping on ballscreens allowed them to pack their defense in the paint and dare the Hogs to hit jump shots. Until Arkansas gets some shooters, that’s how well-coached opponents will play them.
Individual Stats
I’m glad Anthony Black went out on a high note. He fought hard all season despite numerous injuries and provided one of the best seasons in school history. He’ll be a high lottery pick and I hope he has a great NBA career.
And I’m glad Nick Smith at least got to double figures. It wasn’t the high note he wanted, but he battled back after knee issues even though every NBA scout and analyst said he didn’t have to. This wasn’t what Smith or Muss or Arkansas fans wanted from their highest-ranked recruit ever, but basketball is cruel sometimes.
And I’m trying not to say anything negative, but the Mitchell twins playing 15 minutes and combining for zero rebounds has to be pointed out. They were recruited for games like this, and, well, that was a complete whiff in the portal by Arkansas’ staff. I was never high on them, and my endorsement of Kamani Johnson getting more minutes – which came under criticism – was more of a reflection of the quality of play Arkansas was getting from the Mitchells than it was actual excitement over Kamani’s skill. Arkansas played a 6’7 center for almost 50% of minutes in the NCAA Tournament not because they thought the 6’7 center was good, but because the other options were bad. And that 6’7 center added four more offensive rebounds, giving him 14 in three games.
Anyway, that’s a good lead-in to what the Arkansas staff has learned and what we might see in the portal.
How does Arkansas’ roster change this offseason?
Smith and Black are definitely gone to the NBA. Kamani is out of eligibility. Beyond that, I fully expect the Mitchells to be gone, and probably Jalen Graham, although all three of those guys have a COVID year they can use.
I would think that Devo Davis, Joseph Pinion, and Derrian Ford will be back. The two freshmen have a good shot at bigger roles next year. Barry Dunning might also return, but I could also see him hitting the portal if he’s not confident his role will increase.
That leaves three big names: Ricky Council IV, Jordan Walsh, and Trevon Brazile. Arkansas would really like to have at least one of those come back. I tend to think that Walsh is gone, as the NBA sees and loves his potential. Brazile might be leaning towards a return, and I’m not sure on Council. He could really dominate on next year’s team.
This year’s pieces didn’t quite fit
When I was about eight years old, I played in Upward, a youth church basketball league. As a good Christian league, competition was de-emphasized in favor of fairness. All of the kids who signed up had to participate in a skills competition before the season, where their times and grades for things like dribbling around cones and sprinting were recorded. All of those inputs were plugged into some mysterious algorithm which spit out a single grade for each player, 0-100. Administrators then constructed each team so that every roster had the same average score. The goal was total equality.
Except, our team won our first game by a score of 50-7. You see, the “single grade” had a bit of a problem: our poor opponent was not given a point guard. They had no one capable of dribbling the ball up the floor, so our team just stole it at halfcourt and went down for a layup on every possession. The other team could run the 3-cone drill and the 40-yard dash and hit layups at the same skill level as our team, but they couldn’t bring it up the floor.
Roster construction is a big deal, from youth church leagues all the way up to the NBA. In the modern era of one-and-dones and the transfer portal, roster construction is the number-one job of a modern college coach. Dan Hurley, UConn’s coach, is a master of it. I was really impressed with the extreme versatility of the Huskies roster. They can win several different ways with that group.
Eric Musselman is also very good at roster construction. He was ahead of the curve on things like the portal, and he’s done a great job of adapting to the pieces he has. But this season was not his finest work. It’s possible that recruiting was going so well that he saw all the 5-stars – namely Black and Walsh, who are not native Arkansans – and got that glimmer in his eye. Then, suddenly, Arkansas is focused more on accumulating talent than on accumulating the right pieces. This was his most talented roster, but it was not his best team.
By my count, Arkansas lacked three main things this year:
- Jump shooting
- A lead guard who can get the offense in transition
- A post-up presence
- A rim protector
He gets a partial pass for the last one, as Brazile’s injury makes it hard to evaluate what could have been. Brazile is a legitimate shot blocker who would have provided tremendous versatility at both ends. But let’s look at the others.
Jump shooting. This was the biggest issue with taking Black and Walsh on a roster than already had Devo Davis. Arkansas ended up overloaded with guards that couldn’t hit 3-pointers. Muss has had a lot of success with tall guards (Mason Jones, Jimmy Whitt, Moses Moody, Stanley Umude), so it made sense to recruit them and build the offense around them, but “tall guards” who were not strong shooters were basically all the Hogs had. That major roster imbalance plagued the Hogs all year.
A transition initiator. Black does his best work in halfcourt, and unlike last year, when JD Notae could throttle opponents with tempo, Arkansas was often tepid in transition this year. That’s a problem because the Hogs will basically always have superior athletes to their competition, so being good in transition is not optional. When the opponent has a guy like 7’2 Donovan Clingan, you have to get cheap points by beating them down the floor, and Arkansas just couldn’t do that this season.
A post-up presence. You can live without a post-up presence if you run a well-spaced offense that can shoot 3-pointers. Arkansas has the well-spaced part down, but the lack of 3-point threats meant that opponents could, like UConn, just go under and drop on ballscreens and clog up the lane. Jalen Graham was supposed to be the guy who break those clogged looks, but he turned it over on more than 40% of his possessions and ended up with the worst offensive rating on the team by a mile. Makhi Mitchell had some nice wins against weaker foes in non-conference, but once he started facing SEC-level athletes, his only points came on dump-offs or pick-and-rolls, and those could be taken away by opponents willing to pack it in.
All of these are offense-related. Arkansas still had a top-15 defense despite the Brazile injury, so I don’t think Muss and staff are going to rethink their defensive approach. But Arkansas lacked a championship offense, and not having the right pieces was the biggest problem.
What newcomers should we expect?
The Hogs have signed two 5-stars: Layden Blocker and Baye Fall. Blocker is a go-go point guard who should emphatically solve the “transition initiator” problem, while Fall is a 6’10 defensive center who should solve the rim protector problem. Both are good fits for the Hog system.
Of course, there’s one issue. Neither is much of a shooter. Blocker’s jump shoot is a work in progress, and Fall is very raw on the offensive end and will likely be low-usage. So the Hogs still need multiple jump shooters and would like a high-volume forward as well.
We’re working on a post for this weekend that evaluates the advanced stats of every player the Hogs are known to have contacted in the transfer portal. We’ll look at the top names, plus some interesting patterns. Right now, the Hogs are definitely going for more shooting and floor-spacing, and appear willing to target shorter guards if they can shoot and play fast. That’s a good sign.
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