Nuggets: Passing big men, rebounding guards and more
Plus two Big East teams getting different results while relying on three, and a full archive of a classic Murdock performance
This post is filled with randomness and ephemera but also interesting nuggets and internet discoveries for fans of college basketball, the Big East and the Providence Friars.
PC single-game superlatives
Ken Pomeroy has been tracking single-game team records for the last quarter century — starting with the 1998-99 season. That was Tim Welsh’s first at Providence, and, hey, he’ll be on the call when the Friars visit Oklahoma on Tuesday night (7p on ESPNU).
The Friars’ 86-54 win over Wagner on Tuesday featured a pair of rare events in Friars recent history and, considering the trends of the sport, likely school history. For one, PC held the Seahawks to 25% shooting on 2-pointers, the lowest by a Friars opponent in KenPom’s database, surpassing South Florida’s 27% performance in a 21-point loss to the Friars in February 2006.
Through Saturday’s win over Rhode Island, the Friars rank third nationally in 2-point field-goal defense — opponents are shooting just 39.2%. The Friars’ best 2-point defense of the last 25 years came from the worst PC team of this period. The 1999-00 Friars went just 10-19 overall, 4-12 in conference, and finished 162nd in KenPom (the second-worst team was Ed Cooley’s first; those 2011-12 Friars ranked 126th). The 1999-00 Friars team lost 10 straight league games at one point, but it wasn’t because of their defense, which ranked top-40 nationally and 27th in 2-point defense at 43%, led by Karim Shabazz, the Florida State transfer who joined the squad midseason. PC was bad because it had an inept offense, which shot below 30% on 3’s and ranked 273rd in KenPom in adjusted efficiency, making it the only PC offense ever to rank outside of the national top 200. PC didn’t score a point per possession in a Big East game until an unlikely 89-79 win at Notre Dame when Donta Wade set a school record by making 10 3-pointers. Providence’s offense suffered without point guard John Linehan, who played just six games due to injury.
While PC was making Wagner miss inside, the Friars were draining from deep, led by Ticket Gaines’ 7-for-10 performance (after he had entered the game just 3-for-18 for the season). PC made a season-high 13 3-pointers, and they attempted more threes (32) than twos (23), as Wagner was unwilling to let Josh Oduro go to work in the post, leaving shooters open. For the game, 58.2% of PC’s field-goal attempts were 3-pointers, breaking the previous program record of 58.0%, set February 2009 in a 94-91 home loss to Villanova. In that game, in Keno Davis’ first season, the Friars attempted 40 3-pointers, and Sharaud Curry and Jeff Xavier combined to make 11-of-23. PC trailed by as many as 20 against a Villanova team headed to the Final Four but got as close as one with a second left after a Weyinmi Efejuku 3-pointer. It was too little, too late.
One more minor note from Wagner: PC’s 69.6% 2-point field-goal shooting is the program’s 10th-best single-game performance and the Friars’ best since shooting 73.1% in a win over Saint Peter’s in November 2021. That Peacocks team was, as it turned out, en route to the Elite Eight, while the Friars were headed to the Sweet 16.
Boards from the backcourt
Devin Carter has grabbed at least 11 rebounds in three of PC’s last four games. Carter’s defensive rebounding rate (the percentage of opponents’ missed shots that a player gets while on the floor) is a remarkable 23.2%. We’re only about a quarter of the way through the season, so Carter is unlikely to maintain that rate, but if he did, it would be better than Bryce Hopkins’ team-leading 22.5% last season.
Carter ranks 122nd nationally in defensive-rebounding rate despite being just 6-foot-3. There is only one player 6-foot-3 or shorter who ranks in the national top 100: Joseph Venzant of Liberty. Last season, no players that short ranked in the top 100. The shortest was 6-4 Taeshaud Jackson of VMI. No major-conference player 6-6 or shorter finished in the top 100 — the shortest were two 6-7 players: Miami’s Norchad Omier and Creighton’s Baylor Scheierman.
If you’re looking for good rebounding guards from PC’s recent past, 6-foot-5 David Duke had a 16.4% rate in his final season (2020-21). The 6-foot-4 Kris Dunn had a 16.1% rate as a redshirt sophomore (2014-15).
Season after season, PC has struggled at defensive rebounding. Led by Hopkins and Ed Croswell (plus Carter and Alyn Breed out of the backcourt), last year’s team had a chance to be one of the school’s best this century but was throttled on the glass in the season-ending losses to Seton Hall, Connecticut and Kentucky. That swoon meant the Friars dipped outside the national top 100 to 118th in defensive rebounding for the season. A top-100 finish would have been a notable accomplishment for PC, which has only finished in the top 100 once in the last 25 seasons. In fact, starting with the 1997-98 season (Pete Gillen’s last) through the 2011-12 season (Cooley’s first), PC finished inside the top 200 just once.
After his first season, Cooley’s teams fared much better on the defensive glass relative to school history but managed to get into the top 100 just once, in 2014-15, led by senior LaDontae Henton, freshman Ben Bentil and Dunn. PC ranks 99th nationally for the season to date.
Passing from the post
Oduro came to Friartown with a reputation as an excellent passer, and we’ve seen it routinely in the season’s first eight games. He has 13 assists this season and a 13.2% assist rate, meaning he is the assist man on that percentage of made baskets (not made by him) while he’s on the floor. Assuming Oduro maintains a double-digit assist rate (and he did each of the last three seasons, including 22.8% last season), he’ll be the first Friar listed at 6-foot-9 or taller to accomplish the feat since Herb Hill in 2006-07. Hill and Tuukka Kotti both did this two seasons earlier (2004-05). Geoff McDermott, a superior passer at the forward spot, did this all four years at PC, but he was listed at 6-foot-8.
Threes up, twos down
If you watched Creighton dismantle Nebraska at Pinnacle Bank Arena on Sunday afternoon, you probably noticed that the Bluejays took and made a lot of 3-pointers (they went 14-of-40, in fact), led by Scheierman’s six makes on 19 attempts. CU’s 89-60 win matched a record margin for the rivalry (despite Nebraska entering undefeated), and it was also the fourth time in Creighton’s eight games this season that the Bluejays attempted more threes than twos.
Creighton is one of only five teams nationally that has taken more 3-pointers than 2-pointers and is one of just three major-conference teams to rank in the national top 25 in highest percentage of shots from deep. Villanova is one of those other four teams that has taken more threes than twos (undefeated BYU is the other major-conference squad in the top 25).
Taking a lot of threes has proved beneficial to Creighton, which makes 39.2% of its threes (ranking 22nd nationally), and BYU, which makes 38.5% (34th). On the other hand, Villanova ranks just 212th nationally in success rate on threes at 31.8%. Villanova hasn’t shot below 33% on 3-pointers as a team since 2011-12, but last season’s 33.4% was its worst since 2013-14.
In Villanova’s nine games this season, the team has shot under 35% on 3-pointers four times (and, in fact, shot under 30% in all of those games). Villanova lost three of those four, culminating in a second straight loss to a Philly rival when the Cats dropped a 57-55 decision to Drexel on Saturday. In that game, Villanova shot just 5-for-27 (18.5%), with Tyler Burton, Justin Moore and T.J. Bamba going a combined 1-for-11. The Cats’ 78-65 loss to St. Joseph’s on Wednesday saw Villanova shoot 10-for-37 (27%) on 3-pointers while attempting just 19 2-pointers the whole game. That’s 66.1% of all attempts coming from deep, the fourth highest ever for Villanova in a single game.
Villanova has ranked in the national top 30 in the proportion of its attempts that come from deep in each of the last 10 seasons (and appears likely to make it 11 straight this season). Jay Wright was on the vanguard of understanding the relative value of a 3-pointer, culminating in his 2018-19 team taking 53.5% of its shots from deep. Villanova set NCAA Tournament records in winning the national title in 2018 by making 72 and taking 173 3-pointers (39%); the Cats won every game by at least 12.
Are there more runs?
It feels anecdotally like there are more games this year where teams who were way behind make large runs, but are my eyes deceiving me? I looked it up.
There have been 25 games in the season’s first four weeks in which a team trailed by at least 16 points and won (Syracuse’s comeback from down 24 to defeat Colgate leads the way). At the same point last season, there were — 25 such games. If I go back to the last previous season start that wasn’t influenced by COVID (2019-20), there were — 25 such games. It’s remarkable and unlikely consistency, but at least in this small bit of research, nothing has really changed.
I looked back further, since there is some notion that, in an era with more 3-pointers (like we have now), there are bound to be more swings (it seems true in the NBA at least), and so I went back to 2013-14, the last season when less than one-third of field-goal attempts were 3-pointers. Did that season see fewer of these comebacks? Actually, no, there were 31 games in the season’s first four weeks in 2013-14 in which a team trailed by 16 or more and won.
Advantage null hypothesis.
YouTube finds
YouTube’s algorithm got a couple of clips in front of me this weekend that might be worth you queueing up.
I came across a full archive (with commercials) for a game between Pittsburgh and Providence at the Providence Civic Center in 1991. This is worth watching just for the intro, which focuses on Eric Murdock’s ridiculous senior season (he was averaging 28 points per game at the time and was about to break the national record in steals). If you watch, you can spot current Xavier head coach Sean Miller at point guard for Pitt and then see Murdock set a Big East single-game scoring record.
Speaking of Xavier, the Musketeers, made an improbable run to the Elite Eight in 2004. If you had asked me, I would have remembered that, but before I watched this documentary of the season, I didn’t know that this team started 10-9 before winning 15 of 16, including annihilating undefeated Saint Joseph’s in the Atlantic 10 Tournament quarterfinals and later defeating Dayton on the Flyers home court to win the tournament title. This was Thad Matta’s third and final team in Cincinnati before he moved on to Ohio State, making way for Miller’s first tenure as XU head coach. It was fun to remember names like Lionel Chalmers and Romain Sato.
Rick Barnes, who coached Murdock that night in 1991 and whose Texas Longhorns lost to Xavier in the Sweet 16 in 2004, can be spotted in both of the above videos.
One of the more fascinating turns in PC history was the depths of despair in 2000 to the NCAA Tournament in 2001 (my senior year). The '00 team couldn't hit a thing from deep, then in '01 Linehan came back a shooter, Abdul Mills and Rome Augustin took huge leaps, and they added three frosh (Kabba, Anrin, and Laksa) who all stroked it from deep. I think that team started 2-3, then got hot out of nowhere. It was wild.