Happy Monday, Cougs! This is the second half of Bryce Hendricks’ breakdown of the offense that new men’s basketball coach David Riley brings south from EWU to WSU, which is about as good of a way to start the week as I can think of.

GFC!

— Jeff

In today's newsletter

• Size matters, but so does speed

  • The Benefits of Tall Ball

  • Speed Reads

• The Upside

Size matters, but so does speed

By Bryce Hendricks
Guest author

In part one, we examined the actions that Eastern Washington commonly used to generate the excellent shots that led to one of the better offenses in the country — and certainly one of the best you’d find at the level of the Big Sky conference.

Today, let’s look at personnel and pace before finishing off with what, ultimately, this means for just how high the offense can go at WSU.

The Benefits of Tall Ball

In Riley’s moneyball offense, there has to be some type of market inefficiency to exploit, some fundamental failure on the part of defenses that his offenses will try to take advantage of. For Riley, his on-base percentage is post-defense. Riley’s base assumption is that, even if a team has one solid post-defender, they probably don’t have 4. So, if you have 4 guys who can post-up and space away from a post-action, there will always be a mismatch to exploit. 

Of Eastern’s top 6 players in terms of usage, 5 ranked above the 55th percentile in percentage of possessions used as post-ups. Almost all of their lineup constructions had at least 3 of those players and many had 4. They want to have some type of post mismatch to exploit at all times. Whether that be a little guy on a player like Casey Jones or a slower big on a guy like Cedric Coward, they want to have an option to exploit somewhere in the post. 

Having like size up and down the lineup also creates a lot of interchangeability with the screening actions as well. It is not rare to see 6’10 Ethan Price operating a dribble hand off as the handler and as the receiver. Everyone can set screens, receive screens, and flow in and out of actions in just about every spot on the floor. This interchangeability allowed everyone to bring the ball up and initiate actions, which added to their overall pace. 

A part of why so many teams run screen actions for a guy to go to a certain spot is because of positionality. Using that Purdue example from last week, the reason that the screen is being set to send one person to the top of the key and the other to the block is because one of those players is a guard and the other is a big. But when everyone is a wing, screening actions don’t have to send players places based on position. Instead, the offense can read what the defense is giving and try to get players to optimal positions based on what the defense is giving up.