WHAT THEY BRING

Same boring Cuonzo offense you’ve seen for a dadgum decade, man

This past weekend, I got to go to Louisville and watch two very delightful programs do things two very different ways: Bellarmine and Greenville (IL). I’ve covered both in the past as part of my offseason basketball offense series, which you can read about here. Bellarmine’s offense more closely resembles Belmont, if you had to pick a D-1 to relate it to, but I’ve genuinely never seen an offense so tightly built around loud, vocalized communication and hard, relentless cuts through the paint. Greenville, meanwhile, is cocaine basketball; they went from up 23 to up 8 in *four minutes* in the game I saw despite scoring a few points during that span.

Regrettably, neither Missouri nor Tennessee have an offense that come even close to providing me the same joy.

You know Cuonzo’s offense from his time at Tennessee; I guess if I had to relate this team to one while he was in Knoxville, it would be his very first team, which did scrap together some pretty good wins but spent basically the entire month of January looking like a Toyota Camry stuck in mud ten inches deep.

It’s not a fun offense to watch by any means. We will not be spending as much time on it as we did LSU’s, for obvious reasons. Every word I type feels annoyed.

On the inside, a variety of actions to get there: P&RBH, cuts, post-ups

This year’s Mizzou offense gets a few more shots at the rim and takes a few less mid-range twos, though they never took a gigantic amount in the first place. (Very interesting! Perhaps the other team in this preview should do that, too.) Last year’s offense used a lot more post-ups to get to the rim; this year, they’ve scaled down the post-ups and bumped up ball screens and drives from the perimeter in their place.

It’s not a huge bump, necessarily, but you can tell the difference. Dru Smith, the Evansville transfer, uses picks to get to the rim a few times a game, as does Xavier Pinson. If neither can get to the rim, they’ve frequently looked to various guys off of basket cuts to get points.

When they do still go to the post, it’s mostly through Jeremiah Tilmon, who’s been good-ish at scoring off of his post moves.

On the perimeter, lots of spot-ups and off-ball screens

Most of the threes are usurped by Mark Smith (32-of-81, 39.5%):

And Torrence Watson (18-of-62, 29%):

No other player has more than 36 three-point attempts (Kobe Brown, a 19.4% three-point shooter). Both get a lot of off-ball screening actions run for them, as well as plenty of the traditional spot-up looks.

Synergy marks 29% of Missouri’s possessions as ending in a spot-up, which…is pretty darn high. (Only Vandy and Arkansas rank higher among SEC squads.) Again, this is basically the same deal that we saw last year when Mizzou played Tennessee twice and combined for 49 three-point attempts across two meetings. (An attempt at an over/under guess: 21.5 attempts from downtown.)

No player averages more than 8.5 shot attempts per game, so it’s hard to single one out; that’s why there are no player-specific sections this time. What Missouri does offensively is not special or terribly interesting; it is a means to an end, if you squint hard enough.

Per KenPom, it is the 120th-best offense in basketball, an offense that hits just 30.1% of its threes (though 52.2% of twos), turns the ball over way more than they should, and is fairly slow and plodding. Of course this means that they’ll hit 45% of their threes, half of them with three seconds left on the shot clock.

Pretty great defense thus far – lots of TOs forced, boards domination, even blocks some shots at times

As with every single Cuonzo team 2011 to present, this is the more interesting side of the ball. This particular Missouri squad ranks fifth-best nationally in opponent eFG%, 37th in TO%, 55th in DREB%, and does it all despite not blocking a ton of shots or restricting opponents to tons of mid-range twos.

The Tigers give up a solid amount of three-point shots in general, and opponents (who are a hilarious 76.2% from the free-throw line, the 13th-highest rate in basketball) aren’t going to shoot 25.9% from three forever. That said, they’re clearly doing something right.

Again, 2011 to present, Cuonzo exclusively runs a man-to-man defense that aims to force tough twos and own the boards. Surprisingly, his main adjustment from California to Missouri has been to allow more threes, not fewer. Still, they’re absolutely owning opponents, both inside and outside the perimeter. There’s not a ton of blocks, as previously mentioned, but they get their share.

Most opponents have had trouble finding anything easy against Mizzou; only three opponents have shot better than 50% from two.

Interior/mid-range defense has been awesome, though has had trouble with roll man

Strangely, though, Missouri’s interior defense has given up a surprising amount of points to the roll/pop man in ball screen sets. Butler crushed them on it, but more recently, both Nick Richards and Barret Benson got buckets their coaches loved out of these sets.

Both John Fulkerson and Yves Pons could do similar out of these sets, especially now that they have an actual gravity-drawing point guard running them in Santiago Vescovi. As for a secondary way to score…well, there’s not a clear one, but Tennessee has more points off of basket/paint cuts than any other non-spot-up play type this year. Might as well try it, no?

Perimeter defense due for serious regression, I think

I touched on Missouri’s bizarrely great perimeter defense earlier, but it’s worth noting that Synergy gives them a near-even 50/50 split on catch-and-shoot threes in terms of guarding them or not guarding them. Really, there’s nothing wrong at all with this shot; it just didn’t go in.

Two things worth noting: it’s basically impossible to shoot 24.1% from half-court from three all season unless you’re a 300s level KenPom team, which Tennessee is not. As Greenville (IL)’s coach told his team this weekend: let it fly.

The actions Missouri’s had the most trouble sticking with this season, in terms of our preferred Guarded/Unguarded split, both relate to ball-screen coverage. Tennessee can find holes on the perimeter by way of allowing the ball-handler to drive inside and kick it out:

Alternately, they can use Pons or even Josiah-Jordan James as the screener and let them pop out of the screen for what should be a wide-open three-point attempt.

I’m pretty happy with either option, and Missouri’s not going to guard these perfectly, in all likelihood.

NEXT PAGE: The meme with the guy looking back at the girl and it’s “Vescovi” vs. “The other guys”