Advertisement

How much will Pitt's pace of play increase under Kevin Stallings?

By Craig Meyer / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 7 years ago

The weeks and months leading up to the college basketball season, or really any season, is a fertile time for boundless optimism. Everybody’s in the best shape of their lives. A given team, no matter how mediocre or plain bad it was, feels it has a chance to be something special or, at the very least, surprise a few people. There’s a rinse-repeat nature to it all.

This kind of sunny outlook is doubly true when it comes to a coaching change. Short of replacing a wildly successful coach or some sort of brooding, legendary figure, a new person in charge represents all or many of the good things the person they’re replacing didn’t. That may be true in some instances, but in these cases, ‘change’ can also be conflated with ‘progress’ and the magnitude of those changes has a tendency to get overstated.

Which brings us to Kevin Stallings. Jamie Dixon, for all he achieved in 13 years as Pitt’s coach, employed a brutally slow style of play. At the zenith of his tenure, it was a system that helped Pitt emerge as a continual presence in the top 10 of the national polls and shaped the Panthers into one of the toughest teams in the country. Once the wins didn’t come with the same regularity, it became a nuisance, a basketball eyesore for fans and a persistent question for potential new players about how their skills would be utilized in such a deliberate, inflexible scheme.

The move from Dixon to Stallings wasn’t made for that reason – technically, since Dixon voluntarily left for TCU, a move wasn’t even made – but pace of play was undoubtedly a factor in Stallings’ eventual hire. Pitt AD Scott Barnes said as much in a release announcing Stallings as the Panthers’ new coach.

“He plays a fun, up-tempo style that players love and fans will enjoy,” Barnes said in a statement.

If Barnes’ point is that Stallings runs a faster system than Dixon, he’s right. But to dub Stallings’ teams as “up-tempo” is more than a little misleading. Of Stallings’ 15 teams at Vanderbilt since KenPom began rankings, only three of them ranked among the top 100 Division I teams in tempo, none of which came in the past six seasons. Furthermore, not one of his teams in that span ever finished in the top 50 in tempo.

While preseason talk of Pitt playing up-tempo is perhaps overstated, Stallings does represent a small shot of adrenaline in the pace department, if only because his teams generally veered toward the middle of Division I in those rankings while Dixon’s were often near the bottom.

Below is a side-by-side ranking of the two coaches since the 2003-04 season.

 


Dixon and Stallings pace comparison (Craig Meyer/Post-Gazette)

Of all the questions surrounding Stallings’ first team, two of the most crucial will be how much faster will Pitt play and how will it handle that increased tempo. They’re questions that won’t come with firm answers for another few months, at least, but for now, we can use some historical examples to give us an idea of how it all may unfold.

We’ll start with Stallings’ own history with this. Vanderbilt’s 1998-99 team, the final one before Stallings’ arrival, averaged 69.4 possessions per game, a reasonably decent pace. In Stallings’ first season, the Commodores averaged 71.1 possessions per game, a jump of 1.7. In the following three seasons, they averaged, in order, 69.8, 70.4 and 71.1 possessions per game. Those numbers fluctuated on a year-to-year basis, but the basic point was the same – the Vanderbilt program Stallings built in those early years was faster than the one he inherited.

This happened before KenPom started measuring things like a team’s offensive efficiency, so there’s no reliable way of knowing whether the Commodores, with that faster pace, became a better offensive team.

But what about other teams over the past 10 years? How did those moving from an incredibly slow coach fare under a new leader? To find this out, I looked at every team that finished at or below 300 in the pace rankings in a given year that made or had a coaching change following the season (14 teams in total).

Here, individually, is a look at how those teams fared, listed in order of how much possessions per game increased. Before that, though, a quick explanation on each column:

Old coach tempo: Average possessions per game in last season under previous coach

New coach tempo: Average possessions per game in first season under new coach

Old o eff: Offensive efficiency (points per 100 possessions) in last season under previous coach

New o eff: Offensive efficiency in first season under new coach


List of historical examples (Craig Meyer/Post-Gazette)

It’s a lot to digest, but here are some of the major takeaways:

** Of the 14 teams, 10 finished with a higher number of possessions per game than they did the previous season. It’s worth noting all but one of the new coaches who had previously been a head coach had a faster system than the coach he was replacing.

** The average team in that group saw its possessions per game rise by 2.8.

** Six of the 10 teams who increased their average number of possessions per game improved their offensive efficiency in the process. Conversely, three of the four teams with a slower tempo saw their offensive efficiency dip.

** The average change in offensive efficiency was -0.7 points per 100 possessions.

** The difference in average tempo between Stallings’ previous five teams and Dixon’s was 1.8. The closest examples on the above table to that scenario are Tennessee in 2016 and Washington State in 2015. The Volunteers averaged 9.1 more possessions per game in Rick Barnes’ first year than they did in Donnie Tyndall’s lone season in Knoxville while the Cougars averaged 5.8 more possessions per game under Ernie Kent than they did in their final season under Ken Bone (not THAT Ken Bone).

[**UPDATE**]

I got a couple of questions about how, beyond the tempo statistics, these teams fared from a win-loss standpoint. From a fans’ standpoint, I get it. Here’s how each of those teams did in the final year of the old coaching regime and the first year of the new one.

 


Tempo changes and win-loss records (Craig Meyer/Post-Gazette)

The takeaways:

** Eight of the 14 teams finished with a better record than they did the previous year. Some of that can be based on the personnel they inherited, but people were curious, so there you go.

** Six of the 10 teams who increased their pace with a new coach finished with a better record than they did the previous season. Two of the four teams whose average number of possessions decreased with the new coach finished with a better record.

So what to take from all of this and how it relates to Pitt? It’s almost certain, given Stallings’ background, that the Panthers will play faster this season, but between their taller lineup and the pace at which the team is used to playing, I don’t know if it will be a seismic change.

If anything, the numbers (and history) show Pitt, if it follows the average of the recent trend, will be a marginally speedier if slightly less efficient team.

 

Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG