Who Are The Best Offensive College Basketball Programs Over The Last Five Years?

We’re officially starting college basketball season this week. Practices start this week and then we have Midnight Madness starting on Oct. 5 or 12 depending what school you want to look at. So with the season here, it’s officially preview season and we’ll be looking at a bunch of different things heading into the season. There will be the traditional top-25, best players list, conference previews and all that jazz, but we’ll also go more in depth, looking at different offensive and defensive sets and what makes teams so consistently good. We’ve been breaking down a team per day and we’ll keep doing that, but we’ll also branch out to some other ideas.

Today though, I want to focus on offense as a whole. Who are the teams out there that have been consistently good on the offensive side of the ball. There are different stats you can look at in terms of offense, whether it’s points per game, points per possession, percentages, etc, but to me PPP is the most fair way and accurate way to judge how consistent an offense is. We’re going with five years since it’s a reasonable time frame to see a coach develop players and you have a whole class going through. PPP in college hoops during that time is .905 and it’s up a couple tenths of a point in the major conferences.

So who are the best teams? Here are the 10 best teams over the last five years, I don’t think it’s much of a surprise to see some of these names:

There you have it. No real surprise to see Villanova at No. 1, with how it shoots the ball and how efficient the Wildcats are. Also not surprised to see names like Duke, Notre Dame, Michgian, Davidson, St. Mary’s and Belmont. Everyone knows about the big name guys, but St. Mary’s loves to run the high ball screen and make layups. Rick Byrd and Bob McKillop are two of the best offensive coaches in the country.

Let’s get into some of these teams and what you can expect when you watch them this year.

Michigan

For Michigan, it’s based all around cutting and spacing and there’s a reason John Beilein was voted the best offensive coach in the country by his peers last year. The 2-guard offense has Princeton style principals and starts in a 2-3 look. The basic motion starts with the point passing to a wing then cutting to the corner. Opposite wing will then v-cut up to receive a swing pass and take a few dribbles to opposite side. From there, the guy in the middle of the 3 set (typically your 5) will go set a screen for the wing on the ball side to pop up and look for a 3. After the screen the five rolls to the post, opposite wing moves to the elbow and the point moves back up to the wing. Now they are set with a look in the post, a reverse pass or a three.

The main premise here is to beat guys with cuts. They look for backdoor cuts or off of a flare screen for the three. Michigan’s system is designed for wings and stretch players to thrive in this as it’s constantly moving and bringing players away from the basket. They aren’t looking for guys to beat defenders off the dribble like Duke does and you rarely see an ISO set. The two-guard offense is also designed to wear defenses down as they’ll reverse the court and run cuts for 20 seconds at a time. In fact, Michigan is one of the slowest teams in the country as they averaged 19.6 seconds per possession (they are only quicker than 16 teams in the country).

The thing that makes Beilein such a good offensive coach is the sets out of the basic 2-guard offense. He has a chin set, a shuffle set, the basic motion and a pin-down play. All bring a variety of looks out of the same set but more importantly put defenders in weird positions. He recruits bigs that can shoot and will have guards slipping screens or running guard on guard handoffs instead of the traditional guard off a big.

Notre Dame

Mike Brey, similar to K and Beilein, preaches spacing on the offensive side of the ball. Despite typically having a smaller team, Brey’s motion offense will be a 3-2 set with the initial move being the 4 and 5 screening for the 2 and 3. The premise of Brey’s motion offense (remember he is from the Duke coaching tree) varies in the sense that he likes to use screening pairs and uses the 3-point line as a basis. After the 4 and 5 screen for the guards, the 4 will screen for the 5. At the same time the 1 and the 3 are working together on screens. Similar to Michigan here, ball reversal is a key for Notre Dame. They’ll look to switch the floor and then immediately go screen. What I love about Brey is his attention to detail in terms of where cuts happen. He’s said the key to his most common run play is making sure a player has a foot in the lane when they make their cut.

Brey has started to develop more and more NBA looks into his motion offense. The most common one he uses now is a side pick-and-roll with an empty lane.  He brings his guys up past the free throw line and into the corner, the big comes and sets the screen at free throw line extended behind the 3-point line. That makes the defense make a decision. They either have to leave a shooter to help the roll or hope they can get in position in time when the big rolls. Most often these sideline ball screens come after the wing catches the ball from a cut on the other side of the court. You’ll also see Notre Dame run a floppy set or the horns set that the NBA loves now.

Another unique thing that Brey does is run a ‘release’ set with his big. This is when Notre Dame isn’t comfortable making an entry pass along with the opponent big being uncomfortable guarding away from the post. The big will come up high in the motion set while the 1 dribbles away from him. At that time the 5 will make some sort of quick move, whether it’s a duck into the high post or a flash cut to start the offense. It’s something you don’t see a lot of as most teams still don’t have that big they trust being able to not only catch the pass that high but make a play.

The last two years, Notre Dame would run more of a ‘wheel’ type motion. What I mean by that is they’d bring Colson up to the top of the key. There’d be a screen opposite of Colson for the wing up to intiate the offense. The wing on Colson’s side would then run a shallow baseline cut off of a screen of the opposite screener. Farrell, after making the pass, would then run off a Colson screen to begin the wheel. He’d end up running off another screen to opposite corner while he gets replaced by opposite wing. Colson then pops up to catch the ball at the top of the key, where Notre Dame typically had a mismatch.

I talk about that wheel motion because we can see a variation of that this year. They could bring up John Mooney and use him in that Colson role.

Villanova

We’ve seen Jay Wright be one of the notable names to move to the small-ball era. He’s been running a 4-guard set for quite some time, but his offense is based around a 4-out, 1-in and even a 5-out set. What we saw last year is something we won’t see this year. Wright and Nova had the perfect blend of a big in Omari Spellman that could really shoot the ball combined with a guard in Jalen Brunson who could not only score in the post but was an excellent passer out of there. You simply can’t invert your offense like Villanova did without the perfect blend of the two. Don’t expect to see that as a trend going forward.

What’s unique about Villanova’s offense though is how predicated on catch and shoot jumpers it is. Jay Wright has said multiple times that he preaches the most open you’ll be is when you first catch the ball. That’s why you see them run semi-curls around the perimeter to catch the ball in a shooting motion. It’s all by design and it’s tough to defend simply because you have to be prepared for a backcut as well.

Another thing I do really love about Nova’s offense and what they probably do as the best team in the country is replace the pick. What I mean by that is they’ll set a ball screen and while they will typically set that with their big, they aren’t afraid to set the pick with a guard on guard. From there one of the other perimeter players cuts to where the screener came from. That gives the ball handler the ability to drive and kick, pass to the roller, look to score or hit a quick back pass to the new replacement.

So if you want to bet overs or team overs, here you go Glenny. These are teams that are consistently good offensively, no matter who they have on the roster.