How coach Paul Mills is getting Wichita State basketball players to buy in with analytics
It’s not hard for the Wichita State men’s basketball players to believe head coach Paul Mills was a high school calculus teacher in a past life.
Every day before the team practiced ahead of its exhibition tour to Greece, Mills would stand in front of a monitor displaying numbers breaking down each player’s consistency in boxing out and contesting shots from the previous practice, as tracked by player development coach Iain Laymon.
Players also received a print-out of their shot chart and team-wide statistics from the previous practice, which included their scoring efficiency, potential assists, fouls drawn and their win-loss record.
“You try to equate it in a way that they understand and be as simplistic as possible,” Mills said. “You don’t want paralysis through analysis. You do want them to walk away saying, ‘Am I adding value here?’ So we try to put it on a sheet for them as well as show them film.”
Mills and his staff are more analytically-driven than most, which made for an adjustment period for many of the players.
“It’s definitely been a learning curve, but he’s a really good teacher,” Miami transfer Harlond Beverly said. “I feel like all of us have already been able to learn something, so I can only imagine how much we will learn throughout the year with him.”
To avoid making his players feel like they’re trapped in a classroom listening to him drone on about advanced analytics, Mills tries to incorporate video clips and graphics to drive home his ultimate point. He doesn’t want his players thinking about numbers while they’re playing; he wants the numbers to help ingrain habits during practice that will carry over to the games.
Instead of always showing his players past clips of his Oral Roberts teams, Mills likes finding examples in the NBA to show his players the concept being performed at the highest level of play.
“There’s a lot more talk about analytics and stats,” WSU returner Isaac Abidde said. “The learning process is different, but it’s helped me a lot. I’m just a fan of learning and I love learning about the game of basketball, so I’m just trying to soak everything up.”
The focus during this late July practice was properly spacing the floor during transition and Mills had compiled clips of the James Harden-era Houston Rockets to emphasize his point.
When the Rockets grabbed a defensive rebound and raced to the other end, Mills pointed out how the ball handler, Harden in this case, had plenty of room to operate in the middle of the floor because his teammates were spacing the floor by running down the sidelines.
To further emphasize the point, Mills had graduate managers tape the floor before the practice to instruct just how far wide the players should be running in transition. The coach wanted the players to essentially run on the sideline out of bounds to give WSU’s ball handler and the trailing big man as much room as possible to work down the middle of the floor. If a player stepped even a foot inside the tape, Mills would blow the drill dead and force the players to run it again.
“These practices are hard,” Abidde said. “Probably the hardest practices I’ve been through in my life, but we’re getting better.”
While there wasn’t complete game film from WSU’s 3-0 romp through Greece, the dozens of clips posted by WSU athletic director Kevin Saal on the trip revealed a handful of examples of better spacing and better ball movement from the offense.
Before the trip, Mills said the coaching staff was still in data collection mode in terms of determining the spots on the floor and the types of shots where each player is most efficient. The three exhibitions in Greece added more data points, but the coaching staff considers that a work-in-progress that will continue when the players return to campus for the start of the fall semester next Monday.
When it comes to shot selection, Mills is very much a believer in process over results.
“You’re trying to get all of these guys to understand shot selection, but sometimes it’s a little harder if those shots are going in and they’re not necessarily good shots,” Mills said. “We try to encourage our guys even if they’re taking good shots and they’re not going in, we know that will translate for the most part down the road if we continue to put in the time.”
Putting in the time is nothing new to the players, but having so much information at their disposal is something new.
So far, it has been a welcomed change.
“The coaching staff has really made the transition easy for me and I think I could say that for all of us,” Beverly said. “The practices have been really intense so far. Coach Mills definitely brings that energy and you have no option but to match it. It’s been a lot of fun so far.”
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