SAN ANTONIO — The texts piled up on Kelvin Sampson’s phone in the hours after his Houston team ripped a Final Four victory out of Duke’s hands late Saturday night. He responded to none. He had Florida film to watch in advance of Monday’s national championship game at the Alamodome.
He did read enough of them, though, to identify a theme.
“Win one for the old guys, something like that,” Sampson said, citing Gregg Popovich, Tubby Smith, Tom Izzo and Rick Barnes as messengers in support of their fellow Baby Boomer, hoping he becomes the oldest coach, at age 69, to win a men’s national championship.
It’s either that or Florida’s Todd Golden becoming the youngest, at age 39, since NC State’s Jimmy Valvano did it at age 37 in 1983 (at the expense of a Houston Cougars team that was one of the best to play in this tournament and not win it). So there we have it, a generational battle line drawn and a contrast at play.
It’s Golden, the analytically driven new-age coach, who’s been mathing it with the best of the mathers since he cut his teeth in the Ivy League, against a hard-boiled paw paw whose college basketball mentor was famous for this probability-free coaching point: “Be a guard, not garbage!”
It is, of course, not that simple. The same goes for anyone who wants to frame this as rough-and-tumble Houston vs. skill-and-sizzle Florida, while failing to notice that Gators guards Alijah Martin and Walter Clayton Jr. could be doing serious damage on a football field right now if they so chose. The Gators are huge, bigger than the Cougars at most spots, and both teams are among the 10 best in the sport at doing the thing the analytics folks will tell you correlates strongly with winning — rebounding their own misses.
The core of the showdown, illustrating the philosophical difference between the coaches, is that Florida wants to be elite on offense and great on defense. Houston wants to be elite on defense and great on offense. Both have done it this season. Houston, the nation’s No. 1 team in adjusted defensive efficiency per KenPom, will try to stifle the No. 2 team in adjusted offensive efficiency. Two days after doing just that to the No. 1 team in adjusted offensive efficiency.
Florida’s defense (No. 9) against Houston’s offense (No. 9) is pretty good stuff, too, by the way. But the other end of the floor gets top billing. Golden, talking about the Cougars on Sunday, used “tough” or “toughness” nine times.
He also said this of the less-celebrated aspect of Houston basketball: “I’m not sure how analytical they think about the game, but they’re an incredibly efficient analytical team. They don’t turn the ball over. They get back all their misses.”
Let it be known, for those who wondered if the Cougars are just out here punching lockers and chewing raw meat to prep for games, that Houston basketball does care about analytics. Sampson may cackle at the term, like his buddies Izzo and Barnes — the old school coaches who have stuck around and thrived through changes in the sport that have driven other peers away.
But he has embraced math and probabilities as valuable tools in shaping basketball decisions.
“He may poke fun of it, but he knows what it’s about,” Houston assistant coach K.C. Beard, whose previous stops in the NBA have helped make him the staff’s analytics ace, said Sunday. “One of his favorite lines is, ‘All right, let’s not try to be the smartest guy in the room.’ So whenever you come to him with an idea, it can’t just be backed by numbers, it has to be sound in other ways. How can I present it more in a basketball strategy kind of approach?”
So there is a difference. Golden, whose coaching philosophies were shaped while on Kyle Smith’s staff at Columbia, is considered one of the sport’s leaders in data-driven coaching.
“I think they’re a little bit more in the Alabama and Nate Oats territory, where they’re diving into, ‘What’s the best shot per possession?’” Beard said of Florida. “And, ‘In this possession, what do the percentages say?’”
Houston, meanwhile, is a big believer in KenPom and talks about it often. Sampson breaks down efficiency with his team half by half, putting it in his own terms. The Cougars are scoring 1.24 points per possession and allowing just 0.873 points per possession this season, both excellent numbers. In Sampson parlance, that’s an “offensive rating” of 124 and a “defensive rating” of 87.3.
Math runs rampant in this program, actually. Houston has figured out that if it gets four “kills” in a game — three straight defensive stops is a “kill” — its chances of winning that game are greater than 90 percent. Houston’s analysis of Duke in the tournament concluded that while the Blue Devils’ efficiency was off the charts, they were allowing opponents nine more shots than they were taking. So Houston figured if it could be in that range, its defense would make the difference.
That meant offensive rebounding. That meant giving Emanuel Sharp ball screens all night because his primary defender was Kon Knueppel. Knueppel is a good defender, but “he hits screens,” Beard said, more so than Duke guards Sion James and Tyrese Proctor. Houston needed one of its guards to get into the lane to make offensive rebounding possible.
At halftime, Sampson looked at Houston’s specialty hustle stats — including deflections on defense, times crashing the boards, times getting a hand on a rebound, “blow bys” allowed and more — and had one proclamation: If Sharp and Joseph Tugler stayed at zero rebounds in the second half, Houston would lose.
Those two combined for 11 boards in the second half. Houston finished with 18 offensive rebounds. Houston finished with eight more shots than Duke. Houston won.
And that probably doesn’t happen if Sampson fouls Duke down six with a minute to go, as most coaches would do in the same situation. He considered his team’s defensive success rate and Duke’s foul shooting and made the right choice. Tugler stayed down on a Knueppel shot fake and blocked the actual shot.
“It doesn’t always work out,” Sampson said. “(Tugler) goes for the shot fake and draws a foul, we’re down nine. All of a sudden, I’m the dumbest guy ever.”
He’s been there. He’s seen it all. That’s where there’s an enormous difference in this coaching matchup. There’s a general generational difference, too, in coaching style. Sampson, Izzo and Barnes get after players, loudly. Coaches like Golden and Duke’s Jon Scheyer are less likely to do so, at least during games and to that degree.
Sampson’s mentor was Izzo’s mentor, the late Jud Heathcote, and Sampson said Sunday that his father and Heathcote “were just old school, discipline, do things the right way, coach ’em up and play ball. That’s kind of what I was raised with.”
Let it be known, before Sampson attempts to become the oldest coach to win it all, at the expense of one of the game’s bright young coaching stars, that his players can give it back to him. Houston big man J’Wan Roberts was asked Sunday if Sampson has any “OK, Boomer” moments. He wondered aloud if he might get in trouble. He continued anyway.
“We’ll be at practice sometimes, and he’ll be screaming at me, and then in the next five seconds he’ll totally forget what he’s screaming at me about,” Roberts said. “And then like 10 minutes later, he’ll remember and get back on me again. I’ll be like, ‘Bruh.’”
(Top photos of Todd Golden, Kelvin Sampson: Robert Deutsch, Tevor Ruszkowski / Imagn Images)
