For Men's Basketball, Sharpshooting Anchored Offense

With the graduation of Keith Wright ’12 and the withdrawal of Kyle Casey, the Harvard men’s basketball team found itself with a lexically-ironic problem at the start of the 2011-2012 season—it was short on bigs.

The Crimson only had a few true big men returning from its previous campaign, and most of them had played just sporadic minutes in what was their rookie year. As a result, the Harvard offense shifted this past season, a change that reflected an overall trend in both the collegiate and professional games of basketball.

For a majority of the 2012-2013 season, the Crimson played a four-out offense. A typical lineup would feature freshman point guard Siyani Chambers bringing up the ball, with co-captains Christian Webster and Laurant Rivard as well as sophomore Wesley Chambers floating between the wings and the corners, and one of a rotation of sophomore big men down low. A series of screens would reflect which way the ball moved along the three-point line, and thus the rock would largely stay about 18 to 20-feet out from the basket until a back-screen or two opened up a shot, drive, or dish inside.

With its lack of size and the inherently slow-paced nature of Ivy League basketball, many of the Crimson’s possessions resulted in attempts from deep with the shot clock running low. And, with a starting five that featured four three-point threats at almost all times of the game, Harvard’s offense became increasingly reliant on dependable shooting from its undersized lineup.

The Crimson finished the regular season with a .401 shooting percentage from downtown—good for sixth in the nation, a 108-spot improvement from where it landed after the 2011-2012 campaign. Three of its players—Chambers, Rivard, and Saunders—shot over 40 percent from beyond the arc, while Webster came in at a 37-percent clip. As a result, not only did Harvard jump almost five percentage points in three point shooting, but its lack of a big man anchoring the team in the paint was largely hidden. The opposing teams’ need to stay out on shooters aided what the Crimson did have going down low, allowing its sophomore big men opportunities to go one-on-one rather than facing a collapsing defense. The squad’s outside-in mindset was especially apparent in Harvard’s match-up with New Mexico last week—Rivard and Webster combined to go 8-for-14 from downtown, thus diminishing the impact of the Lobos’ main defensive advantage, seven-footer Alex Kirk.

This transition in the Harvard offense from a traditional one guard, two wing, two post set to a four-out manner of play is reflective of trend beyond what happened within the walls of Lavietes Pavilion. It is a shift happening in other college gyms and, most noticeably, in NBA arenas around the country. NBA big men such as Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Love, and even Pau Gasol aat times, make their livings playing outside the paint, with the former two routinely stretching defenses behind the three-point line. Just last season, the Miami Heat won the NBA title without a dominant center, instead relying on small-ball and hot shooting from deep. The year before, the Dallas Mavericks did the same, hitting from downtown at a 41-percent clip behind the stroke of seven-footer Nowitzki.

What was a game dominated by the Shaquille O’Neals and David Robinsons of the world only a decade ago has now become one where the word “center” is an ambiguous, vague label for the taller guys in the league.

Perhaps the most tangible evidence of this transition came on Oct. 23 when the NBA decided to nix the center position from the all-star ballot. Accordingly, the distinction between forwards and centers was further blurred, and the general term “bigs” was left to encompass a range of players with a variety of skills. Stu Jackson, the Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations for the NBA, called the specification of the center position “outdated” and stated that it “didn’t represent the way our game has evolved.”

This evolution of the game, or de-evolution of the center position, is a controversial one for most traditional basketball fans, but it was more than welcomed by a Harvard team that came into its 2012-2013 season without a consistent big to whom it could turn.

—Staff writer Juliet Spies-Gans can be reached at jspiesgans@college.harvard.edu.