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Previewing the Auburn Tigers Men’s Basketball program. Can Bruce Pearl get back to the Final Four with a team that has the highest expectations in program history?
Last season, Auburn opened the season with a neutral-court loss against Baylor. They then won 16 of their next 17 games, started 5-0 in the SEC, and looked like so many Bruce Pearl teams have in the past. They were fast, erratic, and played with a ton of swagger.
If you checked under the hood, only six of those 16 wins were against teams in the top 100 in KenPom, and all six came on the Plains. It’s not like Pearl was purposefully avoiding good teams. They faced three more top-100 teams before SEC play arrived, but none were in a truly hostile environment.
Once the competition stepped up, Auburn faltered a bit. They finished conference action at 13-5, but only two of those victories — Mississippi State and Alabama — came against opponisition that finished better than 40th in Pomeroy’s ratings. Again, both results came inside Neville Arena.
Yes, the Tigers’ record looked gaudy, but they were 3-7 in Quad-1 games. So, while Pearl’s team handled its business against everyone else, it’s hard to ignore the fact it was winless against top-tier teams on the road. Pulvering everyone else boosted the program’s analytic profile to a point where it masked that weakness.
They ultimately proved Auburn’s undoing when they entered the NCAA Tournament and bowed out, unsurprisingly, to Yale in the first round. What lessons did the Tigers learn from last season’s ending?
Other SEC Previews:
3. Tennessee Volunteers, 13-5
4. Arkansas Razorbacks, 11-7
5. Florida Gators, 11-7
6. Kentucky Wildcats, 10-8
7. Missouri Tigers, 9-9
8. Ole Miss Rebels, 9-9
9. Texas A&M Aggies, 9-9
10. Texas Longhorns, 8-10
11. Mississippi State Bulldogs, 7-11
12. Vanderbilt Commodores, 7-11
13. Oklahoma Sooners, 7-11
14. Georgia Bulldogs, 6-12
15. LSU Tigers, 5-13
16. South Carolina Gamecocks, 5-13
Auburn Tigers
Last season: 27 – 8 (13-5 in conference) #4 overall
The Masses Prediction: 2nd in conference, 12.5 – 5.5
SEC Media Pick: 2nd in conference
Analytics Average: 2nd in conference, 6th overall
Cal Tobias/Rock M Nation
HEAD COACH: Bruce Pearl | 11th Season, 206-145
Can you believe we’ve been tolerating Bruce Pearl’s weird sideline antics for 10 seasons? There are times when Pearl appears red-faced and animatedly yelling at the officials and his players, looking like an overcooked potato. But whether you dislike Pearl at a personal level or not, he’s without a doubt the most successful coach in Auburn basketball history. And he’s now proven to be one of the best coaches in the SEC by putting out a consistent winning product year after year and doing so at a very non-traditional basketball power.
Pearl is the quintessential ‘your team’ kind of coach. If your logo is on his polo, you adore him. His reputation in coaching circles and opposing fan bases is pretty ugly. But you have to imagine any fan base subject to him as their head coach would quickly come around when the wins started stacking up. In the preseason, KenPom.com has the Auburn Tigers rated third in the country. That is already the best rating for the program in KP history.
Other than the blip for the program in 2020-21, which was thrown into disarray by the pandemic, Pearl has this thing rolling. Even including the 2021 season, Auburn’s average rating since 2018 is 22nd in the country. And if you drop out of the 2020-21 season, it’s 15th. For some context, I recently averaged out the KenPom ratings of each SEC program since the SEC expanded in 2013. Auburn checked in at eighth with an average of around No. 64, but if you limit it to the past five seasons, the Tigers’ average finish ranks first.
LOST PRODUCTION
Minutes: 43.33% | 4th
Points: 41.77% | 3rd
Possessions: 43.33% | 3rd
How do we know it’s a new era for this sport? Today, your team can lose players who used 43% of your possessions and still be among the top four in a power conference for returning production.
The turnover that did occur was also replaceable. Pearl swapped out all his ballhandlers after Aden Holloway, K.D. Johnson, and Tre Donaldson hit the portal. But none were highly efficient or vital pieces to last year’s squad. Only Jaylin Williams, an efficient jack of all trades, might be tricky to replace.
Overall, Phasn’tas hasn’t had to deal with many outbound transfers. He’s been taking smaller high school classes, but each of the last two years, his prized recruits have left via the transfer portal after just one season. Two years ago, it was both Yohan Traore and Chance Westry; last year, it was Holloway. Pearl has done well in the transfer portal, so perhaps that churn among prep recruits won’t be an issue.
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Even when Johni Broome was terrorizing the Ohio Valley Conference for Morehead State, I don’t think many people foresaw him becoming the force he is for Auburn. Last season, Broome was the 10th-most-valuable player using EvanMiya.com’s BPR metric. He was the 15th-most-valuable defender, and while he was a bit further down the list on offense, he wasn’t that far down and still in the top 50. Last year, he finished third in KenPom’s MVP rankings behind Zach Edey and Tristen Newton, a pair of players whose squads met for a national title.
Much of the Tigers’ success this season will center around Broome’s ability to impact the game at both ends of the floor.
After Broome, there’s still a healthy amount of roster production returning. Chad Baker-Mazara and Denver Jones were the team’s third- and fourth-leading scorers last year. Baker-Mazara is a crafty wing with a consistent shooting touch, while Jones got better and better as the season wore on. Jones reached double figures in seven of the final eight games, including a 21-point outing in a win over Georgia.
Again, Dylan Cardwell and Chris Moore fill in reserve roles. Both are back for their 5th year. If there’s a wild card in the returning rotation, it’s Chaney Johnson. The Division II transfer sometimes popped, but inconsistency made most of the transition season forgettable.
Christopher Hanewinckel-Imagn Images
Baker-Mazara and Jones provide Pearl a fine starting point on the wing, but adding Georgia Tech transfer Miles Kelly should solidify the rotation. Yet J.P. Pegues, who arrives from Furman, might be the most important addition. He averaged 18 points for the Paladins last season, showcasing efficient shooting off the dribble in ball screens and valuing the ball. Pegues should bridge the gap with freshman Tahaad Pettiford, a top-30 recruit who fits the mold of prior Auburn point guards.
It’s critical that Pegues and Pettiford settle in quickly, or Pearl will find himself in the same place as last season with Holloway and Donaldson: point guards who struggle to control the flow of action or serve as a primary option.
Reviewing Auburn’s analytic profile or diving into film reveals a team that isn’t reliant on pick-and-rolls or isolation situations. Instead, Pearl has run different versions of the tried-and-true flex offense, which doesn’t emphasize the point guard directing the action. However, the Tigers prefer a faster pace, and that’s where several sets of reliable hands are needed.
While Auburn has never been a big pick-and-roll team, having a mobile big like Broome and a ball handler like Pegues might signal a small shift. For it to work, Baker-Mazara and Jones must stretch the defense with their shooting. That should leave the middle of the floor wide open for a point guard who likes to pull up and a roller who finishes dives around the rim.
Since Pearl has been the head coach, Auburn has rarely loaded up on Quad-1 games when doing non-conference scheduling. When Pearl did play quality opposition, it was usually on a neutral court and part of a multi-team event. This is par for the course in most power-conference scheduling: load up on safer games, play some tough neutral site games, and get to conference play with a pretty record.
That went out the window this year.
Auburn faces No. 4 Houston during the season’s opening week. They’re also part of an always-stacked field at the Maui Invitation, opening with No. 5 Iowa State. Pearl will also take his team to No. 7 Duke for the ACC-SEC Challenge. And just for good measure, they booked neutral-court showdowns with No. 14 Purdue and Ohio State.
In SEC play, their home-and-home with Alabama will add further juice to their strength of schedule. Fortunately, Auburn’s road schedule in league play is manageable, featuring just two top-20 teams and a trip to Lexington. And we all know how tough Pearl’s crew is on its home court.
THE RULING
At least a portion of setting up preseason projections is whether a team is usually good or not. To a human, some things you begin to trust are just true. Computer rankings can provide a similar adjustment, but humans are far more susceptible to historical factors in making projections.
Last year, there was some doubt about Auburn, at least in this space. Auburn had questionable guard play and was just 10-8 the season before in SEC play. Pearl let an unproductive Johnson run rampant in his backcourt for two years in a row, and while the frontcourt looked solid, this league is run by guards.
Yet all Pearl did was produce the best finish in KenPom.com in program history. Even with Johnson, Pearl scaled back his minutes and pushed him towards the best efficiency of his career.
Now, Johnson is gone, and to replace him, he is one of the most productive guards available in the transfer portal in Pegues. Guard play is going to be important because Auburn has Johni Broome.
Broome is the top overall rated player in EvanMiya.com’s BPR rating, ahead of Braden Smith, Tamin Lipsey, and Hunter Dickinson. No roster in the SEC may be as reliant on one player as Auburn is on Broome. Without him, they will be fine, Dylan Cardwell plays as a backup and is the second-highest-rated player on Auburn’s roster. However, Cardwell’s also a career reserve. He’s only played more than 20 minutes once in five seasons. Compare that to Broom, who only played less than 20 minutes once.
Pearl has some reliable shooters. On paper, he might have upgraded his group of ball handlers. But Auburn’s baseline relies on Broome staying healthy and playing. If Pegues, Pettiford, Denver Jones, and the rest of the backcourt can step up, this Auburn team will look Final Four-ready.
My Results: Auburn Tigers — 2nd in Conference, 13-5
About the preview: a number of respected basketball bloggers were asked to submit one pick for the entire league schedule game by game. The game by game option allows us to account for the unbalanced schedule when addressing any kind of power rankings. Each set of picks are reflected in “the Masses” picks. Included in “the Masses” are various SEC media members who made picks at my request, as well as additional credit given to the analytics projections.
If you’d like to submit your picks, click here for the Google Form we used. If you want to know your results, send me an email.
Additionally, instead of relying solely on KenPom.com for the analytics site projections, we’re taking the average of the four main sites (EvanMiya.com, BartTorvik.com, Haslametrics.com, and KenPom.com) to give a closer consensus picture. These are weighted a touch for reliability.
The projections: This is new! In an attempt to be as accurate as we could be we increased the amount of analytics used to make individual projections which influenced how these teams slotted in order. Matt Watkins used an indepth method for projecting the entire SEC transfer list, we then mixed in EvanMiya.com’s BPR projections, and BartTorvik.com’s preseason individual projections to round out the expected production based upon how each coach routinely uses his rotations.
GLOSSARY
* – an asterisk denotes a walk-on player
GP – Games Played
%min – percentage of total available minutes played, does not account for time missed due to injury
%poss – percentage of team possessions the player is responsible for ending a possession, whether by making a shot, missing a shot not rebounded by the offense or committing a turnover. For returning players this is noted as a percentage of total team possessions. For newcomers it was total possessions when that player was on the floor, better known as Usage Rate.
ORtg – Offensive Rating, similar to a points per possession but averaged out over 100 possessions. So it’s how many points a player would score if they were responsible for 100 possessions.
BPR – Bayseian Performance Rating, a single player efficiency metric created by Evan Miyakawa to determine both offensive and defensive impact when a player is on the floor.
PPG – Points Per Game, RPG – Rebounds Per Game, APG – Assists Per Game: All traditional statistics used to measure player production.
For newcomer player rankings, we used EvanMiya.com’ s rankings for transfers, and 247sports.com ‘s Composite Rating for Freshmen and Junior College signees.
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