Petre Thomas-USA TODAY Sports
Previewing the South Carolina Gamecocks Men’s Basketball team. How will Lamont Paris make his encore?
Two years ago, everyone under the sun, myself included, predicted a difficult entry for Lamont Paris into SEC Basketball. We were largely correct. South Carolina didn’t have the dubious claim of being the worst team in the league, but they did secure the league’s worst KenPom rating by around 70 spots.
Without the NBA talent of G.G. Jackson heading into last season, Carolina’s prospects were grim again. The Gamecocks were picked last by just about everyone, including most analytics services (except for Kenpom, which projected a top-70 finish but was still in the bottom four of the league). We picked them last.
They did not finish last. South Carolina finished in a four-way tie for second place with Auburn, Alabama, and Kentucky. A tiebreaker sent them to the 5th seed in the conference tournament, where they were blown out by No. 4 seed Auburn. On Selection Sunday, Paris’ group was handed a No. 6 seed in the NCAA Tournament. There, they lost to Oregon in the first round. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how Paris’ team found success. They defended, forcing teams to settle for defended jump shots, then kept them off the glass. The offense could stall out sometimes, but with guys like Meechie Johnson and B.J. Mack, there was enough to get by.
So why are we so low on the Gamecocks after they proved everyone wrong last year? Maybe we’ll be forced to learn another harsh lesson in doubting Lamont Paris, but while last year’s team had many questions about them, this year’s team has even more.
South Carolina Gamecocks
Last season: 26 – 8 (13-5 in conference) #54
The Masses Prediction: 13th in conference, 5 – 13
Analytics Average: 16th in conference, 71st overall
Photo by Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images
HEAD COACH: Lamont Paris | 3rd Season, 37-29
Nobody knows how innacurate early season picks can be like Lamont Paris. Last year, when the Gamecocks were picked last, he opined to an SEC scribe:
Does anyone know how many of those (picks) were right? Zero.
But wait. There’s more. Paris calculated the deviations and found that seven of the 14 picks were off by more than four spots, one pick was off by seven spots, and another by eight places.
He’s right! Most of the time, preseason picks are bad! Part of this comes down to the fact that only a few teams are good, a few are bad, and everyone else is very close to each other. So, results tend to fall within a few possessions here and there to sort out the order.
South Carolina used that recipe last season en route to their most conference wins since going 15-1 in the 1997 season under Eddie Fogler. They won close games, and they look a lot like the Wisconsin teams. Paris was an assistant coach for so many seasons. Paris came up under Bo Ryan from 2010 to 2017 when the Badgers were rarely the most talented team in the Big Ten but always contended for league titles through reliable defense and disciplined offense.
Last year, Paris proved he can do the rest when he has enough talent.
If there’s a challenge in front of Paris, it’s finding consistency where you routinely make the tournament. That’s tough at a school that has only lightly supported basketball over the years. In terms of where fans have traditionally spent their time, attention, and money, it’s been football first and then baseball next, ahead of hoops. Dawn Staley has proven you can win big in basketball, but she’s also a unicorn, and women’s hoops are not as competitive as the men’s game. Meanwhile, the men’s program has seen NCAA Tournament play just five times since joining the SEC in 1991.
In contrast, Mizzou has made the tournament four times since joining the SEC in 2012, with a 5th trip the season before. In fact, South Carolina has the lowest tournament appearance rate in the SEC by a good margin.
They’ve only made five trips since 1996-97; the only comparable peers are Georgia and Ole Miss. Next are LSU and Mississippi State. Meanwhile, eleven SEC schools have made the tournament five times since 2011.
The expectations just aren’t there.
LOST PRODUCTION
Minutes: 51.77% | 6th
Points: 58.12% | 7th
Possessions: 56.95% | 7th
If you were to glance at the numbers above, it might not be so bad for the Gamecocks as they prepare for the 2024-25 season. But there are some significant losses. Paris marched through the SEC a season ago with a relatively tight seven-player rotation. There were a few other spot appearances, but on a nightly bases he was funnelling 85% of the teams minutes toward that core. Four of them are back, but the three who are gone were ranked first, second, and third in minutes. They were also the top three scorers. And the top three in possessions used.
The two players who significantly influenced the team’s possession (36% of the team’s total all year) were Mack and Johnson. Mack’s eligibility has expired, and Johnson has chosen to transfer back home to play for Ohio State in his final year. Another significant departure is Ta’lon Cooper, the starting point guard who provided a stabilizing influence for the Gamecocks last year. While not a primary scorer or a major possession player, Cooper managed to occupy 83% of the minutes at his position.
Steve Roberts-Imagn Images
The best news of the offseason for Lamont Paris was the return of Collin Murray-Boyles.
Murray-Boyle’s stats are also constrained by the fact he missed six games to start the year with mononucleosis. That illness also limited his minutes in another eight outings. From the start of SEC play, he averaged 26.6 minutes per game.
Entering this season, Murray-Boyles is a favorite among NBA draftniks. But unlike last season, the sophomore won’t be an X-factor while defenses focus on Johnson, Cooper and Mack. (As his usage and role expand, it’ll be worth monitoring whether he posts a similarly gaudy 121.5 offensive rating.) Murray-Boyles wasn’t a floor spacer, as he only attempted five 3s all season, but you can get away with that when you shoot over 60% on your 2-point shots.
What Paris desperately needs is a proven secondary threat. At the moment, the best candidate might be Myles Staute. The vet, who transferred in from Vanderbilt last season, has shown he’s a trustworthy defender and capable spot-up threat. But experiments with him as a primary ball-handler have gone poorly.
Per Synergy Sports, Stute’s efficiency plummets to roughly 0.5 points per possession, while his turnover rate spikes to nearly 40 percent. As much as Stute perceives himself as an advantage creator, the data says otherwise.
That leaves Norfolk State transfer Jamarii Thomas as the only player with a heavy usage history. As a pick-and-roll ball handler, Thomas excels. They made up 29% of his possessions last season, and he averaged 0.918 PPP. But this remains a tough sell, because those possessions were primarily run in the MEAC, a low-major conference, and Thomas is an undersized guard trying to make the jump to the SEC.
Randy Sartin-Imagn Images
A challenge with these projections is forecasting usage rates for players who have not traditionally been key cogs but will need to take on a greater number of possessions for this South Carolina roster to work.
Last season, South Carolina played 34 games at a pace of around 65 possessions per contest. That works out to over 2,200 possessions to distribute among the entire roster. When Johnson, Cooper, and Mack left, they took 1,088 possessions, which is 57 percent of the Gamecocks’ total.
Next, let’s look at how many possessions each transfer tallied up at their last stop:
Jamarii Thomas: 588
Nick Pringle: 203
Jordan Butler: 71
That’s 862 touches. It’s also unlikely that Cam Scott, a four-star freshmen, would backfill the remaining 226 possessions. What’s more likely is that role players will have to scale up their usage, which is a risky proposition. Ideally, Paris would be figuring out to optimize ways to use his talent. Instead, he might be in a position where some members of this rotation are being asked to do a bit too much.
Early projections have the SEC being a very strong league. The benefit of this is it creates opportunities all over. Every road game being a Quad One game is how you can find yourself in the tournament discussion if you’re able to steal a few. Paris set South Carolina up for success with his scheduling, early challenges against Indiana and in the Fort Meyer’s Classic against Xavier are Q1 opportunities, and even Towson, Clemson, and East Carolina will be well looked upon as Q2 and Q3 wins (if you can win them).
The conference schedule isn’t bad for the Gamecocks either, Mississippi State, Florida, and Georgia look tough on paper but none of those teams are currently viewed as likely top 4 finishers. All of the home games are against teams many project in the top half of the conference, and there are several road games against the bottom half. That’s what you call opportunity. In this league, this year, that’s all you can ask.
THE RULING
Lamont Paris is right about preseason picks. They’re often wrong, but they provide a snapshot of the offseason.
Carolina proved doubters last season. So, why are we forecasting them at the bottom of the standings again?
Unlike last season, Paris’ roster doesn’t have 824 games of experience, which ranked fourth in the SEC. Nor are the Gamecocks second in minutes played. Yes, the Gamecocks were overlooked, but they also leaned hard on experience to prove doubters wrong.
This year, the case has flipped. Carolina ranks 15th in games played and last in minutes played at the Division-I level. Murray-Boyles might wind up as an All-SEC performer, but who will complement him in Paris’ rotation? Making up lost production hinges on Thomas hitting it big and replacing what Johnson provided.
Per EvanMiya.com, Thomas projects to finish with a 2.30 BPR, which would have ranked 85th in the SEC last season. That’s well behind Johnson’s performance. We’ve also run through what might hold Stute back from being a headliner.
While I fully expect Murray-Boyles to be awesome, there are questions about how efficiently he does what Paris needs done. Again, he didn’t power the Gamecocks’ offense last season as a playmaker. Murray-Boyles relied on others to set him up. Meanwhile, his 17% assist rate tells us the sophomore isn’t an elite facilitator.
Suppose South Carolina is going to see around the same 2,200 offensive possessions this year. In that case, I’d want Murray-Boyles to handle close to 600 of them, including assists. That’s a 27% usage rate while playing 82.3% of minutes. Over the past five seasons, just four SEC players put up similar figures: J.D. Notae, Wade Taylor IV, Scotty Pippen Jr., and Cam Thomas.
All those players were ball-dominant combo guards, and three were focused heavily on scoring. That’s not to say Murray-Boyles isn’t capable. Still, history tells us that it would be an outlier — and not exactly an ideal recipe for Paris to make doubters dine on crow again.
My Results: South Carolina Gamecocks — 16th in Conference, 5-13
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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