After the losses of Romeo Langford and Juwan Morgan, Indiana head coach Archie Miller said he hopes to introduce concepts to the offense in 2019-20 to make the attack more multiple and utilize more offensive weapons on that end of the floor.
The time between the 2018-19 season and the 2019-20 season featured the departure of key offensive presences, including Romeo Langford and Juwan Morgan, who both attempted an average of 12 and 11 shots per game and scored 16 and 15 points per game. No other Hoosier averaged more than 10 points per game.
With that kind of loss on the offensive end of the floor, head coach Archie Miller and the Hoosiers will need to find a new identity when attempting to score. It’s been made clear, from Miller’s talk in Evansville in August to the media days Tuesday and Wednesday, that the change will come in the movement of the ball.
“I think each team is different every season. You have to play to your strengths,” Miller said. “We are going to have to move that ball. To do that, you're going to have a lot of concepts and action to the way you play.”
With Langford and Morgan on the floor, many of Indiana’s possessions featured deferment to the two best scorers on the floor, and oftentimes, it made it difficult for the Hoosiers to have one full consistency and tempo.
Miller wants to change that.
His recruiting strategy since he took the job in 2017 has been to recruit positionless or multi-position types of players. That started with current Hoosiers like Damezi Anderson, Jake Forrester and Jerome Hunter, and it continues into the current recruiting cycles.
The end goal was to develop players into versatile pieces that could play a plethora of spaces on the floor, versus having specific and finite roles among the five players on the floor. Morgan and Langford, though two significant contributors to the program, didn’t exactly fit that mold, and now that they’re gone and the system is beginning to filter into the current roster, the offense has become more open-ended as Miller begins to shape it into what he envisioned two and a half years ago.
“I think there’s going to be a lot more off-ball movement involving everyone on the team,” Devonte Green said Tuesday. “I think it’ll be good for us because we’ll constantly be having the defense move.”
Green has been molded into a positionless backcourt contributor, one that can play on-ball and off-the-ball and one that Miller said is the “most talented offensive player without question.” He also continues to grow as a leader within the program.
Miller used Green as an example Wednesday about how players should be able to bounce from position to position mid-game, as moving Green into an off-ball position and giving Al Durham more time at point guard will facilitate Green’s shooting capabilities. But it’s more expensive than scenarios like that.
Miller wants to introduce concepts to the offense, where it’s more than one or two players and more than one or two plays in any given possession. Introducing concepts forces each offensive player to understand the task of each possession and react to the defense no matter which position he is in. That’s where the players with wide skillsets and multiple positions come into play.
“This team in general, and looking at the parts that we have and how we'll have to be built, we're going to have to be much more difficult to deal with, which means we have to have a lot more randomness in what we do,” Miller said. “We have to utilize our versatility with the guys that can play multiple positions together.”
With concepts and ball movement in mind, Miller said he wants to play more people than he was able to last season. After the six-man rotation, there was a major drop-off in minutes played per game, as players like De’Ron Davis, Zach McRoberts and Evan Fitzner were the only players left who hit double digits.
That will also change with the 2019-20 offense, as players like Jerome Hunter, Damezi Anderson and Race Thompson are expected to have bigger roles within the conceptual offense.
“It's going to be much more of a by-committee team on both ends of the floor,” Miller said. “From an offensive perspective, how we generate offense, how we score, how we're efficient, is going to be through the bulk of the parts, not one guy.”
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