While the defensive side of the floor often garners the most attention when discussing Ross Hodge, the offense certainly has its merits, too.
Last season at North Texas the offense was rated as the second most efficient in the American Athletic Conference according to KenPom.
“We were an extremely efficient offense,” Hodge said.
The offense has featured one of the best three-point percentages in the entire country over the past two seasons and is built around some basic fundamentals when it comes to taking care of and sharing the basketball as well as taking shots at the right time on that end.
Hodge believes there has been a misnomer that the tempo that the Mean Green played with, which is best described as a deliberate pace, is a negative. It’s something that has certainly been used in recruiting against him in the past, but the head coach is quick to point out that the team one spot above North Texas in that department is none other than the two-time defending Big 12 Champions Houston.
“That’s the ultimate goal,” Hodge said.
The head coach has had many individual players do things that they hadn’t done at any point in their career and break school records in the process. Senior guard Atin Wright, for example, was at 14.1 points per game on Drake an NCAA Tournament team the year before but saw his scoring increase to 15.2 points per game and made 36 more threes this past season for the Mean Green.
The decision to play more with a deliberate pace on offense is somewhat tied to personnel, but also because Hodge had bigger goals for his team.
“Some of it was regardless of what anyone else may have thought we wanted to win a national championship at North Texas, and we wanted to win games in March,” he said. “And with that we kind of decided to build it with the end in mind and play that way the whole time.”
The Mean Green challenged themselves in the non-conference portion of the schedule, but Hodge understood that on a neutral floor the best pathway to victory against some teams was to give yourself an opportunity to win was to control the pace instead of the alternative.
“If we were going to get on a neutral floor with Kansas or Auburn, we probably are not going to want to run up and down with those guys,” he said.
But the offense is based around making the right decisions instead of making choices just to make them. That is something that Hodge plans to bring with him to Morgantown.
“If you look at any of our all-league players, all-league guards – if they’re open it’s not like you’re telling them don’t shoot it. But you didn’t want to take like that mid-period of contested shots just for the sake of playing with tempo and pace,” Hodge said.
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