An Ode to Matt Ball

Since taking over as Head Coach, it has been clear that Matt McKillop wanted his teams to play a different style than Bob McKillop's. Same motion offense, same pack line defense, same first principles, but it was going to look and feel different. Matt's teams wanted to be more athletic, play with more tempo, and make their hay on the defensive end. We have, at times skeptically, called this "Matt Ball". Well, after three seasons of misfires it appears Matt Ball has finally arrived in earnest... and it looks encouraging.

So far the eye test says this team has played well, and the underlying statistics back that up. It is early and the sample size is small, but stripping out the preseason data, T-Rank says the Cats are running the 68th best offense in the country coupled with the 73rd best defense. Combined, the Cats have the 58th best efficiency numbers in the country so far... if you predicted that preseason you are either lying or your paychecks are signed by the Davidson Athletic Department. So how did we get here? Well, Matt McKillop is rolling out probably the deepest, most athletic team Davidson has had. With Spanish Freshman Phenom (say that three times fast) returning to the rotation, Matt McKillop is playing 12 guys significant minutes on a nightly basis. This has completely transformed how the Cats play both offense and defense.

On defense, spreading out the minutes has kept everyone fresh. This in turn has let each guy go full bore intensity on the defensive end while they are on the court. This coupled with much better lateral speed and quickness has meant that the Cats perimeter defenders are, for the most part, keeping opposing ball-handler in front of them and making opponents work the entire shot clock to find a good shot. This is in stark contrast to last season when the Cats' perimeter defenders were constantly beat off the dribble which would then lead to panicked rotations and open shots (especially open threes). This transformation can be best seen by the marked improvement in opponent three point shooting percentage; last season the Cats let opponents shoot over 35% from three, "good" for 301st in the country, this season opponents are shooting just 30.5% from three, good for 143rd nationally. Opponent turnovers are another area too where the roster transformation is readily apparent; last season the Cats forced 10.5 turnovers per game, "good" for 307th in the country, this season opponents are turning it over 13.3 timers per game, good for a much improved 186th nationally. It's obvious, but this level of improvement is both massive and incredibly impressive.

One final area where there has been a huge improvement has been two-point defense. Last season the Cats let opponents shoot 51.4% on twos, 228th in the country, this year Cats opponents are shooting 46.2% from two point land, good for 106th nationally. However, I think this may be more of a Sean Logan stat than it is a Matt Ball revolution stat. Last season when Sean Logan was healthy opponents shot 46.7% from two against us. That number skyrocketed to 53.7% when Sean Logan was sidelined. Even just this season, in the three games Sean has played the Cats let opponents shoot just 43.5% from two but in the one game he missed Bowling Green shot 50.9% from two. It is a little scary to be this reliant on one player, but it also goes to show how important and good Sean Logan is on defense. The good news is that Sean looks markedly improved coming off an ACL tear, averaging almost 4 blocks per game so far in less than 20 minutes per game. Additionally, we are much deeper at center this season and Ian Platteeuw and JQ Roberts should greatly help protect the rim as they become fully integrated working their way back from injury.

Now for the offense! Last season the Cats were heavily reliant on three players: Connor Kochera, Reed Bailey, and Bobby Durkin. In fact, these three were the only Cats to average double figures and combined they accounted for about ⅔ of Davidson's scoring. Each of their usage rates exceeded 20% and Reed's even exceeded 30%! This meant that if any of the three were off, we faced an uphill battle to win, especially when the Cats weren't hitting threes, and we didn't hit threes for most of the season. This predicament reared it's ugly head in A10 play, when Connor and Bobby's field goal percentages each dipped by about 40 percentage points. The unfortunate reality is that without reliable bench scoring or three point shooting, the Cats had exactly one pitch: Connor Kochera, Reed Bailey, and Bobby Durkin play their asses off. When this one pitch didn't work, we lost... there just weren't any alternative ways for us to score reliably.

This is where Matt Ball comes into play. Emblematic of the Cats newfound depth, seven players are averaging between 8 and 14 points per game this season, four more are averaging between 4 and 6 points, and no one is shooting more than 7.5 times per game. Among rotation players, 10 players have usage rates above 15%, meaning that seemingly every Cat is touching the ball on every trip down the floor. The lack of a true superstar may cap this team's ceiling in the longterm but it also raises the offensive floor considerably and mitigates the impact of any one guy having an off-night. The Charlotte game is the perfect example of this. Sam Brown, the leader of the offense, had maybe his worst game as a collegiate player against the niners, scoring no points, missing 5 shots, and looking all out of sorts. No problem though, Nick Coval, Parker Friedrichsen, and Hunter Adam stepped up with 14, 14, and 16 and the Cats ground out a 7-point win over a rival in a hostile road environment. To his credit, Sam Brown responded to the Charlotte performance by putting on a master class against an athletic, long Bowling Green team; scoring 18 points on 5-9 shooting (4-8 from 3), dishing 3 assists, and pulling down 3 boards. Luke said this on the twitter account the other day, but it is patently absurd that a guy like RJ Greer, with his advanced offensive skillset is the the 4th or 5th guy off the bench some nights.

The depth has also paid dividends for shooting. My biggest area of concern was that Matt McKillop would sacrifice too much shooting in order to improve team athleticism and defense, as was the case in the 2023/24. So far, Matt has definitively proven me wrong. Eight guys on this team have hit a three pointer and seven of those eight are shooting 37.5% or better from three. The most promising stat? Only one player, Hunter Adam, is shooting more than 4 threes per game. This means that the Cats are replete with capable three point shooters, not just one or two shooters who are holding up the team's stellar three point percentage by themselves, as was the case last season with Bobby Durkin and Mike Loughnane almost single-handedly driving the Cats hot 3-point shooting in the non-con last year. This obviously came back to bite the Cats when both shot under 30% from three in A10 play when teams locked in on them. The Cats are shooting 44.4% from three right now, that is very likely to regress at least a touch, but I see a lot of positive indicators that the Cats' three point shooting won't fall off a map like it did last season. The Cats have just too many shooters for that to happen. We aren't reliant on any one or two guys to stay hot to prop up our shooting, we can put minimum three and most times four above average shooters on the floor at all times, and we have eight guys who on any night can light the opposing team up from deep.

It's not all rainbows and sunshine. The Cats have struggled extensively on the defensive glass, conceding 11.5 offensive rebounds per game, 224th in the country. The advanced stats are even worse in this regard, according to KenPom our opponents are sporting a 34.5 offensive rebounding percentage against us, good for 251st in the country. Anyone who's watched our games can see this and Matt McKillop has addressed it publicly time and time again. The good news is that this should get better as our big men get back to full strength (again, a reminder that all four of our big men missed considerable time this offseason and/or are coming off major injury). The Cats are also being way too careless with the ball, turning it over 21.3% of the time, 305th nationally, or nearly 13 times per game, ~200th in the country. Prolonged stretches of lost focus and carelessness have plagued Matt McKillop's teams in the past, especially against aggressive, pressure defense, but again, he's called it out and made it a focus early on. You can reasonably hope that this improves as the season progresses and the young guys gain experience and everyone learns how to play together. One more area that Matt McKillop has regularly called out, is that he wants this team to be much better at attacking the rim. The Cats excelled at pressuring the rim against Wazzu but have relied heavily on threes otherwise. Take it from Matt himself, but we do not expect this to continue unchanged.

It has not been a smooth road to this year's team. 2022/23 was a lost season the second that eight scholarship players graduated, went pro, or transferred. The roster was just too limited and Matt McKillop took over too late in the summer to transform it to his style. 2023/24 felt like a half-way point, the defense matched what Matt McKillop preached but the offense was atrocious. 2024/25 was a weird season where the team felt stuck between Matt's preferred vision but with Bob McKillop style players and ultimately resulted in the bottom seemingly dropping out in conference play. But this offseason, things changed. The basketball program finally caught up to it's peers in NIL (and soon-to-be revenue sharing) and Matt McKillop was able to fully and utterly build out the roster he needed to play his preferred style. As Joe likes to say in our Belk Report groupchat and on the podcast, "for better or worse, this is Matt's team." So far this season, it has decidedly been for the better. The 2025/26 Wildcats have been extremely enjoyable to watch. The offense has almost totally cut out the frustrating iso ball that came to symbolize last season and the threes have started to fall again. The defense could not look more different, the Cats are flying around the court, keeping their man in front of them, and contesting shots effectively. The root of all of those things? The team is simply a ton deeper and a ton more athletic. Things aren't perfect yet, this team is not a finished product, but this is the Matt Ball we were promised and I'm fully bought in.