012: Minutes Minutiae
Digging into the details of minutes for men's hoops.
North Carolina is 13-6 overall and 5-3 in the ACC. The Heels welcome NC State to Chapel Hill on Saturday. The game is scheduled at 5 pm on the ACC Network.
A preseason number one ranking to unranked to untimely injuries, the fan base is anxious. One of the main sources of angst is how Hubert Davis distributes playing time.
So, let’s dive in to some minutes minutiae in bullet point form.
Bench minutes
Carolina is playing the bench fewer minutes over last two seasons
Using kenpom numbers, Carolina plays its bench fewer minutes than ~99 percent of Division 1 programs
The rotations are tight, but is that a good thing or a bad thing?
UNC is 42-16 over the past two seasons and it was a rebound away from a National Title
The best players should play more, right?
It’s also a long season and you need to develop the bench though?
Context matters it’s not necessarily good or bad
Experience on the court
Career minutes for Carolina’s most frequent starting lineup
Leaky Black: 3,701 minutes in 141 games
Armando Bacot: 3,244 minutes in 118 games
Pete Nance*: 3,057 minutes in 123 games (mostly at Northwestern)
Caleb Love: 2,817 minutes in 87 games
RJ Davis: 2,628 minutes in 87 games
By March, this starting lineup is likely to feature five players with over 3,000 collegiate minutes (that feels significant because it is)
According to Inside Carolina and Adrian Atkinson, Carolina has never had a team with four players who had logged 3,000 minutes
Is this the most experienced Carolina starting five of all time?
Consider that Caleb Love has played more minutes than Jackie Manuel in 39 fewer games
Leaky Black has played 141 career games, only 11 shy of the Carolina record set by Deon Thompson (152 games)
Lineups over past five games
Carolina’s injury luck is a bit odd so far this season:
Pete Nance played two minutes against Wake Forest before an injury sidelined him for three straight games
Armando Bacot rolled his ankle about two possessions into the loss at Virginia
Jalen Washington got hurt in warmups before the Boston College game
D’Marco Dunn broke his hand in practice before the Virginia Tech game, and missed five straight games
The recent injuries forced more bench minutes and 44 unique lineups over the past five games
Only five of those lineups played 10 or more minutes, and eight other combinations played five or more minutes
The most frequent lineup over the past five games is not the experienced starting five either (it includes freshman Seth Trimble instead of Nance)
31 of those lineups played fewer than five minutes together
Only two of these 44 lineups did not have one of RJ Davis or Caleb Love on the floor
Dunn-Styles-Washington-McKoy-Nickel for about one minute
Dunn-Styles-Washington-Trimble-Nickel for about two minutes
Dean Smith played six players 29 or more minutes in the 1997 Semifinal loss to Arizona. Bill Guthridge used an alphabetical rotation for a six-man starting lineup.
There's more than one way to bake a cake.