“I wanna go fast.” – Ricky Bobby 

Missouri basketball has played seven games thus far, and the Tigers look like a brand new team. 

Usually, I’m not a huge fan of using surface-level statistics to prove a point, but for Missouri, they do. Their unselfishness has been a joy to watch, as they (cranks megaphone to max volume) LEAD THE NATION IN BOTH ASSISTS PER GAME AND ASSIST-TO-TURNOVER RATIO. In the words of head coach Dennis Gates, that’s a great stat!

Elsewhere, Gates’ aggressive defensive scheme is working, as the Tigers are forcing the second-most turnovers per game. The injection of three-point shooting prowess via the transfer portal has paid massive dividends thus far, as Missouri’s percentage from long-range is over eight percentage points higher than last season. 

With every suffocating sideline trap, every D’Moi Hodge rim-scorching three, every Aidan Shaw skywalk, every Ben Sternberg moonshot, serotonin flows through my veins like a prospering river. Through all of the great things we’ve seen, however, one aspect in particular has stood out. 

In order to fully understand how playing fast can change a team for the better, we need to turn back the clock a few years. Let’s dust off our DMC McLaren, get out our handy flux capacitor and time travel back to November 1987 in Los Angeles, CA. Make sure to pack a couple of track suits and to have some Bon Jovi memorized!

A little over three decades ago, the Loyola Marymount men’s basketball team tried something new. The Lions were led by head coach Paul Westhead, who’d been La Salle’s head man throughout most of the ‘70’s and won an NBA title as an interim head coach with the Lakers in 1980. In his third year as LMU’s head coach, the Lions had made only two NCAA Tournament appearances since in its 30+ years of existence up until 1987 and were coming off of a losing season. If LMU was to become a mid-major powerhouse, something needed to change. 

First, Westhead stole superstars Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble away from USC as well as Corey Gaines from UCLA, the biggest robberies in LA sports history besides David Stern robbing the NBA of an epic alternate universe when he vetoed the Chris Paul-to-the-Lakers trade back in 2011. Now that the Lions had a much improved squad on paper, it was time to figure out how to get better on the court. 

It was time to pick up the pace. 

The style of play Westhead wanted to implement was called “run and gun”, which is as spicy and electric as it sounds. Basically, the team would look to push the ball as much as possible on offense and play extremely aggressive defense, which often included hounding presses and traps. It’s like if an entire team took pre-workout prior to the game.  

It’s also very similar to a football team blitzing a lot on defense and prioritizing deep shots on offense while also going no-huddle; the major downside is giving up a ton of points, but the upside includes scoring a lot yourself, forcing turnovers and playing at a blazing fast tempo. It’s the kind of system I feel like Eminem would run if he ever coached a football or basketball team. For someone who once rapped 99 words in under 17 seconds, I feel like he’d be in favor of playing at a breakneck pace. 

Anyways, the two most prominent examples of this system working in basketball are the storied Celtics teams of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s as well as the Showtime Lakers (although most of their success came after Westhead had left the organization). Unlike probably every other basketball coach in the world, however, Westhead didn’t want to replicate two of the greatest dynasties the sport has ever seen. 

Instead, he wanted to completely transform how basketball was played. 

Westhead wanted to crank up the heat even more; no, that’s an understatement…Westhead wanted to eviscerate the thermostat. Every made basket, rebound or turnover by the opponent was to be a fastbreak opportunity. Every game was to become a marathon at the pace of a 100-meter dash. The intent was to turn the Lions into actual lions that played as if they were starving and on fire. The college basketball world was about to experience a never-before-seen speed supernova from southern California.   

Behind Gathers, Kimble and Gaines, the Lions averaged a mind-boggling 110.2 points per game in 1987-88, then bumped that number up to 112.5 the next season. LMU steamrolled through now-defunct WCAC en route to back-to-back appearances in the Big Dance. Sure, they gave up over 95 points per game to their opponents, but that was supposed to happen. It was clear that few teams were able to keep up with the Lions. 

However, the best had yet to come. In 1989-90, LMU averaged (deep breath) 122.4 points per game. They scored at least 140 points in a game more times than they didn’t reach 110. Kimble and Gathers feasted to the tune of 65 combined points per game. The Lions played so fast that Jeff Fryer, who shot 39% on 11 threes per game for LMU that season, said on the Arsenio Hall Show that Westhead would get mad at him if he didn’t shoot a three-pointer on a fastbreak. In that basketball climate?! It was truly transcendent stuff for that era. 

For all of my visual learners out there, the best example of how LMU’s sound barrier-smashing pace not only looked, but felt, could be seen in their 1990 NCAA Tournament matchup against Michigan. The Wolverines were no scrubs that year, in part because they were literally the defending national champions. The maize and blue ran out six future pros and were a pretty high scoring team themselves. At the end of the game, the scoreboard indicated that Michigan had scored 115 points, which would’ve been enough to defeat all 30 opponents the Wolverines had previously played that season. 

The only problem was that LMU scored 149 of their own, smashing multiple March Madness single-game records that still stand today. The Lions literally ran Michigan out of the gym. Kimble dropped 37. Fryer and Per Stumer shot a combined 16/23…from three. The two teams combined for 174 field goal attempts; for reference, UCLA defeated Kansas that same day by a very normal score of 71-70, and they combined for 111 field goal attempts. 

Alright, people. Fasten your seatbelts, get out some Gatorade and watch just how fast LMU moves the ball up the court. 

Although Westhead’s radical system never stuck long-term, the takeaways regarding the effect of a fast pace on both an offense and an opposing defense were prominent. 

Alright, that concludes our brief history lesson. Let’s travel back to the future now; not quite to the present day; first, we must take a look at Missouri’s pace last season to see where the Tigers left off heading into 2022-23.

Last season, Missouri never seemed to be in a hurry to score. Their 69.1 possessions per game in 2021-22 ranked 243rd out of 358 teams. While not awfully slow, Missouri’s offense last season often felt very, well, slow. Sure, their half-court offense wasn’t very inspiring and was a big reason why the Tigers struggled so much on that end of the floor, but their lack of urgency to push the ball was frustrating in retrospect considering how fast they play now and how much more offensive success they’re having because of it (more on that soon). 

For example, watch these four plays from the Auburn game last season. If any feelings of frustration suddenly sprout within you, I completely understand. 

After watching that, you might have said to yourself “perhaps this was a single-game occurrence? The sample size seems a bit small.” My short answer to that: nope!

I’d like to make something clear: there’s nothing wrong about this. Taking time to set up your half-court offense is completely normal. Virginia is consistently near the bottom in possessions per game (the Hoos haven’t gotten to 65 per game since 2009-10), and they’ve been one of the most successful college basketball programs in recent memory. 

But here’s the thing about taking the ball up slowly: it puts zero pressure on the defense in the first few seconds of the shot clock. Going slow allows the defense to set up, identify matchups and even allots time to take a short breather. You know when the stop light turns green and the car in front of you takes way too long to go? That’s how it sometimes felt watching the Tigers bringing up the ball last season. 

When a team pushes the pace from the jump, the defense has to communicate quickly, and there’s no time to catch your breath. This is where teams like LMU capitalized so often; having to get back on defense in only a few seconds leaves a defense susceptible to missed assignments and a general lack of cohesion, which can lead to easy baskets similar to the ones you saw from LMU earlier in this article. 

Missouri’s slow-paced offense was especially aggravating in games like Kansas and Illinois where the Tigers dug themselves in massive holes early in games. In order to execute a comeback, a team usually needs to score a lot in a little amount of time and prevent the other team from scoring a lot in a little amount of time. When Missouri took as long as they did to set up their offense, however, it was extremely difficult to go on a quick scoring run. 

Remember when I said Virginia plays incredibly slow, yet still finds success frequently? Well, they’re turtle-slow offense has the same downside I just described. When they go down by a healthy margin, it’s very difficult for them to come back because their offense is predicated on swinging the ball around and milking the shot clock; their system isn’t supposed to generate quick points. In games like last year’s ACC Tournament loss to UNC where they were down big early, taking 20+ seconds off the shot clock is far from ideal.

That being said, the Tigers needed new life on both ends of the floor heading into 2022, and they got it with not only a truckload of talented transfers, but the aforementioned Gates. Gates preached aggressiveness on both offense and defense, which not only included taking the ball up a lot faster, but playing more aggressive defense that was intended to create a heap of transition points off of forced turnovers. 

It didn’t take long for those desires to come to fruition. In Missouri’s opener against Southern Indiana, it was evident early on that the Tigers were done wasting time taking the ball up. Watch how many open opportunities are created simply because the ball was pushed quickly. 

Isn’t that so much more fun and exciting?! Look how fast they’re getting down the court! Look how discombobulated the defense gets! Even though not every one of those possessions ended in makes, the mere fact that easy looks were created because the defense had little time to set up was immensely refreshing. 

Even when they don’t create an immediate scoring opportunity, pushing the ball right away has given Missouri a few extra seconds on offense.If you go back and watch the Missouri tape from last season above, the ball-handler doesn’t cross half-court until they’re already five or six seconds into the shot clock. 

As you’ve already seen, this year has been different. Especially considering that the Tigers run a Princeton-style offense – an offense which emphasizes constant ball movement and off-ball cuts, which can sometimes take awhile – getting set up quickly is extremely beneficial. 

Once again, this new pace hasn’t proven to be a one-game occurrence. The Tigers have increased their number of possessions per game to over 77, which ranks in the top 15 of Division I. Gates has been pleased with not only the fast tempo, but the fact that his team has taken care of the ball in doing so. 

“It’s a fun way to play.” Gates said after Missouri defeated Penn on Nov. 11. “If you can play that fast and come away with a two-to-one assist-to-turnover ratio, that’s a great stat. That’s a great way to play.”

Finally, let’s talk about instincts. Instincts are natural impulses and reactions to certain stimuli, like when your dog turns into Usain Bolt when it sees a squirrel. For Missouri, Gates has already instilled an instinct to push the ball immediately after a made basket, rebound or turnover. Playing fast not only gives a team a new freedom on that end of the floor, it keeps defenses guessing. 

“It adds an ingredient that isn’t predictable.” Gates said on the Slappin’ Glass Podcast last Friday. “When you give freedom, you give instincts. When you preach instincts, you’re being unpredictable.”

Those instincts have been extremely apparent through Missouri’s first seven games of the season. Whenever there’s been a fastbreak opportunity, the Tigers have taken it almost every time. It’s almost like a bell goes off in all of their heads, and a little voice tells them “GO!”

Sure, the level of competition hasn’t been too daunting, but through seven games, the Tigers are soaring with a strong foundation beneath them. Now, the onus is on Missouri’s opponents to keep up.