Danny Manning has often been praised for his work with the Kansas University big men since being hired on as an official KU assistant before the 2007-08 season.
But exactly how much have KU’s big men improved?
Let’s take a look.
For this blog, I will be looking at offensive rating, which basically tells us how many points an individual player produces per 100 possessions.
First, I wanted to take a look at the big men that Manning inherited when he became an assistant coach in 2007: Darrell Arthur, Darnell Jackson and Sasha Kaun. Manning had each of these players one season.
Before working with Manning, the three players averaged an offensive rating of 108.1; after, they averaged 116.1.
As you can see, each player improved offensively under Manning, with Kaun (9.1 percent improvement) and Jackson (11.6 percent improvement) making the biggest leaps*.
* — A note on offensive ratings: The numbers above don’t necessarily mean Darnell Jackson was a better offensive player in 2007-08 than Darrell Arthur. To compare different players, you also need to look at their usage percentage — the percentage of possessions they consume on the floor.
In that year, Arthur’s usage percentage was 24.8 percent, while Jackson’s was 19.9 percent. Because Arthur was more of a go-to player with KU and took more shots (and tougher shots), it would be expected that his offensive rating might be a touch lower than Jackson’s.
Because in all these graphs we are comparing each player to themselves, I didn’t include usage percentages. All the usage percentages are listed in parentheses here if you want to see them.
Manning also has worked with six different scholarship big men from their first year at KU (I’m counting Mario Little, who played the four position during most of his time at KU).
Here is what their progression looks like.
OK, there’s a lot to get to here.
• **First off, there have been 12 instances in these two graphs when a player has spent an additional year at KU under Manning.**
*In 11 of those 12 instances*, that player’s offensive rating improved.
Sounds like a potential recruiting tool to me.
Cole Aldrich’s junior season is the only time under Manning that a KU big man’s offensive rating has gone down from the previous season. And even then, it went from an off-the-charts 124.3 his sophomore year to a still-all-league-like 116.8 his junior season.
• **Here are the average offensive ratings for KU players in each playing year under Manning:**
**Year 1** — 102.1
**Year 2** — 115.0 (12.6 percent increase)
**Year 3** — 118.9 (3.4 percent increase)
From looking at this, KU’s big men are making a huge jump between year one and year two. I was a little surprised that the offensive ratings for KU first-year big men were so low. This would seem to indicate that even though KU isn’t bringing in elite freshmen big men that can dominate immediately (think Jared Sullinger and DeMarcus Cousins), it is getting great production out of them after a year in the program.
Also, the jump isn’t as significant from year two to year three. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that KU’s big men had such high offensive ratings in their second years, many times it was hard to improve much.
• **This also might be a good time to temper expectations in the first year for incoming freshmen Braeden Anderson and Jamari Traylor.** Recent history would tell us that KU’s big men aren’t usually offensive studs as freshmen (though as sophomores, they often are).
• **Jeff Withey also is an interesting case study here.** He had one of the highest offensive ratings from a big man during his first year at KU (109.0) but didn’t have a significant increase following his sophomore season like most of the other Jayhawks have had (109.8). I’m sure injuries and limited playing time had something to do with this, along with the fact that Withey’s offensive rating his freshman year was pretty darned good for a part-time player.
Just for fun, here’s a look at how KU’s Manning-led big men compare to other schools’ big men over the same time period.
For the schools below, I pulled players out based on three criteria:
1. Players had to be 6-foot-7 or taller
2. Players had to join their schools in 2007-08 or later
3. Players had to play at least 10 minutes per game in their final season
I compared those players’ offensive ratings with those of KU’s big men from 2007-present under Manning. In each graph, the dark blue lines represent KU players.
Because of the small sample size we can’t take too much from these graphs, but I still thought they were interesting to look at. Manning’s big men seem to fare pretty well compared to recent big men from other schools.
Note: Reader avaholic below requested a graph of KU’s guards in the last four years to compare to the graphs above. Here is that graph. Please note that Tyrel Reed played just six minutes per game his freshman year, and his offensive rating is a bit inflated because of that.
