HOUGHTON NOTE: The one bad thing about Montana’s two Division-I football teams making deep runs in the FCS Playoffs is that it’s difficult to watch any basketball while that’s going on. I didn’t catch the Montana Grizzlies at all – live or on TV – until the calendar flipped to December. But with football out of the picture, I’ve been catching up – watching games, taking notes, making observations and figuring out what I think about the Griz before the conference season starts.
The first thought I had on my first glimpse of Griz basketball this year, as I walked down the ramp at Dahlberg Arena for the first time in nine months, was, Man, that might be more shooting than they had on the court at any point last year. Early on in their game against South Dakota State on December 6, the Griz were playing a lineup of Josh Vazquez, Aanen Moody, Lonnell Martin, Josh Bannan and Mack Anderson – four above-average 3-point shooters around the rim protector Anderson.
A few months into Montana’s schedule, that’s been the most noticeable thing about this year’s Griz. It’s debatable whether they have more talent than last year. What’s clear is that this year’s roster fits together better.
Montana had four players score over nine points per game last year. The Griz decided to move forward with two of them – Bannan and Brandon Whitney – as their centerpieces and then went to the transfer portal to fill roles around them, primarily by adding shooting with Moody (Southern Utah transfer) and Dischon Thomas (Colorado State transfer). It makes sense. Montana’s two top returners are a low-post player (Bannan) and a slasher (Whitney); adding more spacing gives them more room to operate.
“When you get side-to-side, you open up the floor, and we’ve got good enough shooting they’ve got to respect that, especially when your post players can shoot,” head coach Travis DeCuire said after the Griz ran South Dakota State out of Dahlberg Arena with an 81-56 win on December 6. “When you’ve got multiple guys that can score at multiple levels, you’re hard to guard when you run a good offense.”
With Moody adding shooting and secondary ball-handling behind Whitney and Thomas adding shooting and a low-post banger to help Bannan on the boards, everybody’s role is defined and everything looks smoother. After a disappointing start with blowout losses at Duquesne and Xavier and a 3-5 record through November, the Griz have turned things around with a 3-1 December, including a close loss to nationally-ranked Gonzaga.
Here are some more observations from non-conference play:
– Josh Bannan is not the best player in the league and he’s probably not even the best offensive player in the league, but he’s almost certainly the most diverse offensive player in the league. On Montana’s first four possessions at North Dakota State on December 10, he posted up for a short jump hook, faced up and drove from the 3-point line for a bucket, set a screen that freed Brandon Whitney for a layup, and battled to tap out an offensive rebound that led to another layup by Aanen Moody. A couple possessions later he hit a 3, all in the first five minutes of the game.
Which of the other best post-up players in the league is walking into 3s? Bannan can post up, face up and spot up. In the pick and roll game, he can roll, fade or be the ball-handler getting the screen. He’s shooting 53/59/81 (percent from FG/3PT/FT) and is third in the conference in rebounding.
The pace of his development at Montana has been a little terrifying – for example, he went from hitting 23.5% of his 3s on 34 attempts as a freshman to 35.2% on 71 attempts as a sophomore. This year, he’s added another new wrinkle with his play making, primarily out of the high post. Bannan is averaging 2.9 assists per game, nearly double his last year’s average of 1.6, and showing, at times, really good vision and passing ability.
Fake handoff into…well, it’s not an overly complicated read or pass, but it’s also not a simple one. If he hesitates for a beat, the window for that pass into Dischon Thomas is gone. If he sees it late – gone. If he fumbles the ball or can’t make the pass cleanly and accurately – gone.
Now, that increased play-making responsibility has also come with increased turnovers – nearly 2.5 per game so far after being under two last year. Montana has also appeared to move away from Bannan-as-playmaker a little bit recently. He had at least four assists in each of the first six games but just five in the last six combined. We’ll see if that part of his game re-emerges in conference play. Regardless, for all the talk about roster construction and pieces fitting together, this might be the biggest positive point about the Griz so far this year and it might be the only thing that really matters – they finally appear to have an every-game, every-play first option, a guy who’s right up there with the best in the league.
– The two transfers who are playing the most – Moody (Southern Utah) and Dischon Thomas (Colorado State) were, as previously mentioned – brought in primarily for their shooting. Moody has been particularly impressive from beyond the arc: 21 of 55 for 38.2% on team-high volume. Thomas has been streaky and is shooting 32% from deep but he’s not afraid to shoot and he fits the role well.
The reason the whole thing works, though, is that they can do other things besides shooting well enough to stay on the floor and add value. Moody, especially, knows how to leverage the threat of his 3-point shooting to get good looks for himself and others; one of my favorite looks the Griz have is to run him from the corner or wing to take a dribble handoff at the top of the key. If the defender is trailing, he can rise and fire. If they try to fight over the screen or switch, it opens things up elsewhere on the floor, whether that’s Moody getting into the lane, pitching the ball back to the screener or taking advantage of the chaos to find an open man.
It works because Moody makes the cut hard and comes off the handoff looking to shoot, and because defenses have to respect that. Montana didn’t have a lot of players drawing that respect last year.
– In more rapid-fire style, what are some of Montana’s weaknesses that have jumped out?
Depth is an issue – Bannan, Moody and Whitney are all playing over 32 minutes per game, in the top 10 in the league, and Thomas and Martin are also in the top 25. It’s barely an eight-man rotation – behind the starters, Vazquez plays about 17 minutes per game and Anderson and Jonathan Brown are at about 12 apiece. Vazquez is in a hellacious shooting slump, hitting 21.6% from 3 (nearly 18 points below his career average entering the season). Anderson continues to be what he is: a good rim protector and OK rebounder who fouls a lot.
It’s a slight worry about the offense cratering when Bannan sits (I’m once again asking the conference to provide on/off splits for players – they already have the data) but Whitney going one-on-one isn’t a bad backup plan because of how shifty he is. Whitney is shooting 61.3%, best on the team.
Bannan can sometimes hold the ball too long and not do much with it. Despite his turnover issues, he’s actually got the second-best assist-to-turnover ratio on the team behind Whitney. Besides those two and Moody (who’s at 18 assists to 17 turnovers), nobody else on the team has a positive A/TO ratio, and the Griz are eighth out of 10 teams in the conference in turnover margin.
As Montana has heated up on offense in the last couple weeks, they’ve also gotten easier to exploit on defense, and it’s going to be a delicate balancing act to toggle those all season long. Besides Whitney and Anderson, everyone else is an average or below defender, and it’s difficult to play Whitney and Anderson together because that’s two non-shooters. But without Anderson’s rim protection, Whitney’s point-of-attack defense becomes even more crucial. They’re really asking a lot of him and Bannan. Everybody else is going to try hard on defense and be in the right place most of the time, but can be exploited.
Fun semi-related note: Vazquez, who’s listed at 6-3, 177, is tied for the team lead in blocks (6) with Anderson and Thomas, who are both listed at 6-9.
From a pure roster construction standpoint, the Griz don’t have any wings. Probably the closest is promising freshman Jaxon Nap, who’s 6-7, pretty skilled on the perimeter and is playing about 10 minutes a game. Absent a big in-season leap from him – although he looks like a great piece for the future – it’s all guards and bigs.
On the one hand that’s not a huge deal because the Big Sky is a guards-and-bigs league – turns out not a lot of skilled 6-7 guys end up falling to low-major schools!
On the other hand, Montana’s in-state rival definitely has a skilled wing in RaeQuan Battle who’s been handed the keys to that offense this year, and Northern Colorado’s got a 6-6 guy in Dalton Knecht who’s been going off this year as well. So who guards those guys for Montana? No idea.
