When the 2021-22 season ended, Mark Campbell opened up his computer and went searching for hidden treasure.
The Synergy database allows coaches to view clips of players at any school across the country. Campbell, though, wasn’t looking for just any player. He had to find something rare, beautiful and indispensable to his system.
Last year, Campbell’s first at Sac State, the Hornets shocked the Big Sky with a sparse offense built around point guard Lianna Tillman and center Isnelle Natabou.
Both transfers, Tillman from Pacific and Natabou from Iowa Western CC (the Reivers – great nickname), they spammed high ball screens, with Tillman coming off the pick with carte blanche to pull up, step back, get to the rim, find Natabou on the roll or spray the ball out to shooters waiting on the perimeter.
“It’s pretty tried and tested, the pick and roll has been around forever,” Campbell said. “My guess is it’ll be around 20 years from now. But you have to have a great big and a really good playmaker and shooters. And so as we assembled our roster, we assembled it to try to put those pieces together.”
Plenty of Big Sky teams run pick and roll. None had ever done so as heavily, or with such an emphasis on two players.
Tillman, a 5-9 jitterbug wisp from Stockton, had averaged 6.4 points and 2.5 assists over 90 games at Pacific, with a career-high of 16. She scored 27 points in the season opener against Cal, and went on to average 20.4 points and 6.2 assists per game, winning Big Sky MVP due to the numbing superiority of her totals despite shooting barely over 40% and 24.7% from 3 on an eye-watering 186 attempts.
Natabou, a 6-5 oak of a center originally from the Czech Republic, had averaged 9 points and 4.8 rebounds at Iowa Western but boosted those figures to 14.7 and 10.9 in her first year of D-I experience, shooting 64.3% despite a rudimentary post game and earning an all-Big Sky second team nod.
Natabou was just a sophomore in 2021-22. But Tillman’s college career ended with the Hornets’ 74-64 loss to Weber State in their first game at the Big Sky tournament, in which she played all 40 minutes and scored 23 points on 25 shots (she’s currently averaging 29 points, five assists and three steals in three games so far this season for Etzella Ettelbruck in Luxembourg).
That void led Campbell and his staff back to the portal, and to days of watching clips, evaluating, trying to project on players who hadn’t done anything close to what he was going to ask them to do.
Then he saw Kahlaijah Dean.
“We were looking everywhere. And when we saw this one, we knew this was the one we needed,” Campbell said. “And we thought, you know what, this is the next Tillman, the next playmaking point guard that can flourish in our pick-and-roll system. And she has been better than we even hoped. I think she’s one of the best playmaking guards in college basketball.”
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Dean, who was named the Big Sky Conference MVP late last week, is the latest evolution of a team-building strategy that wouldn’t have been possible even 10 years ago – a lab experiment playing out in real time.
Campbell, who was a long-time assistant coach at Oregon and was instrumental in recruiting Sabrina Ionescu and Satou Sabally to Eugene, has used the transfer portal to try to speed-run the Hornets into contention, starting with Natabou and Tillman and continuing this year with Dean.
Only one player from Bunky Harkleroad’s last team in 2020-21, scrappy guard Jordan Olivares, remains on the roster now, two years later.
It’s a calculated approach, designed and targeted to take advantage of the one-time transfer exception that has resulted in unprecedented player movement.
The Hornets don’t recruit entirely out of the portal – 6-foot-2 sharpshooter Katie Peneueta came in from Heritage HS in Vancouver, Washington, in Campbell’s first year – but four of Sac State’s top five scorers this year played at other colleges.
Every coach in the conference talks about how transfers can be useful, ready-made pieces to fill roles in their existing rosters. Campbell has just taken that philosophy to its logical extreme.
“The portal has changed the entire landscape of college athletics,” Campbell said. “And I think everybody’s still trying to figure out how to use it and what’s the best way to navigate it. We want to build a program that’s built to last and something that’s built the right way, and so we’re still trying to figure that out.”
That’s led, in large part, to the Hornets’ unique offense – “You can’t do a motion offense with portal kids. You got to get straight to the meat and potatoes of things,” Idaho State head coach Seton Sobolewski said.
The problem is, you need a unique player to run it. Without a high-usage point guard who can handle, pass and shoot, the whole thing short-circuits.
Campbell loved Dean’s tape. After receiving very little interest coming out of Bakersfield, California, she went halfway across the country to Oakland University in Michigan and was a three-time all-Horizon League selection for the Golden Grizzlies before entering the transfer portal as a grad student.
The problem was, she was a shooting guard who almost never played on the ball.
“Our staff studied the film and we saw some gifts that she had that we thought would fit what we’re trying to do,” Campbell said. “We studied it on film, but you never know how it’s going to actually shake out. It’s hard to get kids pegged on film, it’s kind of an educated guess.”
She shot just 5 of 15 and had 11 turnovers in the first game of the year against UC Irvine (and former Idaho State point guard Diaba Konate).
Since then, Dean has far exceeded even Campbell’s lofty expectations. She had 27 in each of the next two games. In the second weekend of conference play, she had 26 against Idaho and 31 against Eastern Washington. She’s reached 15 points in all but one conference game – when she had 13 vs. Northern Colorado – and all but clinched the conference MVP late in the season by dropping a mindbending 36 points, nine rebounds and eight assists on Montana State and the Bobcats’ star guard Darian White.
She’s averaging 21.2 points, 5.7 rebounds and 5.2 assists on the season and, most impressively given how high her usage rate is, has an assist-to-turnover ratio solidly above 1 and is shooting 46/40/83 from the field, the 3-point line and the free-throw line, respectively.
“That Dean kid is unbelievable,” Sobolewski said. “She hit four 3s off the dribble behind the ball screen, and then when she wants to go to the basket it’s hard to stay in front of her, or if you send help, she’s kicking out to a 40% 3-point shooter. … Tillman would score but she’s kind of a volume shooter. This kid, her percentages are good, and then she is way more committed on the defensive end.”
By slotting in the pieces around her – Natabou, of course, is as devastating a rolling and post-up big as there is in the league, while Peneueta, Utah State transfer Kaylin Randhawa, Nebraska transfer Solape Amusan and freshman Madison Butcher are all good 3-point shooters – Sac State has built an offense that’s exhausting to play against.
The ball is always in Dean’s hands as she probes the defense, never wasting a step, testing her defender with in and outs, languidly flowing low crossovers and hang dribbles, always threatening to explode out of the move in either direction – or step back for a 3-pointer. Always asking questions, always searching for an edge – and if you stay in front of her for an entire possession, she’s coming right back down the floor and doing the same thing again, every time, for 40 minutes. Good luck.
Campbell further stresses defenses with nasty pet sets like having Peneueta and Amusan – both 40% 3-point shooters this year – screen for each other after Peneueta sets a high ball screen for Dean, or set a double screen for Dean at the free-throw line and then fade behind the arc for kick-back passes as defenders get lost and panic to stop Dean.
“What he’s doing is simple. And it works,” Sobolewski said. “He knows how to get open shots. Like we take one thing away, and then they leave someone else open and the thing you’re leaving open is pretty good. It’s Peneueta in the corner.”
After an uneven middle of the season as Peneueta returned from an injury, the Hornets ran off six straight wins to close the regular season, including an 80-54 evisceration of Portland State on senior night to lift themselves into a tie with Montana State and Northern Arizona and clinch a share of the first conference title in school history.
They then knocked off Idaho and Portland State – both by double digits – in the conference tournament to earn a title-game date with Northern Arizona.
Dean went for 22 points, 13 rebounds and eight assists against the Vandals and 17 points and seven rebounds against the Vikings.
“She’s truly one of the best playmakers, the best point guards in college basketball. What she’s doing is incredible,” Campbell said. “I wish she had the national recognition for those awards as one of the best point guards in college basketball, but she’s carrying our program on her back. She’s delivered for 30 games. We’re gonna see if she can get us one more.”
