FAYETTEVILLE — Daryl Macon has spent a lot of late nights alone with his self-proclaimed best friend since arriving in Fayetteville.
The catch: Arkansas’ junior guard isn’t referring to a person. He’s talking about ‘The Gun,’ a basketball shooting machine that returns balls to the shooter, making it easy to shoot in an otherwise-empty gym. Macon’s done plenty of that since getting on campus, spending late-night hours in the team’s basketball practice facility putting in extra work.
The Gun tracks makes and misses. Macon tweeted out a few pictures after a shooting session one summer night. In the first photo, he’d made 238 of 261 3-pointers, a sizzling 91 percent. In the second, he only needed to shoot 566 3-pointers to make 500, an 88 percent clip. Pretty impressive.
The season is about to start, but that doesn’t mean the late-night sessions are coming to an end.
“There’s no turning down when you’re trying to be great,” Macon said. “That’s something I do all the time. I’ve got a dream I’m trying to accomplish and I’m just working toward it.”
All signs point toward Macon replacing graduated sharpshooter Anthlon Bell and joining senior Dusty Hannahs to provide a formidable one-two shooting punch for the Razorbacks this year. Both should be dangerous shooters, requiring extra attention from defenders forced to track them beyond the 3-point arc and in turn opening up the floor for the rest of the team.
But it isn’t enough. Arkansas needs more. Yup, the team with the best 3-point shooting percentage in the SEC last season needs to be a better-shooting team this year.
On the surface, the statement appears ludicrous. But it’s reality. The Razorbacks had two great perimeter shooters last year in Hannahs and Bell, but they were not a good perimeter shooting team, despite shooting a conference-best 39.7 percent from 3-point range.
Bell ranked third in the SEC by hitting 44.1 percent of his 3-pointers and Hannahs was fifth, knocking 43.3 percent on nearly six attempts per game, but the rest of the roster was plain bad from 3-point range aside from those two. As a result, the Hogs attempted the fewest 3-pointers in the SEC and the least a Mike Anderson team has ever taken. Arkansas attempted 3-pointers on just 27.3 percent of its field goal attempts, which ranked 330th out of 351 Division I teams.
Arkansas’ main question marks entering the season are defense and who plays next to Moses Kingsley. But finding added shooting to space the floor and lighten the burden for players like Kingsley and Hannahs is also crucial.
Arkansas hopes to have a more well-rounded shooting roster this year. Last season, the Hogs didn’t get much juice from anyone else outside the arc. The Bell-Hannahs duo took nearly three-quarters of Arkansas’ 3-point attempts and the rest of the Razorbacks shot just 29.7 percent from 3, a dreadful percentage for a team with only one scoring threat in the frontcourt. Only two other players on the roster (Jabril Durham and Anton Beard) attempted at least one 3-pointer a game, with both shooting worse than 29 percent from deep. The rest of the rosters’ inability to pass as a shooting threat often warped the geometry of the floor and made Arkansas a much easier team to guard, especially when only one of Hannahs and Bell were on the court.
By comparison, even though the Razorbacks shot nearly 5 percent worse from deep (34.9 percent) in 2014-15, Anderson’s best Arkansas team had more shooting threats. While no one who took at least one 3 a game shot better than 38 percent, all five shot at least 33 percent, the equivalent of 50 percent on shots inside the arc, with Bobby Portis shooting 47 percent on 30 attempts to boot. The Razorbacks were able to spread the floor with shooters the defense had to account for.
Last year’s Razorbacks attempted 17 3-pointers a game, easily the lowest mark of Anderson’s career as a head coach. Anderson’s best team, the 2008-09 Missouri Tigers, shot 35.3 percent from 3 and had four players who made at least 25. Those Tigers spread the court, which allowed DeMarre Carroll and Leo Lyons to feast on mismatches with opposing bigs.
Last year, Arkansas’ spacing suffered as a result of always having at least three non-perimeter shooting threats on the court. Bell was improved as a defender in both effort and ability his senior season, but neither he or Hannahs were pluses on that end of the court. Still, Mike Anderson had little choice but to play them in tandem. Aside from them and Moses Kingsley, no other player on the roster posed opposing defenses a consistent threat. Kingsley’s numbers sagged late in the year as he appeared to wear down under a sizeable workload. He was Arkansas’ only frontcourt scoring threat, but that was compounded by the Razorbacks’ inability to surround him with shooters, often allowing defenses to load up on Kingsley without fear of being burned by more than a few of the Hogs’ guards.
Even with Kingsley scoring inside and Bell and Hannahs shooting the ball at a scorching rate, Arkansas ranked just eighth in the SEC with an adjusted offensive rating of 107.8 (points per 100 possessions), per KenPom.com. Durham led the SEC in assists per 40 minutes (9.2) and was adept at feeding the ball to Bell and Hannahs in good spots, but his lack of a shot allowed his defender to sag and either help on Kingsley or clog up driving lanes. He also wasn’t consistently able or willing to attack closeouts and get into the lane to make a play for himself, hamstringing the offensive flow at times.
Manny Watkins is a natural, gritty defender and was even Arkansas’ best frontcourt option next to Kingsley at times last year despite being only 6-4. On a team where Bell and Hannahs had to play big minutes, his defensive acumen was needed. But his hesitance to attempt a shot outside the paint was another strike against spacing. It wouldn’t have been as pronounced if he was the only non-shooting threat on the court, but he was often one of three or four in lineups that would lead to packed lanes. Jimmy Whitt’s ugly mechanics and the often uglier results they produced are well-documented.
The jury is still out, but the current roster appears to have more players who are comfortable with taking 3-pointers and have shown potential as perimeter shooters.
“We can spread the floor and people can not only worry about Moses and let’s say a guy like Dusty, but they’ve got to worry about those other players,” Anderson said. “And that’s a luxury we didn’t have last year. We’ve got more options on the floor.”
Much has been made about Arkansas’ newcomers, particularly the two junior college guards — Macon and Jaylen Barford. But Arkansas needs Anton Beard to return to the form he displayed during conference play his freshman year, when he shot 39.3 percent from 3-point range and was a sparkplug insertion into the starting lineup on an SEC runner-up Razorback team. Outside of that stretch, he’s been a 28.6 percent 3-point shooter, including 28.7 last year.
No doubt, a large chunk of that has to do with missing the entire offseason and most of nonconference play because of legal issues. A lot of it is also the result of the shortage of offensive threats playing with him on the second unit when he did return. With a full offseason on the team under his belt and better weapons around him, it wouldn’t be a shock if he made a return to the offensive player he showed signs of becoming as a freshman. Arkansas needs him to. There are a lot of reasons why raw plus/minus is a flawed metric, but the fact that Beard, Whitt, Watkins and Keaton Miles easily had the worst plus/minuses on the team a year ago is revealing. All four were sub-par shooters and compacted spacing.
The Razorbacks are counting on Barford and Macon to help upgrade the perimeter shooting. Both will play big minutes and were good shooters at their JUCO stops. Macon shot a solid 37.6 percent from 3 on more than six attempts per game last year, while Barford canned a respectable 35.5 on four-plus tries a game. NBA scouts evaluate free throw percentage as much or more than college 3-point percentage to gauge players’ true shooting ability. In that light, Macon (82.9 percent) and Barford (78 percent) show signs of being very good shooters who could improve as their shot selection becomes better, even as the competition becomes tougher. Still, that’s not always a given.
Take Durham, who shot 44.1 percent on more than three 3-point attempts per game (74 percent from the foul line) as a JUCO sophomore, then made just 31 percent in two years at Arkansas. No newcomer, high school or JUCO, is assured a smooth transition to the next level, but Barford and Macon appear to have the requisite skillsets and athleticism to create their own looks in the SEC, which will in turn make it easier to get open looks from the perimeter.
Freshman C.J. Jones lit it up in Spain and will carve out a role as a scorer off the bench. His ability to use his 6-5 frame and athleticism to get off his smooth shot give him a skillset no one else on the roster possesses.
Even Wakins, who has taken — and missed — just eight 3-pointers in his career, spent the offseason working on his game in an effort to prevent defenses from ignoring him on the perimeter. He took open 3s in both of Arkansas’ exhibition games.
“Last year a lot of teams were backing off me and I felt like that hurt the team a lot,” Watkins said. “I made it apparent in the summer that’s not gonna happen. If you give me some space, it’s going in the air and it’s going to go in a lot of times because I work on it so much.”
Arkansas would love if one of its frontcourt players could stretch the floor in the same vein as a Carroll, Coty Clarke or even Alandise Harris, but whether that is realistic remains to be seen. Kingsley had mixed results as a mid-range shooter last year, but his form is promising and whether he continues to develop that part of his game will go a long way toward determining where or if he is drafted. He took a few 3-pointers in the Red-White game, a trend that likely won’t continue into the regular season but proof that he has spent time working on his range.
Dustin Thomas has solid technique, but shot 23 percent from 3 and 61.3 from the foul line in two years at Colorado. Arkansas hopes a better system fit and a year of development — spent fixing his form and in the gym alone for hours — aids the 6-8, 225-pounder. He shot the ball well in the fall and will hoist — and make — some 3s, but may be more of a mid-range option, potentially a very good one.
Trey Thompson has shown glimpses of having a decent mid-range shot to go along with easily being Arkansas’ best passing big, but it hasn’t translated to games yet, either in the mid-range game or from the line. Freshmen Adrio Bailey and Brachen Hazen have different games. To this point, Bailey’s game is reliant on his supreme athleticism. Arkansas coaches no doubt hope his shot progresses like fellow Louisiana native Michael Qualls.
Hazen is intriguing. He comes in with the reputation of a shooter and displays sound mechanics, but may not crack the rotation as a freshman because spot-up shooting is one of his three clear plus skills at this point (leaping ability and offensive rebounding). Still, his skill set as a stretch four is promising.
“One of the things last year’s team lacked was those skilled fours, those versatile guys,” Anderson said. “I think our guard play will be just as good or better than it was last year. Now those fours are the guys that have to come around.”
It’s irrational to pin Arkansas’ disappointing results last year on the limited perimeter shooting. There were plenty of other, aforementioned issues. But for all the roster’s flaws, better shooting could have alleviated some of the problems.
Mike Anderson’s teams have always utilized the 3-point line as a weapon when running in transition and to space the floor in the halfcourt.
Arkansas graduated its best shooter in Bell, but the Razorbacks are counting on Hannahs putting up another big year, their newcomers adjusting quickly and growth from players within the program.
The Razorbacks being a vintage Mike Anderson team, one that can make noise in March, could hinge on it to some degree.