FAYETTEVILLE — T.J. Cleveland holds the ball at the top of the key as guards Daryl Macon and Jaylen Barford crisscross each other at the 3-point line and cut off the Arkansas assistant to each wing.
When Cleveland hits Barford with a pass on the wing, the senior dribbles toward the corner and throws a skip pass to Macon in the opposite corner for a 3-pointer.
Rinse and repeat, with two more players stepping up for their turn. The off-ball action is one of several movements Cleveland drills during practices as he works to drive home the motion tenets of Mike Anderson’s offense.
Split cuts, the action described above, are also a favorite of the defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors, who like to use them with Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson whirring around a big like Draymond Green.
“I watched a couple Golden State YouTube videos and they move the ball just like we do, kind of run similar stuff,” Barford said.
Arkansas, of course, doesn’t have Curry or Thompson, two of the best shooters of all-time. Ditto for Green, an incredible passer who doubles as a perennial defensive player of the year candidate.
But Golden State coach Steve Kerr’s flow offense incorporates a lot of motion elements similar to what Anderson and his staff preach in Fayetteville.
Pushing the pace is prioritized. It's easier to score against a defense that isn't set. Arkansas ranked in the top 10 percent in the nation in offensive pace last year, averaging a zippy 15.7 seconds per possession. In the halfcourt, cutting, screening, passing and moving without the ball are championed. High IQ, team-first players are valued.
Seemingly everyone wants to play like the Warriors these days. Anderson’s teams have aimed to play that brand of ball his entire coaching career.
“That’s something we use in recruiting because our offenses are similar,” Cleveland said. “It’s very similar to that. When people look at the way we play and how it translates (to the NBA), that’s the way a lot of people are going now.”
The results have been hard to argue with throughout Anderson’s coaching career. In 16 years, his teams have ranked in the top 80 nationally, essentially the 75th percentile or better, in offensive rating on 12 occasions. Six of his 11 teams since he took the Missouri job have had top-46 offenses, which is akin to being in the 87th percentile or better.
Sure, part of that is the result of Arkansas getting out and running, pushing the tempo. But the Razorbacks also fared well in the halfcourt under Anderson once he stocked the roster with players he recruited, ranking in the 70th percentile or better in 2015 and 2017. The Hogs won 27 games in 2015 and 26 last season, the two highest win totals the program has enjoyed since a repeat trip to the national title game in 1995.
Like Kerr, who only calls set pieces from the bench about 15 to 20 percent of the time, Anderson encourages player freedom and pace over slowing the tempo and hollering out a different play each trip up the floor.
Of course, Arkansas has sets like every team, employing popular actions like floppy and Horns at times. But most possessions are unscripted, with the core motion philosophies dictating the correct basketball play as the players read and react to the defense.
Anderson empowers players to shoot their shots and doesn’t pigeonhole guys into playing within what may be outdated archetypes for guards, forwards or centers.
The Razorbacks, like many NBA teams, want to play positionless basketball. Rather than searching for the point guard to hit with an outlet pass, anyone who can handle the ball has the green light to bring the ball up the court.
“Guys who have aspirations of playing at the next level (will say) ‘How does how you guys play translate?’ And you can look at the Golden State Warriors and you can look at the Boston Celtics and there’s a number of other teams that play that way also,” Cleveland said. “Atlanta Hawks when they were really good, they played the same way with coach (Mike Budenholzer). That’s something we use. We like to recruit basketball players. We don’t want to give them numbers.”
Arkansas’ offense was often at its best last year with 6-foot-9, 260-pound center Trey Thompson in the game and working as the de facto point guard, operating in the high post and either hitting cutters backdoor or using his screening ability to free guards with dribble handoffs.
With Thompson on the floor, Arkansas averaged 126.2 points per possession. To put it in perspective, Oklahoma State led the nation on the team level with a 126 offensive rating.
“Trey’s a very intelligent basketball player,” Anderson said. “His basketball IQ is so important, he’s like a coach out on the floor. … It’s important when you’ve got a guy that skilled that can do those type of things.”
When Arkansas is in sync, whether by pushing the pace (they ranked 33rd nationally in offensive pace last season) or in the halfcourt with all five players bought in and working in unison, the result can be pretty basketball, the kind difficult for defenses to guard.
“We get the freedom to cut, screen, feed off each other and make each other better,” Barford said. “That ball gets swung to the open side, make a play. That’s just how we play, play free.”
Anderson has long preferred a smaller, more skilled player at the 4, dating back to his days at Missouri when DeMarre Carroll, now an NBA veteran small forward, manned the position. That used to be an outlier, with most teams preferring to operate with two traditional bigs.
Not anymore. With the rise of small ball, more and more teams are sliding players up a position or two and trying to put as much skill on the floor as possible, prioritizing players who can shoot and pass over low-post brutes who post up with middling efficiency.
“Everybody’s trying to do it,” Cleveland said. “Hey, we were ahead of the curve.”
The obvious caveat with motion is the onus falls on all five players to move, cut, screen and ping the the ball around while reacting to the defense appropriately. The scheme loses it's effectiveness when players stand around or pound the rock and isolate.
Last year, the Razorbacks had plenty of offensive talent capable of scoring one-on-one. As a result, ball movement and crisp action sometimes suffered.
Barford and Macon arrived on campus after being the go-to guys at their respective junior colleges. Both players possess great one-on-one ability and can create their own shot with ease, which meant learning the importance of moving without the ball and making the extra pass took time to sink in. There were stretches of stagnant offense and poor spacing as they and the rest of an overhauled roster learned each other and what was expected.
“Where they came from, they were the man,” Cleveland said. “They had the ball probably 85, 90 percent of the time and were looking to score. Here, it’s a different kind of offense. There’s going to be times where you’re going to have to move without the ball because people are going to guard you, especially those two guys.”
But Arkansas adjusted and got better late in the year, winning nine of 12 games down the stretch as the roster began to gel and get the system. Seeing the benefits of sprinting hard off a pindown screen or backcutting and getting an easy layup off a slick Thompson dish encouraged buy-in.
“I think it was just the trusting part, for me and Daryl, coming from junior college and having the ball in our hand most of the time,” Barford said. “Learning how to trust each other and trust our teammates helped out a lot.”
Barford and Macon each possess well-rounded skill sets, something Arkansas targets in recruiting. The Razorbacks prizes versatility, targeting players with the ability to check a lot of boxes. Class of 2018 wing commit Jordan Phillips is a prime example, a 6-7 wing who can handle like a guard, has good vision, can shoot and get to the rim.
His frame means he could feasibly play 1 through 4 in Anderson’s system in time. In truth, the positional numbers refer more to who players guard on the defensive end than their role on offense.
Everyone has the freedom to make plays in a fast, up-tempo system that, when executed correctly, is precisely how modern basketball is trending.
Don’t expect Cleveland and company to stop using the Warriors pitch anytime soon.
“We run the offense minus the players,” Cleveland said.
While no one is going to compare Barford and Macon to Steph and Klay, Arkansas' duo is arguably the best backcourt in the SEC.
In year two in Fayetteville and in the system, they could be even scarier for defenses to face.