LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — There is, technically, a Louisville basketball playbook. It’s just not exactly bedtime reading.
“There's principles, there's concepts, but it's hard to scout us,” Kelsey said, “because sometimes somebody will call me afterwards or put something on Twitter and be like, ‘Man, look at this set they run.’ Sometimes it's not even a set. The beauty is in the randomness. It’s just reading the randomness and the cutting. It’s a fun way to play.”
Kelsey has used that phrase — the beauty is in the randomness — before. In Tuesday night’s 99-76 exhibition win over Bucknell, it felt like a mantra.
This wasn’t a team running floppy sets and flex screens. This was a team hitting the paint, warping the defense, and turning gravity into jump shots. Thirty-one made field goals. Twenty-six assists. Twenty-three threes. A shot chart that looked like a firework went off behind the arc.
It wasn’t just that Louisville made shots. It was how they made them.
Skip, spray, swish
The offensive emphasis wasn’t an accident. After a clunky loss to Kansas last week, Louisville players said the film review focused more on mentality than execution. But one number stuck: paint touches.
“We track them every game,” guard Isaac McKneely said. “We try to get 50. That was a big emphasis. Get into the paint, play off two feet, and kick.”
McKneely had six made threes. Mikel Brown Jr. added eight more. Ryan Conwell added four. But before the swish came the skip, a heavy dose of two-footed paint drives, collapsing defenders, and punishing the help with corner bombs.
“We really didn’t play our brand of basketball in that first game,” Brown said. “Our pace wasn’t there. The ball speed wasn’t there. We weren’t really moving the ball the way we wanted to.”
Kelsey confirmed the metric: “We gage force in our ability to touch the paint,” he said. “And then we look, conversely, how we can limit their paint touches.”
From rigidity to rhythm
The most effective possessions looked unscripted, because they often were. A drive might flow into a dribble handoff. A corner flare might turn into a ball screen. Bigs screened and rescreened. Shooters relocated. The defense had to guess, often wrong.
Even Louisville’s own players are still adjusting to it.
“I was talking to Sananda [Fru] the other day,” Kelsey said. “He was like, ‘Man, where I played in Europe, it was extremely rigid. This is what I do, here, here.’ I told him, ‘You came to Louisville. You’re hooping now.’”
You’re hooping now. That could be the tagline for this team.
“Our offense grows,” Kelsey said. “And we get better and more comfortable. … Pretty soon they start having fun. You can see the pep in their step and the smile on their face.”
A fine wine, with a 3-point finish
At one point, Louisville had made 18 threes and just three two-point baskets. Their final tally — 23 of 46 from deep — included inside-out feeds, skip passes, transition spot-ups, and NBA-range jumpers.
The Cardinals didn’t just shoot the lights out. They played with offensive gravity. The cause becomes the effect. The randomness becomes the rhythm.
“I felt that today, you could see them playing with a little bit more rhythm,” Kelsey said. “Helps when the ball is going in, and it went in a lot. As you know, we have an elite shooting team. We have a selfless team, and we talk about force getting to the paint. Well, the other part is gravity, and the gravity is the way we're able to pull people away from the basket because of the shooting gravity we have, which opens up the paint. So there's a method to the madness. But it looked it looked good tonight.”
With each five minute segment, players looked looser, more free, more comfortable with each other and more like a group that trusts the chaos.
“It’s like a fine wine,” Kelsey said. “I don’t drink a lot of wine … but I hear.”
And if this offense ages the way Kelsey believes it will, there may be a few toasts ahead.
