The Kings' D-League experiment is going to be a lot of fun
The Reno Bighorns aren't thinking outside the box. They've outrun the box entirely.
As the NBA Development League has expanded over the past few seasons, more and more NBA teams have settled into exclusive affiliations with D-League franchises. Seventeen of the NBA's 30 clubs are operating with an exclusive affiliate, arrangements that provide plenty of benefits to the parent clubs.
Chief among those benefits is personnel development. The D-League exists largely with the goal of becoming a proper minor league system that the NBA has lacked in the past, keeping prospects physically closer to the league and under the tutelage of NBA franchises. It's an imperfect system, but the D-League is improving each year as teams learn how best to leverage the relationship and the NBA becomes more flexible in how it's used.
The Valley of Death to the Mid-Range
But there are benefits beyond player growth, too. The NBA uses the D-League to test out rule changes, tweaks to the flow of play, advertising on jerseys and more. Teams, meanwhile, have begun experimenting with how the game of basketball is played.
Long known as an analytics-driven organization, Daryl Morey and the Houston Rockets pushed their D-League affiliate to take their shot mix to the efficient extreme last year. As a result, the Rio Grande Valley Vipers took 45.4 threes per game, nearly 10 more than any other team, eschewing the mid-range game and its inferior expected points per shot.
This season, the Sacramento Kings are ready to push the envelope of shot mix and strategy and get downright weird with their D-League affiliate in Reno.
The Kings have had what's known as a hybrid affiliation with the Bighorns since last season. That means they don't own the team outright, but the Kings finance and run all basketball operations. For the purposes of basketball, the Kings have total control, from the staff to the players to the tactical elements of play.
Of course, the primary focus is still on the players. Eric Moreland has been assigned to the D-League from the Kings' roster, and the team also assigned Sim Bhullar and David Wear as "affiliate players," who can be signed by other NBA teams but in the interim are part of the Kings' organization.
Bhullar, in particular, is of interest, and speaks to the Kings trying new things. Not only is Bhullar aiming to be the first player of Indian descent in the NBA, but also the league's largest, at 7-foot-5 and 355 pounds.
Grinnell Gunning
The Kings made another key acquisition for the Bighorns this summer, with an eye toward a dynamic style of play. On Oct. 8, the Kings hired David Arseneault Jr. as the head coach in Reno. Arseneault had been an assistant under his feather, David Sr., at Division-III Grinnell College, which had become well-known for its unbelievably high-scoring style of play.
The ultra up-tempo style employed at Grinnell suggests that the first possible shot is the best possible shot, with its teams often firing from 3-point range in transition. They also double-team the ball-carrier, concede layups if their defense gets broken down, and crash the boards with aplomb. To help stay fresh, they run substitutions closer to those seen in hockey than in basketball.
The system has had some success, with the team winning multiple conference championships and, of course, setting all kinds of individual and team scoring records. That includes Jack Taylor's 138-point outburst that shattered the previous NCAA record on Nov. 20, 2012.
The Kings aren't looking to pad anyone's stats, but they're certainly going to push the pace in ways that are completely new to the NBA and the D-League. They haven't expressly said as much, but to give an idea of their unique approach, owner Vivek Ranadive reportedly pitched playing defense 4-on-5 in order to guarantee successful offensive possessions off turnovers or rebounds on the defensive end.
These Aren't Typos
The Bighorns aren't doing that, but what they've done through two exhibition games is obscene: they've taken 244 shots to score 263 points, grabbed 47 offensive rebounds, taken 113 3-point attempts and forced 75 turnovers. Read those numbers again. That's in two games, only one of which went to a five-minute overtime.
Remember Rio Grande Valley's insane 3-point rate? The Vipers took 45.4 threes a game. Reno took 56.5 in those two outings. That's more than any NBA team has ever taken in a single game.
The Bighorns' games have averaged 135 possessions, meaning they were played at a 26 percent faster pace than the fastest-paced team in the D-League a season ago. It would be 19 percent faster than the fastest-paced NBA team since the statistic was first measured in 1973-74.
It's taxing enough that no player cracked 30 minutes in either game for Reno (Bhullar didn't play, for those curious how he held up). This style of play will heavily inflate individual counting stats, but the early returns, and general logic, suggest rate stats will be hurt - the Bighorns have shot just 37.7 percent and 28.3 percent on threes, owing to their shoot-anything strategy.
How much any of this matters is unclear. The Kings and Bighorns will see what kind of success they can have with it, see how their players hold up over a couple of weeks and determine if any strategic elements can be carried over to the parent club. That's part of what the D-League is for, and it should make for a fun, if exhausting, season in Reno.