Is a late roster addition in the Cards?
Louisville may soon land a Bluegrass State native guard via the transfer portal. What does Mason Faulkner bring to the team?
In early May, I wrote that Louisville needed to land another playmaker in the transfer portal. At the time the pickings seemed slim, and they sure got even slimmer. A brief flirtation with Marcus Carr aside, Louisville never seemed to be all that close to landing another guard and it seemed like the roster was set.
Just like that, an option surfaced. Mason Faulkner had declared his intention to transfer to Colorado from Western Carolina earlier this spring. Louisville was mentioned in connection to him when he was mulling his options, as he attended Caverna HS in Horse Cave, KY. Faulkner apparently had second thoughts and announced this week that he wants to return to Kentucky to be closer to his young child. The overwhelming consensus is that he will end up at UofL next season.
Faulkner has had a lot of success, albeit for teams on the lower end of mid-majors. But he’s a guard who has put up strong scoring and assist numbers in his career. Is he the final piece of the puzzle for Louisville? How big of a role might he have? In this edition of Hoops Insight, I try to answer the questions surrounding Mason Faulkner to the Cards.
He’s put up numbers, but not against quality teams
Faulkner began his career at Northern Kentucky and transferred to Western Carolina for his junior and senior years. I am honestly not certain how his status as a former transfer impacts his ability to play this season, or if he would qualify as a grad transfer. The NCAA had set a deadline of July 1 for players to announce their intentions to transfer and be eligible immediately this season. Technically Faulkner did that (to transfer to Colorado) and then reopened his options. For the purposes of this article, I’ll assume he picks UofL and is approved to play immediately this season, although I honestly have no idea what the NCAA rules are around that or if they even enforce anything anymore.
After transferring to Western Carolina, Faulkner blossomed. He averaged over 17 points per game and 5.5 assists per game as a Catamount, with a solid 49% effective FG% with a usage rate of over 27%. His teams didn’t have a lot of success, but Faulkner assisted on over 30% of his teammates baskets and drew a ton of fouls. Last season he even hit 36% of his threes and 51% of his twos, so on the surface he seems to bring a lot to the table. But looking more carefully, I noticed a troubling trend.
Faulkner really struggled overall the past 2 seasons when playing quality teams. His numbers took a big hit in some key areas:
Faulkner’s teams were bad (ranked 156th and 241st in KenPom the last 2 seasons), so it could be the case that teams just loaded up to stop him. It’s also certainly not a crime for a player to play worse against better teams, although his performance against top 100 teams is a pretty steep dropoff. The biggest red flag to me is that Louisville is going to play a ton of games against top 100 teams, and it seems based on these numbers that he might struggle with the adjustment.
When I see data like this, it makes me want to inquire as to 1) what was happening in these games, and 2) how useful it actually is to look at these splits for transfer guards. So, let’s do that!
Faulkner has strong passing instincts, but shot creation is iffy
To figure out what was happening in Faulkner’s games against top 100 teams, I turned to the good old eye test. Unlike the cake-eaters of some other popular blogs and sports websites, I do not have the fancy Synergy subscription with video, just the stats one…so I couldn’t just pull up video clips on there. Instead, I went digging on YouTube for Western Carolina games against top 100 teams and found two: February 2020 against East Tennessee State, and November 2019 against Florida State. I’ll be honest, I skipped around a bit and didn’t watch three full hours of Mason Faulkner game tape for this article. But I did see some common themes:
Faulkner has nice passing vision out of pick and roll and driving sets
He wasn’t very successful creating good looks for himself against pressure defense
He commits a lot of turnover trying to make spectacular passes
Faulkner made some nice pocket passes out of the pick and roll and also some nice skip passes off of drives when the defense collapsed. He’s got good vision and instincts, as he found teammates quick enough for them to get off good looks. That should be an asset with the overhauled Louisville offense, as Faulkner can move the ball to take advantage of “dominoes” opportunities.
Faulkner was bothered quite a bit by man-to-man defensive pressure, however. He made a couple of nice moves, but on balance he had more poor possessions than good ones. I didn’t see much of the ability to get by his man and get to the rim in halfcourt situations, or to do a lot of positive things off the ball. He also got swallowed up by over-penetrating against drop coverages.
There were a number of situations where Faulkner drove with the ball and decided to try an outlandish pass to the perimeter. It looks cool when it works, but there were quite a few jump passes out of bounds or ugly turnovers where he didn’t have an outlet.
It feels like Faulkner’s best role within UofL’s new offense (as I imagine it) would be as a secondary ballhandler who can attack closeouts and make nice interior passes as he draws defenders. His timing looks good, and I actually like his interior passing even more than his kickouts for three. I don’t know that he’ll be a very efficient finisher, but I think he can find a role.
Pre-transfer struggles vs top teams may be meaningful
The second question, if pre-transfer stats vs top teams are meaningfully predictive, is a tougher one to answer. It’s probably not worth the time to find a good set of comparable players and do a rigorous analysis. Instead, I decided to look at UofL’s recent history of mid-major guards transferring in and how they fared with the move up in competition.
Luckily, Louisville has had 4 guards in the last 3 seasons who transferred from mid-major schools: Carlik Jones, Fresh Kimble, Khwan Fore, and Christen Cunningham. All transferred from schools ranked 180th or worse in KenPom the season prior, and all were consistently starting for their prior program. They all were solid offensive contributors at their prior programs:
Note that I used stats for the combined prior 2 seasons for Cunningham due to a lack of games played in the season before transferring. All had at least solid effective FG% numbers, with Jones and Cunningham also being excellent playmakers. Kimble’s stats were the weakest, but he played in the strongest conference (A-10). And that brings me to my next data point, these players stats in games against KenPom top 100 teams:
I combined numbers over 2 seasons for Jones, Kimble, and Cunningham due to the small number of games played against good teams in their immediate season prior, but the data doesn’t dramatically change with the more reasonable sample. Jones, Kimble, and Fore all saw their eFG% drop with the step up, while Cunningham’s actually improved. Fore’s eFG% would have dropped even more thanks to his 16% shooting from three, but he took very few threes in these games. Cunningham and Fore had declines in their assist/turnover ratio, while the other two improved. So what happened when they go to Louisville and played against stiffer competition more often?
Jones, Kimble, and Fore all suffered declines in their eFG% to pretty inefficient levels, while Cunningham actually improved to become quite efficient. This tracks with their relative decline or improvement when playing top-100 teams pre-transfer. Oddly enough, their assist to turnover ratios didn’t follow much of a pattern at all, with Jones and Cunningham looking mostly like their previous selves.
So what does this portend for Mason Faulkner? Given that his shooting fell off dramatically against better teams, it seems reasonable to expect that he’ll be a fairly inefficient scorer at Louisville. His assist to turnover ratio wasn’t great at Western Carolina, but his overall playmaking instincts should translate. One commonality between Christen Cunningham and Mason Faulkner’s higher turnover rates against good teams is that they both played several conference games against East Tennessee State, who was effective at forcing turnovers for the past few years.
I’m more bullish on both El Ellis and Jarrod West to be more capable scorers for Louisville, so it seems like Faulkner is suited as a backup guard who can be a playmaking asset but possibly a bit of a shooting liability.
My main takeways from looking into the data and game film are that:
Faulkner is likely a backup guard for Louisville given his history of wayward shooting against good comp, and some evidence that this carries over at UofL
Faulkner’s passing instincts and bravado should fit with the ball movement offense Ross McMains is bringing
Louisville needed a playmaker and got one, but the ceiling of this team is not affected much by this
It’s quite possible that I’m being too hard on Faulkner and that he’ll be a scoring dynamo for the Cards. After all, his teams were quite bad. Another factor is that almost all of his games against good teams were on the road; maybe he’ll get energized by the home crowd and make shots at a higher clip. Those are possible, but it seems more likely than not that Louisville is getting a nice playmaking piece for their bench, but not a game changer.