Furman Basketball: 2022-23 season preview for the Paladins

4.3 seconds. That’s all that stood between the 21-22 Furman Basketball team and their first NCAA Tournament since 1980. Leading scorer Mike Bothwell muscled his way into the paint and scored over UT-Chattanooga big man Silvio De Sousa to give Furman a one-point lead with only 4.3 seconds remaining.

What happened afterward was the perfect microcosm of the madness of March. David Jean-Baptiste caught the inbounds pass, took six dribbles into a double-team, and heaved up a prayer from thirty feet that were answered at the buzzer. The Mocs won the SOCON Championship, beating Furman for the third time that season, and extended the Paladins NCAA Tournament drought to 42 years.

Furman experienced total heartbreak that night in Asheville, but this season certainly feels like the year they can break that drought. See, there’s been a trend in the SOCON over the past few years: teams slowly get better each season, and after close calls, breakthrough and win the conference tournament. The flip side of this trend is that these teams then lose their head coaches to bigger programs that are willing to lure them out of the SOCON. For example, after leading the Wofford Terriers to a conference title (and a win in the NCAA Tournament), coach Mike Young was hired by Virginia Tech.

The next season, Steve Forbes finally broke through and led East Tennessee State to a conference title (to this day I am a firm believer that they would have pulled off an upset in the big dance if the coronavirus didn’t ruin it), and was immediately hired to be the coach at Wake Forest. The following year, Wes Miller led UNC Greensboro to a conference title and NCAA appearance and was soon after poached by Cincinnati. Last season, after steady improvements over the course of a few years, UT-Chattanooga won the SOCON and an NCAA bid.

You can probably guess what happened to head coach Lamont Paris after that (spoiler: South Carolina swooped in and hired him away to replace Frank Martin). This season, I’m calling my shot and saying Furman wins the conference tournament and head coach Bob Richey is the next in line to continue the SOCON to power conference coaching pipeline.

Richey has been one of the most successful coaches in program history. His four 20-plus win seasons are the most in school history and is the only Paladins coach to achieve more than two of those seasons since Eddie Holbrook achieved that from 1978-1982, coincidentally, the last coach to take them to the big dance.

Another factor is in Richey’s favor: he is one of the more analytically inclined coaches in all of college basketball. Last season, 51.6% of Furman’s shot attempts were three-pointers. That high volume of three-point chucking was the second highest rate in all of college basketball per KenPom. It also helps that they made 37.5% of those attempts, ranking them inside the top 20 three-point shooting teams in the country. But the Paladins also ran a spread ball screen offense that produced balanced scoring and the eighth-highest assist rate in the country, with 62% of their made field goals coming off an assist (also per KenPom). Since Richey took over the program in 2018, his team has been top 90 in the country in assist rate with the exception of 2020.

This year’s team is coming off of a second-place SOCON regular season finish (second in three years). They are the ideal team to take the next step. They return their leading scorer from last season, Mike Bothwell, and reigning SOCON Defensive Player of the Year, Jalen Slawson. But how does the rest of the team look after the departures of starting guards Alex Hunter (13.4 PPG) and Conley Garrison (9.6 PPG)? I’ll preview the season ahead for the Paladins as they embark on a quest to break a 42-year tournament drought.