Hoos Embrace Analytics as Valuable Tool

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In the men’s practice gym at John Paul Jones Arena, a whistle hangs around the neck of Ryan Odom. A laptop rests in the hands of Matt Hart.

Welcome to college basketball in 2025. As the game continues to evolve, more and more coaches are employing analytics as a resource. At the University of Virginia, Odom’s staff includes Hart, the program’s director of analytics. Hart held that position at Virginia Commonwealth University until this spring, when he followed Odom from Richmond to Charlottesville.

Hart, who grew up near Buffalo, N.Y., played basketball at Hamilton College and George Washington University. (In 2015-16, he helped GW upset No. 6 UVA in Washington, D.C.) He has a bachelor’s degree in organizational sciences as well as an MBA. Numbers have always intrigued Hart.

“I’m a math guy,” he said. “I like stats and all that.”

So does Odom, who’s had an analytics wiz on his staff since his days as head coach at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“What you measure, you can improve,” Odom said. “I think that’s the biggest lesson. If you measure it, you can get better at it. And so I think that’s the primary focus for us. We want to try to use these numbers to help our guys individually improve and use the numbers to help our team overall improve.”

When he started at VCU, Hart said, he met only a few others in college basketball who specialized in analytics. “I’m sure there were more, but now in this offseason alone, I’ve talked to 15, 20 kids who are doing the same thing as what I’m doing.”

Odom said: “You’re probably making a mistake if you’re not really diving into it.”

When Hart played at GW, he never heard analytics mentioned. “Maybe it was talked about with the staff, but [the players] never heard any of that stuff.”

During Odom’s tenure at UMBC, the first staffer to focus on analytics was Noah Ralby, a graduate assistant who had played at nearby Johns Hopkins University.

“At that point in time analytics were becoming more [prevalent],” Odom said. “They’d already really become a thing in the NBA, but it was just starting to be present in the college game, and we wanted to be on the forefront of it and try to be ahead, like we always want to do, on changes without changing our overall values.”

In 2021, Odom left UMBC to become head coach at Utah State University, and Ralby came with him as director of analytics. Hart joined the USU staff as a graduate student manager in 2022, and working with Ralby introduced him to analytics.

At VCU, Odom “thought it would be a perfect fit for me to go into that role,” Hart said, “and I’ve loved it ever since.”

Odom said Hart has “taken it to another level, and Noah would have, had he stayed. But Matt’s been a really good fit for me personally and then, more importantly, for our team.”

Hart said he tries “to collect as much data as I possibly can—just collect all the data into one easy-to-read thing for myself—and then disperse it to the coaching staff.”

Stats are omnipresent today, Hart noted. His job is to determine “what’s actually useful, what actually helps you win, what translates to winning,” he said. “On our staff, the assistants do different things, so they require different [data], so I do different things for different coaches. And then for Coach Odom, he’s big on analytics. He still coaches with feel, on what he sees, but he wants to know the numbers. So the stuff I give him is more simplified and easy, just a couple action items that are important. With the rest of the staff, there’s some more in-depth things that we can go back and forth on.”

A typical box score tracks 16 different stats, including shots, points, rebounds, steals, assists and minutes blocked. Hart’s breakdown is considerably detailed.

“There’s 58 different things that a player for us can do on the floor at any time,” Hart said.

“We [chart] assist opportunities, not just assists. We do hockey-assist opportunities. We do our offensive principles and defensive principles. Are you stopping in the paint off two [feet]? You’re either stopping or you’re wild, right? You’re not stopping. Are you finding [passing] windows on the perimeter for your teammates when they get in the paint? Are you sprinting to the corner? We track all of that. And those don’t show up in box scores.

“The defensive stuff—like rotation errors, positioning errors, ball-screen errors—we track all of that. And then things like walling up, good rotations, all of that, and then steals and blocks. We do all the normal stuff and then just add a bunch of process points … A player could [be graded on] four or five different things on any given possession.”

If a player makes a great pass to a teammate who then misses an open layup, the passer still gets full credit for the play, Hart said.

Once the season starts, the games will be Hart’s primary focus. During summer and preseason practices, however, he’s on his laptop “live-coding the possessions, offense, defense, and then who’s on the floor for which team,” Hart said. After practice he breaks down video clips of each possession and grades the team overall and the players individually.

“It’s a lot of work for one person,” Odom said, “and Matt’s amazing with the amount of work that he puts in relative to giving back to our team and our staff.”

After every practice, each player receives what is known as a CAV Score, and that reflects his overall performance. The team’s collective effort is graded too. Hart sends the scores to the team’s group text, as players can see how their teammates fared that day.

“Matt is really elite with how he analyzes our stats,” said Devin Tillis, who transferred from UC Irvine to UVA after the 2024-25 school year. “It’s not even just about our stats, it’s about doing all the little things. He tracks how many times we crash for rebounds or how many times we block somebody out, so it’s way more in-depth.”

Hart’s breakdowns can be jarring for players, Tillis said. “There could be a day where you think, ‘I had a great practice,’ because you got a lot of assists or a lot of points, but [the CAV Score shows] you didn’t do all the little things. So I think what’s good about it is it really makes you think about all the little things that you have to do. And you get better at those things, too.”

A player who shot 4 for 6 from 3-point range might believe he had an excellent practice, Hart said, only to receive a poor CAV Score. “It’s like, ‘You didn’t crash [the boards], you didn’t box out, you had six defensive rotation errors.’ It’s stuff that they don’t think about that is graded harshly. So it’s not about making shots. Obviously, you get points for making shots, but there’s always an example in practice where a guy took one shot or just made one shot, but he was the best player in practice because he did what he was supposed to do. Every year that happens.”

Since the advent of analytics in basketball, midrange shots have fallen out of favor, especially in the NBA, where the priorities on offense are layups, dunks and 3-pointers. Odom’s stance on that hotly debated topic?

“I don’t want guarded midrange shots,” he said, “but if a guy can prove that he can make open shots that are inside [the 3-point arc] that are good for us, then we want him to shoot them. We’re not saying, ‘OK, you are only allowed to do this or only allowed to do that,’ because that limits you. And sometimes the defense dictates the quality of the shot that you can get. Sometimes it’s the best shot you can get at the end of a clock, and so they better be ready to take it. Sometimes it’s best for that individual player. Again, they need to be ready and encouraged to do what they do well, because it’s playing to your strengths.”

Hart agreed.

“I have nothing against a midrange shot,” he said. “When I played, that was my favorite shot, a midrange jump shot. But for us, offensively and defensively, it’s all about efficiency, so we’re gonna take efficiency over inefficiency the majority of the time. Sometimes you’re gonna need it. We’re gonna need Malik Thomas to make a midrange pull-up at some point. Do we want him taking 15 of those a game? Probably not. We want him taking 15 3s if he’s open. There’s definitely a balance. It’s never black and white. And that’s the big thing with analytics.”

The Hoos’ coaches leaned on analytics as they put together their roster for 2025-26, “mostly to see if a player’s statistical profile would fit the way we play,” Hart said.

“A big thing for Coach is passing. Not only if they pass, but what are their passing numbers like? What are their turnovers like, if they handle the ball a lot? So we definitely use analytics to see if a guy would fit. And then we have to watch the film, If he fits on paper and he fits on video, this is a guy want to talk to.”

His fellow staffers value his work, Hart said, “so it’s easy for me to do it and to present it, because I know it’s going to be accepted. But with all that, Coach even tells the guys that it’s not going to determine who’s starting or who’s playing all the minutes, but it will determine if guys are willing to do what we’re asking them, because it’s tracked. We can see it. We don’t have to guess if this guy’s missing his box-outs or not crashing. We know. So it’s gonna help with the formation of lineups and players.”

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