Sunday Column: For Shrewsberry, It’s About Knowing Which Buttons to Push … And Which He Doesn’t Yet Have

It would be easy to tell who the good coaches were if they all had a few games with the exact same roster. If the players were the same, play-calling and strategy would become more evident. You’d be able to see which coach players played the hardest for, how the coaches made the individual talents form the most effective team fit.

Since this is not possible, we must measure the quality of coaches not just by how successful their teams are but how successful they are in relation to the talent and chemistry – and availability – of the players on the floor. And most coaches, particularly in an era where the transfer portal is less an option and more a matter of course, are in the habit of adjusting on the fly. It’s not about who can draw up the best play but who can find the play that the five guys on hand are best equipped to make.

This is where Micah Shrewsberry is in Year 1 of his Penn State tenure. He is making the most of what he has, and in doing so is producing a brand of basketball that isn’t exactly elegant but has made his first Nittany Lion team perhaps more competitive than it ought to be.

Penn State is still dead last in the Big Ten in total offense and turnover margin, which are usually two fairly telling statistical categories. The team’s leading scorer, Jalen Pickett, checks in at 20th in the conference with 13.0 points per game and is on pace to be the lowest average by the team’s leading scorer in 14 years. Pickett is a crafty scorer and one of the few Nittany Lions who can consistently generate his own shot; he and Sam Sessoms can get hot against certain matchups, and when the locked-in version of Seth Lundy appears, he can score on anyone. By and large, though, Penn State’s offense is best personified by big man John Harrar, who averages 10.5 points per game and scores with will as much as skill. Like his team, he relies on patience and positioning to get his buckets.

All of this is a long way of saying this team is not going to win many shootouts. Shrewsberry has no interest in even trying; his team is ranked 347th in pace of play out of 358 teams. To win, the Nittany Lions need to lean on their defense (third in the Big Ten and 45th in the country in points allowed per game), make just enough threes to keep opponents from packing the paint, and limit their turnovers, which has been not as easy as you would hope for a team that takes the air out of the ball the way Penn State does.

Does this mean that Shrewsberry is a defensive-minded coach who will look to recruit gritty, deliberate players who will turn most games into the equivalent of a 13-7 football game? Of course not. It means he is making the most of what he has to work with.

The same thing applies on a micro level as well as the macro level. He moved Sessoms to the bench, a role the small but dynamic guard seems better suited to, even when it meant inserting Dallion Johnson, a player who might not have been ready for extended minutes, into that spot. He shortened the minutes of struggling transfers Jaheam Cornwall and Jalanni White, even though it meant pushing other players in the rotation to heavier minute totals and even when Greg Lee, such an important piece of Penn State’s frontcourt, was again forced to the bench with an injury (Viewed through this prism, the desire to slow the game down makes even more sense).

It’s been impressive to see his players – especially when a few of them have been overextended from a minutes perspective – play hard for Shrewsberry each night. That’s what you want from a coach. But previous Penn State coaches have gotten their teams to buy in and play hard and not gotten results. What makes what Shrewsberry has accomplished with a slapped-together team impressive is that, regardless of the opponent, the Nittany Lions have been able to hang in against, if not outright beat, the vast majority of their conference opponents. Maybe that’s a low bar, but it was hard to say that of many previous Nittany Lion teams whose coaches were in their third or fourth seasons.

We can’t know what Shrewsberry would have done with Lamar Stevens and Tony Carr, or Talor Battle and Jeff Brooks, just as we can’t know how he’d fare with the current and loaded Purdue roster that he helped recruit. Nor do we know what Penn State coaches of yesteryear would have done with this scrappy but offensively challenged roster. But what he has done with this particular group against this wild ride of a schedule strongly suggests that he is capable of taking Penn State teams with only slightly more offensive talent to new heights. Or, at the very least, that he will be able to extract the most out of them as the circumstances will allow, which might be the most important quality a coach can possess.