Louisville basketball thriving after timeouts under Pat Kelsey. What the numbers tell us

Posted by author January 30, 2025 Basketball

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Louisville’s success scoring and getting stops after timeouts was a big factor in its undefeated January.
Across eight games during the month, the Cardinals had a +23 edge in ATO scoring, producing 53 points and conceding only 30.

Pat Kelsey called a timeout with 11.7 seconds to spare in the first half Tuesday night. His Louisville basketball team was already well on its way to a 10th consecutive victory, leading Wake Forest 42-21, but it never hurts to pad the cushion.

And lately, the 49-year-old Cincinnati native has been on fire when he puts dry-erase marker to whiteboard.

What Kelsey drew up in this huddle didn’t exactly go to plan on the court. A Demon Deacons defender stuck to sharpshooter Reyne Smith like glue, and he took a tumble; James Scott‘s screen for Chucky Hepburn wasn’t the cleanest. As a result, the senior point guard hoisted up a contested 3 with 1.4 seconds on the clock.

The ball touched nothing but net. The KFC Yum! Center went bananas. And the No. 22 Cardinals (16-5, 9-1 ACC) produced points on two of their three after-time-out (ATO) possessions during the second half en route to a 72-59 win.

“We’re just clicking,” Kelsey said.

During U of L’s 70-50 victory at Virginia on Jan. 4, Mike Rutherford of Card Chronicle birthed a meme on X, formerly Twitter, based on Kelsey’s ATO success. He posted a photo of the coach and wrote, “If someone texts you this picture it means they’re ready to score after a brief break.”

It was shared again and again and again during the program’s first undefeated January since 2009, when it earned the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament.

“If I was on my deathbed,” one fan wrote in a post to X on Jan. 11, not long after Louisville secured a crucial road win at Pittsburgh, “I’d ask my doctor to call time out and ask Pat Kelsey what to do. (The) man is an ATO machine.”

Just how good have the Cards been in these scenarios? The Courier Journal crunched the numbers to find out.

Before going any further, a note on how this study was conducted: The Courier Journal surveyed the StatBroadcast game logs from all eight of Louisville’s contests over the past month to track the amount of points it scored, and allowed, on ATO possessions.

Sequences where the Cards, or the teams they faced, retained possession after a miss and scored without a stoppage of play were included. Situations where a foul was committed before a timeout, resulting in free throws immediately after the break, were omitted.

That said, U of L produced 53 points by scoring on half (22 for 44) of its ATO opportunities in January. It had two games, the win at Pitt (4 for 7) and Tuesday’s victory over Wake Forest (5 for 8), in which it broke double digits after timeouts; scoring 10 and 13 points, respectively. And only four of its possessions ended in turnovers.

“Out of timeouts and special situations, we work on that all the time,” Kelsey said after the aforementioned win at Virginia, during which his team went 3 for 4 on ATO execution. “The opportunities don’t present themselves every game to use a lot of the things you work on, but, every day, you’re continuing to put deposits into that area so that, when we need them, we can bring them out of the mothball, so to speak.”

Smith accounted for 20 of Louisville’s points after timeouts over the past month. He hit six of his Division I-leading 82 3s on 11 attempts during these sequences. J’Vonne Hadley came in second with 11 points, followed by Hepburn with nine and Terrence Edwards Jr. with seven. Scott, Khani Rooths and Aboubacar Traore also chipped in two points apiece.

As of Wednesday, the Cards ranked 22nd nationally on KenPom.com in adjusted offensive efficiency (118.9).

Kelsey has said repeatedly that U of L’s defense has been the catalyst in its 10-game winning streak.

“There’s a movement going on with our team from a defensive perspective; and it starts in the minds and hearts of each guy in a Louisville jersey,” he said after Tuesday’s victory. “Getting stops matters, taking care of their assignment matters, picking up for a mistake of your teammate matters.

“Defense is an attitude; and our guys have been playing with that little bit of a chip on their shoulder for the better part of the last month and a half.”

To his point, the Cards owned a +23 advantage in ATO scoring during January by getting stops on 17 of their opponents’ 31 opportunities (54.8%). They conceded only 30 points — a low of zero on Jan. 14 at Syracuse, a high of seven a week later at SMU — and forced six turnovers.

Kelsey attributed a good deal of that success to his scout team, during practices and games.

“Memorizing the sets of the other teams, memorizing the baseline-out-of-bounds alignments of the other teams and identifying, when the other team lines up in the baseline out of bounds, what’s coming,” he said Tuesday. “They’re screaming it out to our players. That matters.”

As of Wednesday, U of L ranked 45th nationally on KenPom in adjusted defensive efficiency (97.5). The formulas powering BartTorvik.com say it has been the 17th-best team on that end (92.4) since the calendar flipped to 2025.

Will these trends continue down the stretch and into the postseason? We’re about to find out, but they certainly bode well for Kelsey’s revival.

Reach Louisville men’s basketball reporter Brooks Holton at bholton@gannett.com and follow him on X at @brooksHolton.