Tommy Lloyd’s fast-paced Arizona Wildcats were an inspiration for Akron coach John Groce

In the months after he led Akron into the 2022 NCAA Tournament while running the nation’s seventh-slowest adjusted tempo, then letting a near first-round upset of UCLA slip away, Zips coach John Groce sat down to study some video.

Maybe a different way might work even better.

First up for review: Gonzaga. Also: Arizona.

The Wildcats, who will face the Zips in an NCAA Tournament first-round game Friday in Seattle, won the Pac-12 and earned a No. 1 NCAA seed in 2021-22 during Tommy Lloyd’s first season as their head coach. That season, UA ranked in the top 10 in overall offensive efficiency, adjusted tempo and ratio of assists to made field goals.

Arizona moved the ball with a purpose and quickly.

Groce took notice.

“This was right after (Lloyd’s) first year and we wanted to try to figure out what fit our personnel and how we wanted to play,” Groce said. “I watched Gonzaga and there were some tendencies (from the Zags) in what he did at Arizona, certainly initially, and even now I’m sure that’s impacted his philosophy.”

Also having run quicker teams as the head coach at Ohio from 2008-09 and midrange-tempo teams at Illinois between 2012-13 and 2016-17, Groce decided to dial up a slightly faster tempo the past two seasons at Akron.

The Zips reached the NCAA Tournament again last season after a second-place finish in the Mid-American Conference, but Groce still ran a lot through post player Enrique Freeman for a good reason: Freeman became the MAC Player of the Year and a second-round NBA draft pick last season.

Groce also cited an advanced stat noting that Freeman ranked third last season in points per possession in the post behind only Purdue center Zach Edey and Youngstown State forward D.J. Burns.

To “one coach in our league, I said, ‘Man, if we didn’t throw it into him, a pro who was drafted by the Pacers, they should probably fire me. We got to get that guy the ball,’ ” Groce said.

But once Freeman and three other starters departed last spring, that’s when Groce really turned it on.

While going 28-6 overall and blowing through MAC play with a 17-1 record this season – then edging Miami (Ohio) on a winning floater from standout Nate Johnson with 2.3 seconds left in the MAC Tournament final – the Zips ran the 16th-fastest tempo in the nation.

They’ve also shared and shot the ball at a high rate. Akron ranks 52nd in the ratio of assists to made field goals (45.4) and 49th in 3-point shooting. They get 38.1% of their scoring off the 3, too.

“It was a style change and it was dictated by the personnel change,” Groce said. “We had a group of guys here for five years that were the all-time winningest class in school history. … All those guys were in the same class, all of them went on to play professional basketball at some level, highlighted by Freeman with the Pacers. And they all left. They were gone.

“So now we had four guys on the whole roster returning and combined with the newcomers we took, we thought we were going to be pretty deep. We thought we would need to change styles a little bit to fit that depth and the strengths of our personnel.”

As Groce dived deeper into coaching his more up-tempo team, he said he now even wonders if his Akron teams of the past two seasons might have been able to pull off a similar style.

Freeman, for one, was no plodder: A former walk-on, Freeman’s combination of size and mobility was one reason the Pacers drafted him at No. 50 overall.

“So we played a little bit differently with him, but I’m not so sure those guys couldn’t have played this style, the more we’ve played it,” Groce said. “You just have to make sure (it works) within what you do, and obviously, Tommy does a good job of that within what they do. They make sure their posts get touches.”

Groce said the Zips are foundationally similar to Arizona in how they want to run, though there are different wrinkles in how they do it. The Wildcats this season rank 54th in adjusted tempo, partially because the rugged Big 12 defenses they have faced – and their below-average perimeter shooting – have prompted them to go deeper in the shot clock.

Arizona ranks just 247th in 3-point percentage (32.4) and gets only 25% of its scoring from 3s, the 33rd least.

“We play with pace. That’s an emphasis for us and an emphasis for them,” Groce said. “You can tell it’s an emphasis for them in how quickly they run, when they get stops, how quickly they inbound the ball.”

While all Big 12 teams other than UCF (No. 11 fastest in Division I) and Oklahoma State (14) run a slower tempo than Arizona, half of the MAC’s teams are among the fastest 100 in college basketball and Groce said several nearby teams feature it, too.

That includes Xavier.

Yes, Xavier. Groce became a good friend of former Arizona coach Sean Miller while both were assistants at Xavier and North Carolina State in the early 2000s and Miller went on to mostly run midtempo offenses as a head coach at Xavier and at Arizona.

But since Arizona fired Miller in 2021 after a 12-year run in Tucson, Miller resurfaced at Xavier a year later and ran teams ranked 31st and 33rd in tempo over the previous two seasons.

This season, Xavier ranks 74th in tempo and reached the NCAA Tournament’s First Four with a 21-11 record.

These days, running works for Miller, Groce and, as always, Lloyd.

“There’s a lot of people trying to play that way,” Groce said. “A lot of teams, if they’re not taking it holistically, are taking parts of it stylistically.

“A lot of teams that are playing that style a little bit, and it’s fun to watch (Arizona). Man, they have a high assist rate. They really move the ball. They play with such great pace. … They play really fast, and we’ve done the same thing.”