Olen built his coaching reputation with an ability to be flexible based on personnel

The Journal reached out to several people around the college basketball world on Sunday to try and start getting some answers to the main question on most Lobo fans’ minds.

Who the heck is Eric Olen?

The 44-year-old former UC San Diego coach, who earlier in the day was named the 23rd coach in UNM Lobo men’s basketball history, is considered one of the rising stars in the game. But what does that mean about what we’ll see on the court?

One national college basketball journalist lauded Olen’s defense.

“Lobos fans can expect a team that will turn teams over and be able to score,” said Andy Katz, the former Journal reporter now working for NCAA.com and Turner Sports.

Another national college basketball analyst praised the offense.

“Eric Olen is one of the elite offensive minds in college basketball,” said Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports.

And a third summed up what so many in the game have started to feel about the fast-rising, albeit still rather unproven at the Division I level, coach.

“The guy can flat-out coach. Period,” said Jeff Goodman, analyst with the Field of 68 network. “He just pulled off one of the most impressive coaching jobs in the last decade, and people on the west coast have known about Olen for a while.”

As for specifics, Olen will tell you a lot of what we’ll see on the court depends on who actually makes up the roster.

This past season, he started four Division II transfers and didn’t have a player over 6-foot-8. He developed 6-6 Hawaii-Hilo transfer Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones, from New Zealand, into the Big West Player of the Year and a potential NBA player.

“I believe very much that players win games, coaches lose them,” Olen told the Journal. “So, we want to put our players in situations where they have a lot of freedom, but we also want to create enough structure where they’re confident in what their jobs are. And that’s, that’s a delicate balance to strike at times.”

Offense

Olen runs a five-out “flow” offense that, at least recently when the team lacked the size of some of their opponents, had very little feed the post for back-to-the basket type offense like UNM was able to use the past three seasons with big men like Nelly Junior Joseph, J.T. Toppin and Morris Udeze.

And rather than a two-man, pick-and-roll scheme with Donovan Dent and Junior Joseph, fans may now see pretty much any player on the court setting the screens.

“We set a lot of ball screens,” Olen said. “I think we’ve been top five or top 10 in the country in ball screen frequency over the last several years. But we don’t just do it with one individual person all the time. We kind of mix up who’s in the actions and who’s in the ball screens...

“A lot of it’s going to be match up dependent, because we don’t want you to be able to hide right? A lot of teams want to switch the ball screen to defend pick-and-pop. So maybe they’re trying to take their five and put them in a different position. But we don’t want to let people do that. We’ll kind of have versatility.”

UCSD this season averaged 79.3 points per game, though Olen would be the first to tell you he isn’t much into traditional box score stats like scoring average or rebounds per game for his players, paying more attention to things like usage, true shooting percentage and rebounding rate — stats based on a player’s efficiency when on the floor, not just raw numbers accumulated over a 40 minute game.

UCSD ranked 61st in offensive efficiency per KenPom.com (UNM was 75th) and scored 39.7% of its points off 3-pointers, which ranked 16th out of 364 Division I teams (UNM’s 25.5% 3-point scoring distribution ranked 336th).

Defense

While one article in the San Diego Union-Tribune described the Tritons’ defense as an “unorthodox matchup zone,” Olen is quick to point out that he’s run plenty of man in his career, too, and zone was geared toward his roster this season.

One thing that isn’t dependent on the roster is forcing turnovers.

“We’re going to be aggressive on that side of the ball, but we’re also going to play to our strengths,” Olen said, emphasizing he would love to land several skilled big men in the transfer portal.

“If we get the right guys, we’re going to tailor our scheme accordingly, but we’re always going to be aggressive,” Olen said. “I do think that the turnovers are important, and we want to create margin there.

“I mean, one of the emphasis for us is always going to be possession positive. We want to win the possession battle.”

The Tritons averaged 15.9 forced turnovers per game, No. 8 in the country (UNM’s 15.1 ranked 18th), and were No. 2 nationally in turnover rate, forcing opponents into a turnover on one of nearly every four possessions (23.3%).

Overall, UCSD ranked 32nd in defensive efficiency, per KenPom.com (UNM ranked 20th).