Provo • It’s one thing to put together arguably the most talented roster in BYU basketball history.
It’s another to divide up the minutes.
Cougars coach Kevin Young revamped the program in the few short months since he was hired. He not only retained BYU’s core playmakers from a year ago — Dallin Hall, Richie Saunders, Trevin Knell — he also added two potential NBA Lottery Picks in Egor Demin and Kanon Catchings. That goes along with Utah transfer Keba Keita and Rutgers transfer Mawot Mag.
Young has an embarrassment of riches at the moment. And he is balancing how he’ll use them.
On the one hand, he doesn’t like playing guys for short bursts to rotate plenty of players in. But also he doesn’t want to tighten his rotation too early in the year.
“Definitely be more than seven or eight [players deep]. I don’t know how far that reaches. We are still trying to learn this group a lot,” he said Tuesday. “... We will whittle it down to a manageable roster as it relates to subbing. I’m not a fan of guys playing super short stints. I think guys need longer stints to get into a rhythm. There’s only so many minutes to be had. So it’s a competition.”
Young brought in Akash Sebastian, a former Phoenix Suns staffer, as BYU’s director of analytics to help him sift through the problem. He worked closely with Sebastian to figure out different subbing patterns with the Suns. But Young admitted this is a different beast than the NBA.
“It sounds obvious, but in the NBA world, we’re used to four 12-minute quarters. So you get in a pretty clear subbing pattern. That was something I was really heavily involved with in the NBA world. So I felt really comfortable there,” he said.
He continued, “Obviously this is a totally different thing. With timeouts, halves and so forth. So we are trying to map out what our substitution pattern is going to look like. For me, it is not just the starting five. But what combinations of guys pairs well with who and combinations like that.”
Young said he is still far away from naming a starting five — and whether Demin and Catchings will be in it.
Demin is a highly-touted prospect from Russia — a five-star, 6-9 guard. Catchings, a 6-9 forward and the No. 35-ranked recruit in the country last year, decommited from Purdue to play for Young.
Shooting guard Trevin Knell noted that Demin is already one of the better passers he’s played with.
“He just sees the floor in a different way than a lot of us,” Knell said. “We’ll do a play and he’ll come up to me and say, ‘Alright, let’s try this.’ And it will work. And we’ll do another play and he’ll say, ‘Let’s try this.’ And it works. He is super smart, super talented.”
Young said he isn’t worried at the moment how his starting five and rotation shakes out. Having quality backend depth, that may not get time, is part of the price of his approach on talent acquisition.
“This is really not something that keeps me up at night. I like having a competitive group with guys with talented backgrounds and resumes,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we’ll see how that plays out in practice.”
