Jaylen Wells is WSU's (not so) secret sauce

Good morning! Yesterday, I found myself ready to write again after spending the weekend in Bellingham and Vancouver celebrating my birthday with my family — first, attending a rock ‘n’ roll show at the venerable Wild Buffalo on Friday, then, crossing the border on Saturday in pursuit of the best gluten free¹ bakery we could find. (We totally found it. And it was incredible.)

We also had some solid barbecue for dinner and found a killer record store in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. I came home with a couple of fun albums — one picked by me, the other by my youngest as a birthday gift — and another son found some CDs and tapes because those are about as cool to him as records are to me. Go figure.

But mostly, the trip provided a nice distraction after Thursday’s disappointment that was compounded by Saturday’s unwelcome news that USC beat Arizona. Because I was busy, I had little time to stew.

Now that I’ve returned to real life, I’m thinking about hoops again. And with the Pac-12 tournament tipping off today and about to take over our attention, I wanted to make sure to write about something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for weeks.

Jaylen Wells is freaking awesome.

The Pac-12 revealed its all-conference selections yesterday, and while Kyle Smith (Coach of the Year), Myles Rice (Freshman of the Year, all-conference first team) and Isaac Jones (all-conference first team) all were properly recognized, Wells …

… well, Wells got screwed. He was named just an honorable mention as not quite one of the top 15 players in the conference.

That, my friends, is insane.

By now you know the broad strokes of how Wells ended up at WSU, up-transferring from Sonoma State after being a Division II all-American there. He was the second D-II transfer to WSU in the last few years; Tyrell Roberts was the first, and he had mixed success in his one season in Pullman. So naturally, there were questions about just what we should expect from Wells, even as there were rumblings that the coaching staff really liked him, never mind the fact that he is all of 6-foot-8 and not 5-9.

Wells didn’t light the world on fire out of the gate, mainly because of injury; he sat out the first game of the season and then played just six minutes combined in the next two, including the neutral site loss to Mississippi State.

After recovering, Wells ramped up and settled into a sixth man role off the bench for a dozen games: 22 minutes a night, 9.3 points, showing a deadly stroke from deep by shooting 41% beyond the arc. Like Roberts, Wells was struggling to make his 2s — just 31% — but he was adding 4.8 rebounds, so his contributions were a big net positive for a reserve.

The team, though, hit a wall during that time. Eight wins in the first nine turned into four losses in the next six. This included going 1-3 to start Pac-12 play, and the season was on the brink. Wells wasn’t exactly helping the cause with his up-and-down play against the stiffer competition.

Smith decided he needed to make a change to the lineup and go all-in on size — and that meant replacing Kymany Houinsou² with Wells a starter and making him the nominal shooting guard. It was risky, and far from a sure bet; Wells would be relied upon even more for scoring, and he’d also have to defend perimeter players.

Boy, did he rise to the occasion.

In starting the final 16 games of the regular season, Wells became one of the most important players on the team … and arguably one of the best players in all of the Pac-12. In 36 minutes a night, he averaged 15.8 points, 4.6 rebounds, 1.3 assists, and just 0.5 turnovers(!), displaying an increasing array of offensive skills that demonstrated just how it was that he averaged better than 22 points a year ago at the lower level.

Evolving from just a spot-up shooter, Wells showed a deft ability to not just get to different spots on the floor, but to make shots from all sorts of different angles. The pinnacle was when he dropped 27 points on Arizona; whatever questions anyone might have still had about Wells’ ability against the highest levels of Division I, they were erased once and for all on that night:

In 20 conference games, Wells finished second in the Pac-12 in offensive rating — an insane 129.8 — driven by some incredible shooting. Even after going 1-of-10 in the season finale against UW, he was 44% from beyond the arc (third in the conference) as a high-volume shooter (101 attempts, more than 5 per game) while also upping his rate from inside the arc (48% on 107 attempts) and becoming nearly automatic from the free throw line (86%, third in the Pac-12). He turned the ball over on less than 6% of the possessions he uses — best in the league by a mile, which is crazy for a guy who actually puts the ball on the floor with some regularity.³

That kind of incredible efficiency is a major, major reason why the Cougs have gone 13-3 in that stretch, both ascending into the AP poll and achieving “lock” status for their first NCAA tournament appearance since 2008.

It might even be fair to say that Wells is the reason WSU has done that.

Obviously, Myles Rice and Isaac Jones have been ultra important, and I don’t want to diminish their leadership. However, the emergence of Wells as a legitimate third scoring threat is what supercharged this team. There’s a reason why NBA teams are always trying to assemble a Big Three — devising a plan to defend three legitimate scorers who beat you in different ways is a really, really tough thing to do.

The coaches who voted on the all-conference teams should know that. Shame on them.

If you’re wondering how unusual it is for a D-II up-transfer to do this sort of thing at the high-major level … so was I! So, I decided to investigate.