Length, touch make Hogs’ Vanover a formidable weapon

• Connor Vanover (Arkansas Athletics)

By Chris Dortch (@cdortch)

As a 6-foot-4 seventh-grade basketball player, Connor Vanover discovered a secret weapon that came along with his prodigious height.

Wingspan.

Vanover recalls one game during which a player drove past him on his way to the basket, and for the first time being able to do something about it.

“I just came from behind and swatted [the shot],” Vanover says. “That’s when I knew I had this ability. If someone drove past me, I could just knock the shot away, and there was nothing they could do about it. If they tried to go up, I could sometimes take the ball out of their hands.”

Vanover wasn’t finished growing—far from it. With parents who each stand about 6-2, he was destined to become uncommonly tall. By the time he left Little Rock’s Arkansas Baptist Prep after his junior season and headed for famed Findlay Prep in Las Vegas, he was 7-3. And even with that height, he had a plus wingspan of 7-5.

Vanover’s length made his everyday practice jousts with teammate Bol Bol, 7-2 with a 7-8 wingspan, useful exercises for both of them. Vanover transferred to Findlay to play against better competition. He didn’t even have to leave the practice floor to find it.

“That was the first time I actually got to go against somebody really similar to me in height and skills,” Vanover says. “[Bol] could shoot it well. He could get to the rim and he had really good touch around the rim. Going against him was almost like going against myself. We really learned a lot from each other.”

After graduation, Bol took the more conventional route to the game’s next levels, signing with Oregon, where after one promising but injury-plagued season, he moved on to the NBA after being drafted by the Denver Nuggets with the 44th overall pick.

Vanover’s path post-Findlay Prep has been more circuitous, but it eventually led him to where he needed to be all along—the University of Arkansas, where in five games—admittedly not against the best competition, he’s already racked up a list of rare accomplishments.

More on that later.

That Vanover eventually landed at Arkansas—where his mother Robyn played from 1986-89 and led the Razorbacks in blocked shots for three seasons—was influenced by the firing of three Division I head coaches and the hiring at Arkansas of Eric Musselman, who has found success as a college coach running his teams like the NBA franchises he once led. To Musselman, the NCAA transfer portal is a tool to be utilized like a trade or the waiver wire. His 2018 Nevada team that stunned the college basketball world in 2018 by overcoming two double-digit second-half deficits against Texas (14 points) and Cincinnati (22) in the first two rounds of the NCAAs included nine transfers, and five of them—notably twins Caleb and Cody Martin and Jordan Caroline—started. During his first five months on the job at Arkansas, Musselman signed five transfers.

One of them was Vanover, who by that time had already signed with two other schools.

Vanover chose Memphis out of Findlay Prep because it was close to home and he thought he could fit into then-coach Tubby Smith’s system. But when Smith was abruptly fired so Memphis could hire hometown hero and former Tiger and NBA star Penny Hardaway, Vanover relocated to the University of California, where he played for a season and proved—by averaging 12.8 points and 5.0 rebounds in his final 10 games—he was more than capable of competing at the Power 5 level. But Cal fired coach Wyking Jones after Vanover’s freshman season, sending him on the move again. He considered several schools during his re-recruitment and narrowed his final three choices to Maryland, Vanderbilt, and Arkansas, where Mike Anderson, who had been coach for eight seasons, was fired in late March 2019 and quickly replaced by Musselman.

It took more than four years for the well-traveled Vanover to finally land where he wanted to be all along.

When Vanover was a freshman in high school, Anderson and his staff offered a scholarship. “But they didn’t pursue me after that,” Vanover says. “The system they ran was fast-paced, and I think they didn’t feel like I could thrive in it.”

Musselman’s teams hardly play slow, but he had no such reservations about Vanover fitting into his system. Vanover eventually chose Arkansas because he could play for the team he grew up watching, but also because Musselman and his staff had done their homework, clearly demonstrating to the big man how he would be utilized on offense and defense. Vanover was quickly sold.

The Arkansas staff hoped Vanover would be granted immediate eligibility in 2019-20 because Jones had been fired at Cal, but a waiver request was denied by the NCAA. That allowed Vanover the luxury of what Musselman, preferring to use an NBA term rather than the word redshirt, calls a developmental year.

Vanover took advantage of the year on the sidelines, bulking up to around 250 pounds and developing a jump hook along with the nearly extinct Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhook. Last summer, Musselman told Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook he was pleased with Vanover’s year away from competition.

“Everybody should add to their repertoire when they have a development year,” Musselman says. “So I think it’s awesome. … [But] the one thing that really sticks out with me about Connor is how he’s grown as a man. When we talk to him he’s not shy anymore. He talks with great confidence; he walks with confidence. It’s been cool to see him change and become much, much more confident than maybe what he was a year ago.”

Despite having battled COVID-19 during the offseason, Vanover was ready for the Hogs’ belated regular-season opener. In a 142-62 blasting of Mississippi Valley State on Nov. 25, Vanover produced eye-popping numbers—23 points, eight rebounds, three blocked shots, and 4-of-5 shooting from 3. He played just a tad more than 18 minutes.

That performance and the non-COVID-19 illness of a teammate thrust Vanover into the starting lineup in Arkansas’ next game against a veteran North Texas team, and he didn’t disappoint, delivering six points, but more importantly, 16 rebounds and six blocked shots.

There aren’t many players in the country capable of knocking down four 3s or grabbing 16 boards in a game. In the 2019-20 season, per KenPom.com, only 61 managed to do so.

In Arkansas’ next game, against well-coached UT Arlington, Vanover contributed 12 points, two boards, and two blocks.

Mavericks coach Chris Ogden came away impressed.

“He’s a very interesting player,” Ogden says. “Because they have taught him how to use angles to take advantage of his size and length. And then throw in the fact that he can really shoot makes him a tough matchup.”

Vanover’s fourth game, against Lipscomb and its versatile big man Ahsan Asadullah, impressed yet another opposing coach after he played just 15 minutes of an 86-50 rout yet still managed six points, nine rebounds, four blocks, and two 3-pointers.

“Vanover has a chance to be special,” Lipscomb coach Lennie Acuff says. “He’s a legitimate 7-3 who started his career [at Arkansas] 8 of 11 from 3. He can stretch the floor at the five-spot, and he is only going to get better. As good as he has been offensively, I think he will impact the game more on the defensive end. Big time rim protection and his feet are better than you would think. He is also being extremely well-coached on both ends by coach Musselman and his staff.”

Vanover has worked his entire life to get to this stage.

“I feel like I’ve always had decent hand-eye coordination,” he says. “I always worked on it as I kept growing. I made myself into a surprisingly decent ball handler. I would always work on ball-handling drills—with two balls, and a bunch of different stuff. That hand-eye coordination, along with length and my size, allows me to bring different things to the table. 

“That combination gives a lot of different teams problems. They don’t really know what to do with me.”

Vanover thinks he inherited his shooting touch from his mother—"She could step out and hit midrange or corner shots or from the elbows,” he says. “That was her money shot. She could really knock it down.”—but he’s content to just sit back and let the offense come to him.

That’s a good thing, because Arkansas doesn’t run plays for him.

“What really intrigued me about coach Musselman is he runs an open offense,” Vanover says. “It’s free flowing, and that really goes with what I’m able to do. I don’t hunt shots in the offense. I just help everything flow together by giving us another person to step out and make 3s.”

Whether he scores makes little difference to Vanover, who derives great pleasure from serving, as Musselman referred to him after a recent game, as the Hogs’ “goalie.” Vanover is practically a one-man zone while his teammates apply defensive pressure on the perimeter.

“I want to be on the floor doing whatever I can,” says Vanover, who after five games was averaging 10.0 points, 8.8 rebounds, and 3.6 blocked shots and shooting .576 from the field and .450 from 3. “Grabbing rebounds and blocking shots are my other ways to do that. I enjoy not letting other people score. Even if I get a goaltend. Not letting [opponents] see their shots go in the basket can be sort of intimidating. Even if they try to score, I can mess everyone up who wants to try to get to the rim.”

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