Yuri Collins swears he’s not counting assists. Well, at least not usually. But when 20 assists in a single game is achievable, you have to at least try, right?
“I didn’t really start hunting [assists] until I got to 17,” Collins says with a laugh. “Then, I was like, ‘I might as well get three more.’”
Collins is college basketball’s assist king, and the distance between his throne and the rest of the sport keeps getting bigger and bigger. After leading the country in assists per game at 7.9 a season ago, the Saint Louis floor general has upped that number to 11.9 per contest through nine games in 2022–23. No other player is averaging more than 8.2. Collins has had five games this season with 13 or more assists, including 20 against Tennessee State and 14 against Southern Illinois in the last week. And he’s done all this while decreasing his turnovers from a season ago from 4.1 to 3.1 per game.
Jake Crandall/USA TODAY Network
“There’s guys with feel [for the game] and then there’s guys like him,” Billikens coach Travis Ford says.
Ford, a former star point guard for Rick Pitino at Kentucky himself, didn’t have to go far to find his floor general. Collins attended high school at St. Mary’s in St. Louis, just under five miles from the university’s campus. From the first time Ford saw Collins play as a high schoolsophomore, he knew he had something special. He turned to his assistant coaches with one message: “We have to have him.”
Saint Louis jumped into Collins’s recruitment early, and the persistence paid off with a commitment even as more prominent programs started circling. By the end of his first month in college basketball, he was the Billikens’ starting point guard, earning a reputation for being one of the best passers and defenders in the Atlantic 10. But his game really took off in 2021–22, when he took on a more featured role after preseason A-10 Player of the Year Javonte Perkins went down with a season-ending knee injury a few weeks before the season opener. In his absence Collins blossomed, seeing his scoring average more than double from 5.1 to 11.1 ppg and topping the country in assists.
That star turn amped up the attention nationally on a player who felt under-recruited out of high school. So in mid-April, Collins entered his name in the transfer portal, instantly becoming one of the top available players. His phone blew up as he fielded calls from “the biggest [schools] you can think of” that were interested in adding his services. But less than a week after his initial announcement, Collins announced his return to Saint Louis for a fourth season, turning down those bigger opportunities to stay with Ford in his hometown.
“I don’t regret my decision at all,” Collins says. “A lot of people still tell me all the time, ‘You should have went here, you should have went there, your [NBA] chances would have been better,’ but I feel like I’m exactly where I belong.”
The results have been eye-popping. His 14-assist, no-turnover season debut against Murray State set the tone for a record-setting start. According to Jared Berson, no men’s player in the last decade had tallied more than 90 assists in his first nine games of a season. Collins has 107. The 20-assist, one-turnover outburst against Tennessee State was just the second time in the past decade a player has tallied 20 assists in a game against a Division I team. The other player? Trae Young, who had 22 against Northwestern State in 2017.
Collins feels out his opponent to open games, figuring out where the holes will be. Then he attacks.
“I kinda get that feel within the first three or four minutes of a game. … I know the weaknesses and strengths the defense has and where I can pick them apart,” Collins says. “Once I start getting going, it’s hard to stop it because I know all your weaknesses; I know where I can get you at.”
He attacks those weaknesses with almost unfathomable precision and touch. A compilation of his best assists this year gets more and more audacious by the highlight, from one-handed whipped bounce passes to no-look cross-court darts, almost all through heavy traffic and almost all right on target, in stride. Collins is often passing players open like a quarterback would, anticipating where spaces will appear before they pop open and hitting them with the perfect pass every time. And he does it all with an assassin-like approach, rarely celebrating or showing any emotion at all.
“In the game that he had 20 assists the other night, there were 5–7 plays where I said, ‘Wow,’” Ford says. “You don’t see it coming. He sees things so far in advance and he trusts his teammates that they’ll keep running, keep cutting.”
These aren’t passes you can easily practice. A shooter can get better by going into the gym every morning and taking 1,000 shots. But passes like these can’t be simulated in an empty arena. They require an innate instinct few players have. So Collins pores over countless hours of film, watching everything from his own games to Chris Paul’s and Luka Dončić’s, studying timing, angles and reads. Then, when he gets on the practice floor, he tests new things out … occasionally even pushing the envelope too far.
“I take a lot of risks in practice,” Collins says. “Even Coach Ford will tell me sometimes that I turned it over too much in practice, but I’m just trying stuff.”
Ford says, for the most part, he’s willing to live with the occasional head-scratcher as a tax for the brilliance Collins so often produces.
“The positives far outweigh the negatives, that’s for sure,” Ford says. “He has the ball in his hands 95% of the time, so it’s honestly shocking he doesn’t turn the ball over more than he does.”
Perhaps the most notable part of Collins’s game, though, is how unselfish he is. He makes it known he’s more than just a facilitator, but he’s clearly not interested in hunting shots if that’s not what the defense gives him. Exhibit A: Collins scored 21 points on a season-high 13 shots against Providence, then turned around the next game and took just one shot in a 15-assist masterpiece against NAIA school Paul Quinn. It’s a quality that Ford says is “unheard of” these days.
“Everybody wants to score. And if he wanted to, Yuri could average 20 points per game. He can get to his spots so easy and he can score the ball,” Ford says. “What I love about him is he gets a feel for the game as the game is going on, which games he needs to score, which games he needs to run the offense and set everybody up. And it’s usually all based on how teams are playing him.”
Collins is the heartbeat of a Saint Louis team ranked No. 40 by KenPom and considered the favorite to win the A-10, thanks to early-season wins against Providence and Memphis. One pass at a time, he’s moving the Billikens closer to accomplishing the one goal they’ve yet to achieve in his time there: a trip to the NCAA tournament.
Dave Kallmann/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/USA TODAY Network
Five observations from the week in college hoops:
- My trip to see Marquette’s upset win over Baylor was a good reminder of why Shaka Smart is right at home in Milwaukee. Watching fans cheer on “kills” (three straight defensive stops) and deflections as the Golden Eagles won with three- and four-star prospects Smart developed was quite the contrast from his Texas days. It’s a good reminder of how important fit is in evaluating coaches.
- Speaking of fit, Chris Beard has been just what the doctor ordered at Texas. His relentless energy in engaging the UT student body has changed the vibe around the Longhorns’ program, and it was palpable again in their win over Creighton on Wednesday. A sparkling new arena certainly helps, but Beard is clearly on the way to accomplishing what he did at Texas Tech: getting a football school to become highly engaged with basketball.
- It’s great seeing star freshmen Cam Whitmore (Villanova) and Nick Smith Jr. (Arkansas) finally on the floor after preseason injuries. They could be the two best NBA prospects in college basketball this season, and in Smith’s case, his return lifts the Razorbacks into the national title picture.
- In less than two weeks, Kent State has played Houston and Gonzaga wire-to-wire on the road. Rob Senderoff has a team no No. 4 or No. 5 seed will want to see in the NCAA tournament come March.
- Youngstown State’s Dwayne Cohill put together perhaps the best half you’ll ever see Sunday in a win over Wright State. Cohill scored 30 points on 11-for-11 shooting in the second half to rally the Penguins to a conference win, capped by an off-backboard alley-oop dunk to himself.
