Slow GYERO day, so hopefully nobody minds if I indulge in a bit of a deep dive on what’s been going on with our defense. This was inspired by Pope’s comments today, which I found very interesting. If you missed it, he said “maybe my faith in the numbers is getting challenged right now… I’ve been an analytics guy my whole career, and haven’t felt bludgeoned like I have by the numbers, especially recently.” He went on to say we are the least disruptive team in the league. He also specifically mentioned midrange shots, off-the-dribble shots, and several other things.
To start with, here is a plot of our game-by-game defensive efficiency, which is basically how many points we give up per 100 possessions.
Couple things jump out: the Ole Miss game was our worst defensive performance of the season (2nd worst was actually the Florida win). Secondly, we started the season pretty solid defensively, but have fallen off a cliff recently. In particular, we have really tanked the last 5 games, so let’s focus on those.
In those 5 games, we are:
- 2nd in adjOE (barely behind Missouri)
-
244th in adjDE.
What’s driving the precipitous fall? Several things, but I’ll highlight just a few:
1. Teams are taking 51.1% of their total FGAs against us from 3, which is a preposterous rate. Unfortunately, despite this huge volume, they’re also shooting 37.1% from 3 on these attempts, which is a really high number. Div-I average is about 33.5. Again, this number includes the Tennessee 11-45 performance, so that tells you how well everybody else is shooting it against us.
2. The trade off is we are allowing only 18% of opponent’s shots to come at the rim, which is incredible. The best number for the whole season is only 24.8%. So where are the rest of the shots coming from? Midrange, which is where you would like your opponents to take a ton of shots. However, our opponents are also hitting 51.9% of their midrange 2s over this span. Div-I average is about about 37%.
In fact, our opponents are shooting unbelievably well from just about everywhere. Here are some field goal percentages and percentiles for our opponents over this 5-game span:
- at the rim: 76.3% (100th percentile)
- midrange: 51.9% (100th percentile)
- above-the-break 3s: 38.4% (97th percentile)
Look at this shooting chart:
That is a
lot of red. “Bludgeoned” is a pretty good word for that.
3. Our forced-turnover rate is 7.9%, which is good for 364th place. There are 364 teams in Division I. And the gap between us and number 363 is a full percentage point.
In summary, our strategy seems to have been to keep teams away from the rim by not gambling and sagging off “non-shooters.” On paper, that would seem to make sense with a depleted roster, and it worked very well against Tennessee. However, it’s not working at all against everybody else.
In general, the most likely explanation for outlier performances is a small sample size. If you flip a coin 40 times, there’s an 80% chance of getting 5 heads in a row at least once. However, it’s really hard to ignore that abysmal turnover rate, and I don’t think Pope is doing that - he also said that maybe teams are outperforming their expectations against us just because they’re so comfortable.
All in all, no definitive answers here, but I actually felt a lot better after hearing him talk about things today. I think he recognizes the issues and will do what he can to address them. I also think even if nothing changes it’s extremely unlikely that teams will continue to shoot this well against us the rest of the season.
