Trends in offensive and defensive efficiency rankings

by TheCrestedHelm on Dec 9, 2009 12:15 PM CST

[Bumped. Defense! Defense! -KJ]

Prescript: I started this post a week ago, and in the meantime The Geeks have beaten me to it. The cause of the delay is my inability to figure out how to post excel charts despite literally hours of trying and some advice from KJ. So I decided to post the info as a table instead, which has less visual impact but will have to do.

I thought it would be interesting to look at trends in where the MSU Basketball team has ranked in terms of offensive and defensive efficiency. Mr. Gasaway and our own KJ are the main insprirers of this post, but it was John Gasaway, in his Big Ten Wonk days, who first noticed a couple of years ago that the conventional wisdom regarding our basketball team was generally wrong. Probably because our first era of truly elite sustained success was the Flintstone era around the turn of the millenium, MSU has generally has the reputation of a hard nosed defensive team that is sometimes, but not always, offensively challenged and is prone to winning ugly. I believe it was in the 2006 season that Mr. Gasaway noticed that the CW was completely wrong - we had an efficient offense but our D was mediocre.

In observing posts over the years on KJ's old blog and the former Big Ten Wonk blog, there is generally much fretting over Tom Izzo's set-oriented offensive scheme. People complain that it is predictable, stifles creativity, and is easier to scout than more flexible schemes. I don't know enough about basketball offense to really say one way or the other, but looking at our efficiency ranking, there appears to be much ado about nothing. Granted, we have turnover issues from time to time, but offensively speaking, we have been remarkably consistent, and good, through the last half-decade. I pulled adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency rankings from Kenpom.com from 2004 to this year. These are our offensive and defensive rankings, not the raw efficiency scores, so low numbers are good. Here is the table:

Year	Off	Def
2004	12	97
2005	6	25
2006	18	103
2007	38	14
2008	12	26
2009	20	10
2010	30	70

The numbers clearly shows that we are much more consistent, and consistently good, on offense than on defense. This belies our stereotype. It also explains why Izzo spends a lot of time fretting about our D – it is clearly the side of the ball that exhibits more variance in performance. Over the past 6 full seasons, we have finished outside the top 20 on offense exactly once, and then we were still a fairly respectable 38. The stats show that our average finish on offense is 17th in the nation, and the confidence interval shows we have a 95 percent chance, on an annual basis, of finishing in the top 30. Not bad.

On defense, the story is somewhat less rosy. We are very good some years (last year we finished number 10 in defensive efficiency) but in other years we are less-than-stellar. It’s not so much that we are consistently mediocre but that we are inconsistent, and the years where we are not so good on D are the years when we have less post-season success. Over the six seasons I pulled data for we finished an average of 45th in the nation in defensive efficiency. We exhibit more variance on that side of the ball (standard deviation is 42 as opposed to 11 for offensive efficiency ranking).

This year so far our D looks a lot like our D in 2004 and 2006, which were not notable for successful postseason performance (or league championships for that matter). We clearly need to improve on that side of the ball, and that is true even if we throw out the UNC game as an anomaly. Last year we started out so-so on defense, but we had a very solid post defender sitting on the bench injured. This year the improvement has to come from the group that is already getting playing time.

This is a FanPost, written by a member of the TOC community. It does not represent the official positions of The Only Colors, Inc.--largely because we have no official positions.

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Good stuff

Just to clarify my record: I think most of my concerns about overreliance on set plays have had more to do with volatility in offensive performance (the turnover explosions) than with baseline, season-long offensive performance. When teams can force out of set plays with tough man-to-man defense, things often fall apart.

Defense is definitely the key this year.

Fight for The Only Colors: Green and White!

by KJ@theonlycolors on Dec 9, 2009 12:23 PM CST reply actions

I'm with you

The turnovers are maddening, and I think the sets are part of it – I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the opponent jump the passing lane when we are passing from the point to a guy on the wing coming around a screen. You can almost count on it happening a couple of times a game. Teams seem to know where the ball is going.

One thing that puzzles me is that Izzo wants to run, so you think he would pick a simpler half court offense to master. If you want your half court offense to be option number two you’d think you’d spend most of your time practicing UNCs secondary break and pick a half-court offense that’s simpler to run. I guess maybe there isn’t a simpler offense – I really have no idea whether (for instance) a motion offense or the new fad – the dribble drive – is easier to learn. It seems to take people a while to settle into our offense though, and given that Coach Cal uses a bunch of one and dones to run the dribble drive, it seems that must be easier to learn.

by TheCrestedHelm on Dec 9, 2009 7:56 PM CST up reply actions

Reasons?

Great stuff. I think you are exactly right that this team will go only as far as its defense, and that far it is a concern. There is really not a single player who stakes his reputation and playing time on defense. Most bewildering is the lack of progress of the juniors, who seem no more committed to defense than last year, and only marginally better than their freshmen years.

I wonder what explains the year to year variation in the quality of the defense. Izzo sometimes suggests that team depth helps the defense but arguably his best defensive team the 07 team was one of his most thin teams. Is it the presence of a lock down defender? Walton was on teams with quite different defensive levels. It obviously can’t be Izzo’s defensive philosophy (no press, no zones), since that has not really changed from year to year. This year, defensive weaknesses seem attributable to the weaknesses of the guards, and the inexperience of what is a pretty short front line (Morgan is the only upperclassman). But there does not seem to be a pattern from year to year.

by Anderlecht on Dec 9, 2009 1:10 PM CST reply actions

I think it's the players

Ager, and to a lesser extent Brown, were never very good perimeter defenders. Ager especially had a hard time fighting through screens. The common thread in the past few years has been the combination of Suton and Walton. I think Neitzel turned himself into a pretty good defender in the end – he was a pretty tenacious guy.

This year I think our lack of height is a problem, plus we are young on the interior where we are basically starting freshmen and sophmores. Hopefully they’ll mesh as the year goes on. We are OK as far as defending perimeter shots – teams have generally struggled from the perimeter against us. I haven’t seen enough games to say whether we’re preventing dribble penetration as well as we should be.

by TheCrestedHelm on Dec 9, 2009 8:24 PM CST up reply actions

Taking another look

I think it’s effective height. the 2003-2004 team was small with the exception of Paul Davis. Naymick and Rowley were freshmen and didn’t play much, so Alan Anderson, at 6’6" was our power forward, and we didn’t have much size coming off the bench.

The situation was similar in 2005-2006 – Naymick got hurt that year so we lacked size inside. We still had Davis, but the other top 4 in terms of minutes played are Neitzel, Ager, Brown, and Walton. Trannon got the most minutes at PF (with Suton, a redshirt freshman, behind him). Basically we were small at power forward and small forward (Ager being our defauld SF at 6’4").

The 2004-2005 team was also somewhat vertically challenged but very experienced. Hill, Anderson and Torbert were seniors, Davis and Ager were both juniors. I think that team must have used experience to overcome their height disadvantage.

Ken Pomeroy has not posted his effective height figures yet this year – I think they will come when he posts individual player tempo free stats later this month, This year’s team doesn’t have the experience, especially inside where height is most important, that the 2005 team did. In addition, we’re small inside as Sherman/Nix/Herzog are not playing a significant number of minutes. We go basically 6’6" 6’7" 6’8" across the front line most of the time.

The past few years we’ve been on the plus side of Ken Pomeroy’s effective height and our D has been very good. This year I expect we’ll be on the minus side and that’s probably the reason we’re not as strong on D. Pomeroy has not calculated effective height back past 06-07 but I suspect that we would have measured out as below average in 03-04 through 05-06, which is why we struggled two of those three years on D.

by TheCrestedHelm on Dec 10, 2009 9:56 AM CST up reply actions