Sunday, February 03, 2019

MAC MBB in Quadrants


So, I really like quadrant charts.  I think they provide a succinct way to look at a lot of different things.  Here, I have set one up for MAC MBB.  The chart is for offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency, expressed as points per 100 possessions on kenpom, unadjusted and MAC games only.  The lines are 103 points per 100 possessions, which is the conference average right now.  The farther in the corner, the more extreme the difference is.

The interesting thing is that you can identify the one-dimensional teams and see how they perform.  Those guys are top left and lower right.  Balanced teams...for good and ill...are in the other two quadrants.

A few observations:

Although they vary in extreme, 8 of the 12 teams are in the one-sided parts of the chart.  Only four--and really, three--fall into the balanced category.

BG and Buffalo are good on both offense and defense.  On one hand, you would kind of expect that since they've only lost 3 games between them, but it would be possible to win in the upper left or lower right quadrant, too, but that isn't what is happening.  The top teams in the MAC and playing both phases well because counting on outscoring or outdefending your opposition is not sustainable.

Similarly, you could be winless like WMU and be in two of the other quadrants, but they aren't, they are bad at everything.  See how far in the corner they are.

There's three teams that are much stronger on offense...Kent, CMU and EMU.  CMU is no surprise to see there, but EMU counting on that zone and they are relatively easy to score on this year.  Kent is similar.

There's really one team relying on defense to the exclusion of offense, and that's Akron.

There are five teams that sit on one of the two average lines.

Ohio, Ball State and Miami are average defensively but below average offensively.

UT is average defensively but above average on offense.

NIU is the closest to being average on both.

If anything, I'm surprised that there's only one team relying hard on defense, and frankly I'd expect that given the chance to grow the program, Groce would prefer to be on the right side of the chart.

No comments :