Falcon Men's Basketball....the year in numerical review....DE-FENSE

Now that the season is over, we have an opportunity to look into the statistics and see what we can learn about this years team.  In fact, I do think we can see a little about what kind of weaknesses the team had, and why we finished in 10th place.  Simply put, we were a 10th place team with 10th place stats--and consistent with earlier analysis of who we beat, I would contend that we are pretty much who we appeared to be.

I start with defense, because Coach Orr constantly says that our identity is to be a defensive team.  Based on that, this was a serious area of struggle for the team.

Most commonly, that is measured in points per game, which BG was 9th in (all stats are based on conference games ONLY).  BG had the 10th fewest average  possessions per game (meaning we played one of the slowest tempos in the MAC), and was also 9th in points per possession allowed.

There are usually four factors that are believed to contribute to a team's performance on defense:  Effective FG% (meaning 3s count for 1.5), Off Rebound %, Free Throw Rate and Turnover Rate.  Let's look into how BG fared on this.

We actually do not have to look too much beyond FG% Defense, which is obviously a central part of "getting stops."  (A stop is either a turnover or a missed shot and rebound).  BG was 10th in the conference allowing opponents to shoot 43.8% from the field.   When effective FG% is factored in, BG is 11th in the conference, with 51%.

The disconnect there is due to one thing---BG was victimized by opponent 3s more than any team in the conference.  BG was 10th in 3FG attempts against, but far and away first in 3s allowed.  BG allowed 120 3s in conference game, and the nearest team in the MAC allowed 105, meaning that BG allowed almost one more 3 a game than the next game and almost twice as many as the next team.  BG's opponents shot 37.5% from 3, (11th) and given the quantity of attempts, that was deadly.  (Coach Orr would like to hold opponents to 37% shooting on ALL their FG attempts).

I don't know what to make of this.  The easy conclusion would be that we were in a zone virtually every possession of the season, and you attack a zone from the outside.  Now, I know that Coach Orr has said that even in our zone, you should be able to cover the 3, but it is clear that we were not.  It may well be that we did not have the quickness to cover the outside shot in the 2-3 zone, or it may well be that from time to time (as Coach has inferred) we lacked the intensity on defense to get out there.

Either way, from a shooting perspective, it a pretty sad math effort.  In conference games, BG made 67 3s and gave up 120.  That's a deficit of 53, with is 159 points and almost 10 points a game on 3s alone.

In looking at the other factors, despite our three senior post men, we were only #8 in offensive rebounding % allowed.  So we allowed teams to make 44% of their shots and then were below average in the conference in terms of letting them to the boards.

We were eighth in turnover percentage, meaning we just didn't cause very many turnovers...which means teams were more likely to get a shot off and then more likely to make it.

The one part of the defensive factors we excelled in was keeping teams off the line.  We were the best in the conference at not committing fouls and third in free throw rate.  We ended up +4 for the season on free throws.

We'll look at the offense tomorrow, but I think that what the numbers say is that for a team that is supposed to be built on defense, we did not defend our conference peers very well.  Teams shot well against us, especially from the 3 point line, and that made it difficult for us to keep scores where they needed to be for us to win.