Men's Hoops--Tempo

One of the things we talked about in the pre-season was that our team was now a 100% Orr creation, and that our team was going to be able to run a little bit and pick the pace up...get some easy baskets, etc.  I wanted to go back and see if our tempo changed significantly from previous years which was very slow.

In fact, our pace was up about 4%.  Probably not as much as we might have hoped, but it was up.  We had hoped to play some man defense, too.  Anyway, as you can see, we were up about 2.5 possessions per game.  I checked our conference rank, too, just to make sure we didn't move up as the entire MAC did, but we moved from the bottom of the conference to the middle.

This number could have been a little higher.  I think we did try to run the ball up after baskets and off rebounds, but we lacked the playmakers to do anything in the transition, which meant we just lapsed into our half court offense, and then ran the shot clock down, and for this tempo measure, that's pretty much the same as just walking it up.

Anyway, the conclusion is that we did increase our tempo a little bit this year, compared to the previous years.  I don't think anyone expected us to be up-tempo and they were right.