Offense Part II...

So, earlier in the week, we established that the offense was actually pretty good...BG was 4th in the MAC in offensive efficiency.  I was pretty surprised to see that...it seemed like BG went through prolonged periods of time where they could not score at all and had virtually no offensive competence.  We said we wanted to play inside out, and I guess we were pretty good when that was working, but when teams packed it in (as CMU did against BG in the MAC Tourney), we didn't have the "outside" necessary to pull them out.

Let's look at the four factors that go into that efficiency.

The most important is FG%. If you thought you observed that BG doesn't like to shoot the 3, you did see that right.  BG was last in the MAC in 3-FGA and 11th in 3s made.  So, by process of elimination, you would expect BG to have a high FG%, since more of their shots were coming closer to the basket.  And that played out pretty much as you would expect...in terms of raw FG%, BG was 2nd, shooting 46.6%.

Now, when you look at Effective FG%, which gives teams 1.5 makes for a 3 and 1 for a 2, we can a slightly less optimistic story.  BG falls to 5th in the MAC in EFG%.  That's certainly not terrible, but it does show the impact of teams taking all those 3s and demonstrates the trade off BG makes in playing the way they do.  To win, we'd need to be even better on 2-FGs than we are.

The second most important stat is turnover%.  BG was 5th in this as well, with 20.6%.  Which means that BG was slightly above average in actually getting a shot, and slightly above average in making them when we did get them.

So far, in fact, we are over-performing to be 4th in efficiency.  Oddly, for a team that supposedly wants to play inside, BG does not get to the line.  BG was 11th in the MAC in free throw rate.  Which means they cannot expect much help from the stripe to the overall scoring.  (BG was also 10th in the MAC in FT%, so not only did BG not get to the line, but they didn't convert very often when they did).

Now, you start to think we are really over-achieving.  The final category helps explain, which is offensive rebounding.  BG was 4th in the MAC in offensive rebounds, averaging 35% of their overall missed shots.  This obviously helps, though you'd think getting those second chance shots would lead to a better overall shooting %.

We noted when looking at the defense that the average MAC team got 51% of its points from the field, 28% from 3, and 20% at the line.  BG was 62% FG, 22% 3-FG and 16% FT.  It would be interesting to see how many successful teams are that one-dimensional.  I'd like to think you'd be harder to defend if you successfully found two ways to score instead of one.

Other notes....

Assists are an interesting stat.  First, it seems like they are giving a lot fewer assists than they used to.  More importantly though, it strikes me that there are two kinds of assists.  The ones where you rotate the ball and make an easy pass to an open guy who hits a 3 (relatively easy pass) and then where a PG beats his man, gets into the key and kicks out to a guy who hits a 3 (in my mind, a more real assist).

BG was 9th in assist% and in 5th Assist-turnover ratio.  It is interesting to me that 7 of the 12 teams in the MAC had a ratio less than 1.  BG's was 1.

So, that gives us an idea of how the offense stacked up.  I guess when I looked this over, I don't mean to sound like it was worse than it was.  In fact, with some balance, the team probably had the potential to be better.

Next, we'll look at trends in our offensive basketball...are we moving in the right direction?  Are we establishing, for good or ill, an "identity?"