Seton Hall: Sometimes, it’s that simple

Winning a basketball game is not about excellence at one simple thing. Multiple individuals must accomplish multiple micro-tasks in concert. The combinations of screens, bounce passes, jump shots and defensive rotations take infinite forms, some radically different in aesthetics. An ideal win for North Carolina looks very different from the ideal pursued in Madison, Wisconsin. Each team places unique emphasis on those micro-tasks, picking and choosing which they will focus on to outdo their opponent.

In his book, Basketball on Paper, Dean Oliver used the unifying theory of possessions to identify specific arenas in which those micro-tasks can be placed. His Four Factors; Effective Field Goal Percentage, Rebound Percentage, Free Throw Rate, and Turnover Percentage, represent different slices of focus on the ultimate goal – outscoring the opponent. You won’t find a single team in college basketball this season who is ranked in the top ten in all Four Factors, on either side of the ball. The same is true for the last nine seasons. By virtue of constraints in personnel and system, teams must decide where their advantage lies and focus their attention on exploiting it. Even the elite teams are not elite in everything.

When I look at the Four Factors I see a clear demarcation, splitting them in half by intent. Rebound and Turnover Percentage are about maximizing the number of scoring opportunities your team gets. Effective Field Goal Percentage and Free Throw Rate are about the quality and results of your scoring opportunities. Attempting to explore this division a bit more, I came up with a different way of representing one half of the equation.

For each team in college basketball, I calculated how many scoring opportunities they had per game. For my purposes here I considered a scoring opportunity as either a shot attempt or a trip to the free throw line. I also calculated how many scoring opportunities per game each team allowed their opponents. In both cases there are no quality judgements made about those scoring opportunities. What I’m really identifying is teams that, offensively and defensively, control the rebounding/turnover portion of the Four Factors. The table below shows the results for the top 60 teams by their Scoring Opportunities Margin per game. You can see the rest of the results here.

Scoring Opportunity Margins

You’ll find elite teams scattered throughout that table, top to bottom. Ohio State ranks in the top fifteen in the country in both Offensive and Defensive Rating. They also lead the country in Scoring Opportunity Margin, creating for themselves an extra 9.18 opportunities per game. Those extra opportunities, created by their dominance on the glass and control in the turnover battle, compensate for the fact that they are anything but elite in both eFG% and eFG% defense, 56th and 46th in the country respectively, and offensive and defensive FTR, 116th and 29th. It’s okay that the Buckeyes don’t make shots at a tremendous rate, or do a particularly good job of forcing their opponent to miss shots. They win because they give themselves so many extra scoring opportunities.

But I’m not here to talk about Ohio State. The impetus for this project was number fifty-two on that list, Seton Hall.

I’m not exactly what you would call a Pirates fan, having grown up about an hour from Syracuse, but I’ve kept my eye on them since college. I remember accompanying a close friend—a Seton Hall fan— from school to his home for a meal, and when he told his father I’d rooted for Seton Hall nemesis UConn in the previous year’s title game, his father dropped his fork, calmly stood up, pointed at the door and told me to, “get the hell out of his house.” The memory stuck, and I’ve looked out for the Pirates ever since.

That’s why I was so excited, just over a month ago, to share, here at HoopSpeak U, that the Pirates looked poised to win eleven conference games, a feat they hadn’t accomplished in well over a decade.  I wrote that piece on January 6th. On Janurary 13th they begin a six game losing streak that all but put those hopes to bed.

The table below shows the five-game rolling average of Seton Hall’s Net Rating (ORtg. – DRtg.). The six game losing streak should be fairly easy to pick out.

The Pirates have won their last three so the dream is not completely dead. but reaching eleven will mean winning out against Cinncinati, Georgetown, Rutgers and DePaul. In just three weeks they dug themselves a pretty deep hole. Following this slide by statistics and not observation is what led me to the reconfiguring of rebounds and turnovers as scoring opportunities.

Seton Hall is a team who’s statistical profile resembles that of Ohio State. Their strength lies on the defensive side of the ball, where they thrive by reducing scoring opportunities for the opposition. They have a solid DRB%, 70.2% which is 71st in the nation, and create a turnover on 22.8% of their opponent’s possessions, 57th in the nation. Those numbers help ensure them an average of 3.68 more scoring opportunities than their opponents each game. That margin in scoring opportunities helps cover for a narrower margin in eFG%, where they shoot 49.8% and allow their opponents to shoot 45.9%.

The thing that I found so interesting was that this losing streak was not marked by a negative margin in scoring opportunities, in fact quite the contrary. The table below shows the five-game rolling average of Seton Hall’s Scoring Opportunity Margin per game and their eFG%.

The similarities in the graph of their eFG% and of their Net Rating above are not optical illusions. They stopped making shots and they stopped winning. Over that six game stretch Seton Hall shot 32.8% from the field and 26.5% on three-pointers. Those scoring opportunity numbers are inflated by rebounding so many of their own misses, but it’s clear that the strength of this team didn’t fail them. The thing they did reasonably well, making shots, failed in ways that were both miserable and spectacular. Without being able to make shots at something approximating an average rate, the strengths they had chosen to build on were rendered moot.

All is not lost for Seton Hall. Despite the damage done, the ship has been righted and some semblence of offensive efficiency has returned. The consecutive losses came against some extremely tough defenses. Notre Dame, Louisville, Marquette, UConn and South Florida all sit in the top 65 in Ken Pomeroy’s Adjusted DRating. Four games remain on the conference schedule. Cincinnati, Georgetown and Rutgers all loom as serious threats, being very good defensive teams. Even a 2-2 finish would likely require some Big East Tournament wins to get them into the Big Dance. The good news is that given the right inputs, their formula still works. Seton Hall doesn’t need to shoot the lights out every night, because their advantage is in the way they can hoard scoring opportunities. They just need to shoot well enough to keep from burying that advantage under a pile of bricks.

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