Coaching Strategies

In February I looked at Bucknell's extremely conservative style of play in detail. One of the interesting ideas I took away from the post was Bucknell's contradicting strategies. On offense, they value possessions by taking care of the basketball. On defense, they allow their opponent to freely take care of the basketball by not going for steals. Here is what I wrote back in February:

"If you don't like watching teams turn the ball over, Bucknell games are the ones for you. If you think about this strategy a little deeper, it's a very odd concept. On offense, Paulsen stresses not turning the ball over and not crashing the glass (presumably to focus on getting back on defense). On defense, Paulsen forces his opponents to use the same exact strategy he uses! If Paulsen believes taking care of the ball and getting back on defense is the best way to play basketball, why does he enable his opponent to do exactly that? The answer here is probably that he believes that Bucknell can play Bucknell basketball better than their opponents play Bucknell basketball. Confusing, I know."

There's no one absolutely correct way to coach a basketball team. There's a trade-off involved in every four factor. For example, you can increase your shooting percentage by being more patient and passing up looks to get a better shot. However, this would in turn increase your turnover percentage. The Dave Paulsens and Bo Ryans of the world choose to make their opponent play their brand of basketball. In this post, I tried to quantify the top 10 most "consistent" coaches in the country and the top 10 most "contradicting" coaches in the country (i.e. - Paulsen).

First, I looked at teams in the top 100 in both offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency in the 2013 season. I didn't want talent to be a major factor and the coaches of bad teams aren't a good fit for this analysis. With 61 eligible coaches remaining, I simply subtracted each four factor defensive ranking with the corresponding four factor offensive ranking. By adding together the absolute values of these four differences, I developed a very basic metric to measure coaching consistency. If my explanation is confusing now, the charts below should clear things up visually.

In 2013, Bill Self had the most consistent strategy and Bo Ryan had the most contradicting. It should be noted Bucknell did not qualify, because their offense was not in the top 100.  The tables help visualize the concept. Take a look at Kansas' coloring on offense and defense in the four columns. KU's offensive and defensive ranks are essentially the same. Now look at Wisconsin. Where there is green there is red and where there is red there is green. The list of most consistent coaches is loaded with coaching stars: Bill Self, Tom Izzo, Tom Crean, Mark Few, Brad Stevens, etc. However, it's by no means a bad thing to be on the right. John Beilein nearly won the national championship with a contradicting strategy (first in the country at not fouling, 329th in drawing fouls!) and Bo Ryan has had amazing success with his style of play. If anything, this shows how many different ways there are to win at the college level.

Minnesota and Rebounds: The Art of Cherry Picking

Last month, I looked at Bucknell and turnovers in college basketball strategy. Another interesting team in the 2013 season has been Tubby Smith's Minnesota team. The Golden Gophers rolled through non conference play, but are just 8-9 in the Big Ten. Despite the struggles, Minnesota is still 16th in efficiency in the country largely due to a ridiculous offensive rebounding percentage.

Minnesota ranks first in the OReb% by a wide margin and just 239th in DReb%. Offensive and defensive rebounding aren't exactly the same skill by any means, but it doesn't make sense that a team would be so far off in the two categories. Instead, I think that the large difference is more a product of the coach's system. Here are the two schematic possibilities for Minneosta's differential.

1. Cherry picking - Minnesota is great at rebounding, but they decide to cherry pick (get out in transition) instead of having everyone defensive rebound.
2. Allowing cherry picking - Minnesota is not quite as good at rebounding as their OReb% indicates, but they decide to crash the glass relentlessly on offense instead of worrying about transition defense.

The point here is that there is a natural trade-off between rebounding and transition plays.

To further examine this, I first looked at teams with the biggest differentials between offensive and defensive rebounding. To do this, I took the z-score of each, meaning I found how far away a team's OReb% and DReb% are away from the NCAA averages.

The 10 teams on the left are all Minnesota-like. They are much better at offensive rebounding than defensive rebounding. This means we would expect a much higher number of transition players per game than the teams on the right. The teams on the right are conservative when it comes to rebounding (notice Bucknell again). They get back on defense instead of going for offensive rebounds and box out instead of cherry picking. In both cases, the two strategies by the teams on the right limit plays in transition.

I decided to put this theory to the test using hoop-math.com. Using the data from that site, we can see how often these teams both go in transition on offense and allow transition plays on defense. I did this by looking at the percentage of times a team shoots in 10 seconds off missed shots versus the percentage of times a team shoots in 11-35 seconds into the shot clock off missed shots.

The table above illustrates the trade-off between cherry picking and transition. The teams on the left (the cherry pickers) are in transition 42% of the time and allow transition 41% of the time. The teams on the right (the conservatives) are only in transition 32% of the time and allow transition only 35% of the time. 

To me, three things particularly stick out about individual teams from the tables above:

1. Minnesota is a weird team. It looks like the Golden Gophers are really just that good at offensive rebounding. I expected them to allow an extremely high percentage of transition plays due to crashing the boards, but it was actually the lowest of the top 10 teams at 36%.
2. Northwestern St. is the biggest cherry picker in the country. I haven't watched film, but the stats show that Northwestern St. takes a shot within 10 seconds of getting a defensive rebound 58% of the time. This was by far the highest percentage and might be a reason why Northwestern St. is the second best team in the Southland.
3. Bucknell ran a fast break once, just to see what it felt like. Yes, I think Bucknell is the most interesting team in the NCAA. Dave Paulsen's squad focuses on boxing out and holding teams to one shot. They only get out in transition on 14% of missed shots (not a typo).

For those of you statistically inclined, here are the scatter plots of the cherry pickers and non cherry pickers. You can see the r-squared values and how big of an outlier Minnesota is in all of this. Removing Minnesota increased correlation tremendously.

Cherry Pickers:

Conservatives:

Bucknell and Turnovers

There has been a lot of talk all year long about VCU's havoc defense. The type of defense Shaka Smart's team plays is exciting to watch and pretty effective. Currently, VCU is 30th in the country in AdjD.  Bucknell is a team with an equally unique defense, but not even close to the same media attention.

Dave Paulsen's Bucknell squad currently sits at 22-5 and is coming off of a big road victory at Lehigh. The team is led by senior big man Mike Muscala and is ranked 50th in the country in AdjD. They have accomplished this by being the "anti-VCU". Bucknell does the fantasy sports equivalent of "punting" a category on defense. They don't look to create turnovers on defense at all, instead they focus on contesting shot attempts and keeping opponents off the offensive glass. Bucknell ranks number nine in the nation in opponent's eFG%, number two in the nation in opponent's in defensive rebounding, and number 345 in the nation in forcing turnovers. 

To make matters more interesting, the Bison also don't turn the ball over themselves (on offense). If you don't like watching teams turn the ball over, Bucknell games are the ones for you. If you think about this strategy a little deeper, it's a very odd concept. On offense, Paulsen stresses not turning the ball over and not crashing the glass (presumably to focus on getting back on defense). On defense, Paulsen forces his opponents to use the same exact strategy he uses! If Paulsen believes taking care of the ball and getting back on defense is the best way to play basketball, why does he enable his opponent to do exactly that? The answer here is probably that he believes that Bucknell can play Bucknell basketball better than their opponents play Bucknell basketball. Confusing, I know.

For fun, I added offensive TO% and defensive TO% together for every team this season. As I figured, Bucknell came out on top (the lowest total):

Basic logic says that the total (Off TO% + Def TO%) should have no correlation to winning/efficiency. A low total means your TO% is good on offense, but bad on defense. A high total means your TO% is bad on offense, but good on defense.  These should cancel each other out either way. However, the previous table shows that there are some pretty solid teams with low totals. To compare, the table below shows the bottom 10 of the table (their games consist of many turnovers):

VCU barely makes it on the list, but overall these teams are definitely weaker than the first list. I wondered if there was anything to this finding, so I added five more years of data and found the correlation between  Total TO% and Efficiency (AdjO-AdjD). I got an r-value of -.33, meaning there is a small negative correlation between Total TO% and Efficiency. In basketball terms, this means that teams who don't force turnovers but don't turn the ball over themselves tend to be better than teams who do force turnovers but also turn the ball over themselves.

Here's the top 10 Bucknell-esque teams for 2008-2013. Notre Dame and Mike Brey dominate this list and of course 2013 Bucknell is right there with them: