" title="Spartans Weblog">Spartans Weblog

First, a couple other things:

Ohio State knocked off Purdue tonight, 80-77, in overtime.  This rejuvenates the Buckeyes’ NCAA tournament hopes and makes them a pretty dangerous opponent for MSU on Sunday in Columbus.

It also, of course, knocks the Boilermakers a half game down in the conference standings and puts Wisconsin in the driver’s seat to win an outright conference title.  The Badgers finish the regular season with a home game against Penn State and a road game against Northwestern.  I’m sure they’re taking nothing for granted, but the title is all but their’s.

Wisconsin is a deserving champion.  With MSU out of the race, I’d have preferred to see the title get split up by two or three teams.  But it’s not like that would have reduced our disappointment much about not contending for the regular season crown this year.

As for tonight’s game, Jamar Butler was clearly the difference.  After scoring just 2 points in the first half, he scored 23 points in the second half and the OT period.  And his 25 points came on just 8 FG attempts plus 8 perfect FT attempts.  That’s a PPWS of 2.12.  Can’t get much more efficient than that.

Per NorthernSparty’s request in the previous comments section, here a link to vote for Drew Neitzel for the Lowe’s Senior Class Award.  Based on the current standings, it doesn’t like he has a real shot at winning–but let’s at least keep him out last place.

Now to the topic of this post’s title.  As much as we’ve focused on MSU’s turnover problems this season, the most distinctive feature of their tempo-free profile is actually their reluctance to shoot three-pointers.  They rank 337 in the nation–fifth from last–in the percentage of field goal attempts taken from beyond the arc.

I thought I’d take a quick look at other teams with similarly low percentages to see if we could learn anything about teams that tend to avoid shooting three-pointers.  The table below shows key tempo-free stats and associated national rankings for MSU and the 12 other BCS-conference teams with the lowest 3FGA/FGA percentages.  I’ve sorted them in descending order of offensive efficiency to get some sense what things the good offensive teams excel at to compensate for a lack of 3-point shooting.

Observations:

• You can be an elite offensive team without shooting a lot of three-pointers.  If you look at adjusted, rather than raw, offensive efficiency, Kansas, UNC, and UCLA are three of the four best offensive teams in the nation at the moment.  (On the other hand, taking a lot of 3-pointer can be a sign you’re not very good offensively.  Northwestern and Iowa take the highest % of their shots from 3-point range among BCS-conference teams.)
• Offensive rebounding is correlated to shooting more 2-pointers.  This is probably partially a result of more opportunities to rebound the ball if your offensive players are taking shots closer to the hoop.  It’s also a necessity to score efficiently when you’re not getting 3-point shooting runs; you have to get more cracks at 2-point attempts.  All eight of the top offensive teams on the list above rank in the top 25 nationally in offensive rebounding %.
• Playing at a faster pace helps.  Of the top 9 teams at the top of the list, all but 3 play at a pace of 69 possessions per game or higher.  The exceptions are UCLA, Stanford, and MSU.  UCLA has Kevin Love.  Stanford has two 7-footers taking a lot of their shots.  Both teams can afford to slow the game down and feed the post.  MSU becomes the outlier.
• It also helps to get to the free throw line.  Of the 7 teams at the top of the list, 5 have free throw rates in the top quartile nationally.  The exceptions are Kansas, who shoots a stupendous 54.9% on 2-point attempts, and MSU.

If I were to draw conclusions from this statistical sample, they would be:

1. MSU will perform better on offense when they play at a faster pace.  But we knew that.
2. Getting to the free-throw line more would help compensate for not shooting as many three-pointers.  The obvious candidates to create more contact near the hoop on offense are Morgan and Suton.  Finding ways to consistently get the ball to them inside remains an elusive goal.
3. Keep rebounding the ball.  We tend to take MSU’s offensive rebounding prowess for granted at this point.  But if it disappears for a game, they’re in big trouble.  Our final three conference losses all came with offensive rebounding percentages below 30%.

None of this is anything dramatically new in terms of what we know about our Spartans.  But it is another glimmer of statistical hope that the team’s offensive approach can be successful–particularly when we get out of the plodding Big Ten.

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