Season Stats

BALL HANDLING: With a perimeter oriented team we should have pretty good ball handling stats and we do. Outstanding in fact. Our A/TO is 1.67 which is far and away the best ever for KU. Let's hope we can keep that stat. And we are getting the ball stolen on only 7.9% of possessions which is also the best ever. We are getting about 5 points per game on average from turnover margin. That is pretty huge.



DEFENSE: I would not exactly say our defense is back but it is not terrible. The opponent effective FG% is 45.6% In Self's first 10 years the Jayhawk effective FG% defense was 43.5%. So we are clearly not there. That equates to about 5 points per game we give up now that we did not then. There is clearly room for improvement but it is far better than last season which was terrible.



POSSESSIONS: This will change as will all the stats as out schedule gets more difficult. But there is no way to describe this team thus far as anything if not an offensive juggernaut. We are scoring 1.2 points per possession. The average for Self's first 14 years was 1.112 points per possession. Assuming 73 possessions per game this is 6.5 points per game better than Self's average team and the best ever. This team can flat out score. Thus far this team has been above average defensively in terms of points per possession. We have given up 0.927 points per possession compared to an average for the last 14 seasons of 0.934. However in Self's first 10 years the average was 0.913. The last four years has been 0.986. That equates to giving up about 5.6 points per game more over the last 4 years. If we can keep these numbers even remotely close we will be fine.



REBOUNDING: Much has been made about our rebounding and it is all true. We have 30% of our misses on the season and that is not good. And that is against generally weaker competition. We have done better on the defensive glass at 72.3%. I will take that. We simply have way too little presence on the offensive glass.



SHOOTING: Much has also been made of our shooting this season and rightly so. Our 42.2% from 3 point range is outstanding. Only the 1990 with downtown Terry Brown and eagle eye Jeff Gueldner. Thanks to Dok's basket assault techniques we are also shooting a Jayhawk all-time best 58.2% from 2 point range. Our effective FG% is an outstanding 60.3%. This is the most talented shooting team top to bottom KU has had possibly. Even our FT% is well above KU's norm of 69.9%. Unfortunately we don't shoot many.



SHOT SELECTION: As has been pointed out many times of late, this team seems to be living and dying with the 3 point shot. Well this fool's gold has been mostly real gold for Kansas thus far with the exception of the Washington game. We are attempting 41% of our shots from 3 point range. In the first 12 years under Self that was 29.9%. We have increased our proclivity for shooting long-range by a third. Last season was the record at 35.9% and we have increased that by 15%. Maybe the most shocking stat of all is the % of points scored from the FT line. A Self teams typically scores about 21% of points from the charity stripe. It is less than half of that this season. I'm not sure what to make of that other than to marvel at it.