Stat of the Day

Today we will analyze KU's ball handling. If you want to follow along you can see the stats I have posted here --> Jayhawk Stats

If you look at our ball-handling stats in toto for the season, you would surmise this team is near the top of Jayhawk teams over the last 25 years. But you would be deceived. Let's dig in.

First lets look at A/TO ratio. This season we have an A/TO of 1.36. That compares to a 16 year average for Self-coached teams of 1.20. Pretty good, no? The best season was 2018 at 1.42. So we are just below the best year. The 2008 NC team had an A/TO of 1.36. So this years team is clearly doing pretty well, right? Well, yes, sort of. The overall number is good but lets look a little deeper. We have played 4 lower tier teams, 3 pretty good teams and 3 really good teams. Here is the breakdown of A/TO by those divisions.

Lower Tier -- 2.07
Middle Tier -- 1.82
Top Tier -- 0.74

Notice a trend? We have done poorly against good competition. That is to be expected, you say? Well, true that! But the slope is far too steep. So is this due to poor assisting or too many TO's? Lets look at A/FGM. Self runs a lot of x/o offense. In a Self team, A/FGM should be in the 0.6 range. In fact, in the first 10 years of Self at KU it was 60.4%. In the last 6 it has averaged 53.8%. This season it is 54.8%. Here is a breakdown by tier.

Lower Tier -- 57.2%
Middle Tier -- 59.2%
Top Tier -- 48.2%

But it isn't just poor assisting, which is a proxy for poor offensive execution, it is also too many TO's. Here is the %LoB (% of possessions where we turned the ball over)

Lower Tier -- 14.7%
Middle Tier -- 17.6%
Top Tier -- 26.4%

Ouch, we are turning the ball over and not executing way too much commensurate to the competition. Sure, the number should get a little worse with better competition, but again these curves are too steep. I don't care who the competition is, turning the ball over 25% of the time is not acceptable. Plus, the low A/FGM is showing we are not executing on offense. Now to be sure, these numbers are a little skewed by the Duke game. But we did not do well against Colorado either. We did do fairly well against Dayton.

Clearly offensive execution and ball protection has been a focus of Self and staff. We have stayed in games and done actually quite well in the final results because as poor as we have done offensively on execution and ball protection, we have done even better on defense.

Now in spite of the poor ball handling stats, our overall offense has been actually quite good thanks mostly to the fact we are shooting 61% on 2 point FG's. That is outstanding. And our 37.3% from the 3-point line is an effective FG% of 56%. So our total EFF FG% is 59% which is going to win most games. Our overall points per possession is 1.150 which is quite good, but as I said, it is in spite of offensive execution and ball-handling not because of it. If we can improve our ball handling stats and keep our excellent defense and shooting, we can be a dominant team.