Originally Posted by
pfrduke
Offensive performance can be looked at as, essentially, how efficiently do you score points (i.e., in a given possession, how many points are you likely to score). There are essentially four ways a possession can end - a made field goal, a missed shot (FG or FT) with a defensive rebound, a turnover, or a made free throw. The better you are at ending possessions with points, the higher you'll rank. This season, we ended possessions, on average, by scoring 1.12 points - 13th in the country.* Prior to the slide in March, we ranked even higher. Even so, a top 13 offense is very good.
Of course, there are a variety of different ways to avoid possessions ending, which is how different looking offenses can result in similar productivity. Mirroring the four ways a possession ends, there are essentially four factors by which you can increase efficiency - shooting (converting field goal attempts into points), offensive rebounding (extending possessions for multiple chances to score), avoiding turnovers (more possessions ending with shots rather than turnovers), and getting to the line. Those four factors control how effective your offense is. You'll note, as an aside, that assists are not included here. Kentucky, the 2nd best offense in the country, had an atrocious A/FG performance (as did we). UC-Irvine, which got assists on nearly 64% of their baskets, had a terrible offense.
It's very rare that teams are good at all four of these - Missouri, for example, had the most efficient offense in the land, and it was driven entirely by shooting well (they were the best shooting team in the country) and avoiding turnovers (3rd best in the country). They were a poor offensive rebounding team and only middling at getting to the line. UNC, which finished pretty much where we did on efficiency, shot poorly (142nd in the country), but made up for it with killer offensive rebounding (10th best in the country). We finished no lower than 68th (which means we were in the top 20% in the country) in all of the four factors - 39th in shooting, 38th in avoiding turnovers, 68th in offensive rebounding, and 13th in getting to the line. Being that highly rated across the board is rare - of the teams that had more efficient offenses than we did, only Kentucky finished in the top 100 in every category. We didn't really excel in one particular thing (other than getting to the line, where, as you note, we didn't convert as often as we would have liked), but we weren't weak in one particular thing either - it was relatively hard to turn us over, relatively hard to make us miss, and relatively hard to keep us off the glass.
As to the numbers you point out, raw fg% is less informative than effective field goal% (where we finished 39th), because the latter gives credit for the extra point from the 3. Our raw turnover numbers look worse because we play at a higher pace than most teams. I'm not sure why our raw offensive rebounds are so low (maybe attributable to good shooting), but we gathered 35% of available offensive rebounds, which is pretty good. Again, we didn't do anything great, but we were very effective across the board, which led to our scoring more frequently every time we had the ball than the vast majority of teams.
*this is often defined as a "rating" (specifically, an offensive efficiency "rating") but it's really just a narrative stat that has no subjectivity involved - we had 2362 possessions on the season, and scored 2642 points. Pomeroy "adjusts" this raw number for strength of schedule - per that adjustment, he concludes that our efficiency would have been higher had we played an "average" schedule, and we rank 11th, rather than 13th, in adjusted efficiency.