Another interesting stat

Michigan’s avg off poss. is 19.6 sec (2nd longest in B1G), avg def poss is 16.6 sec (shortest in B1G) via www.kenpom.com

Not sure what it means … the short defensive possessions seems like a negative.

The short defensive possessions definitely seem like a negative to me upon first glance, but that could honestly be to our defense’s advantage. I feel the longer you work against our defense, the more likely you are to get a good look. Also, since we have a such a short rotation right now, less time working on defense could be a positive.

It Really is hard to draw a conclusion off those numbers. If short defensive possessions are bad does that mean long offensive possessions are also bad?

Vice versa?

I always look at offense as something you dictate, Michigan is patient on offense because it wants to be.

Defense is the one that is tough to make sense out of to me.

According to hoops-math, we have more transition possessions (shots within the first 10 seconds) on offense than we give up on defense - 27% to 21%. That seems like perhaps a good thing, although those are year long stats. If the other team is shooting more shots in the 10-20 second part of the clock, it might mean they’re getting good shots earlier, or that we’re more patient. Seems hard to take to much from it, but I’d say the key in this regard probably is getting more transition attempts, especially since Michigan is such a good shooting team that firing up a late 3 isn’t really such a bad thing.

I would think the short defensive number is a result of our opponents realizing very quickly that they can have their way with us on that end of the court. We don’t exactly make our foes work to find a good shot–it happens easily and quickly way too often.

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My initial reaction is that our offense is slower because we don’t have the weapons to do otherwise. We’re not drawing doubles in the post and we don’t have much by way of dribble penetration.

Likewise, defensively it seems we’re bad at stopping dribble penetration.

Michigan is really good in transition efficiency-wise, but I think that’s mostly because they only push in advantageous situations. U-M is never going to run off of opponent makes, etc.

It’s interesting how negative many of the assessments are on what this stat probably means when they’re taken from a sample of games in which, if it’s just conference games, Michigan is 6-2 with an efficiency margin of over 6 per game, or, if it’s season-long, in which Michigan is 16-5 with a substantially bigger efficiency margin. In other words, on average, possessions have yielded more points for us than for the opposition, but we have a stat about length of possessions that is somewhat opaque and we assume it says something bad about us.

This is conference only stats.

Thanks. So it’s the former statistical profile, but the point stands…

Yeah, not disagreeing with your point.

To be fair, the offense has been good and the defense bad. But that doesn’t necessarily make sense because we can’t say the offense is good because it’s slow and the defense is bad because it doesn’t make sense.

Good for discussion still I think though, it is definitely not a decisive measure.

This really is a difficult stat to digest. I definitely agree that I think the important note about the duration of offensive possessions is good because that means the offense is consistently dictating when it scores points no matter the opponent. The defensive duration stat is weird for me and I wonder if you have to go slightly more to the second level of what types of offenses have been faced and how they operate tempo-wise.

Definitely strange.

Just thinking out loud here, but maybe it is an intentional strategy being implemented by opposing coaches against us. In other words, opposing teams are being coached to be aggressive and get shots off earlier against us since - as we’ve noted - our defense isn’t that strong… so why let the shot clock become an extra defender?

Yeah, I don’t know what to make of it, and I wasn’t particularly criticizing the negativity, just thought it was interesting. One thought I had was that other teams use more one on one play, in the post or off the dribble, or even simple pick and rolls, while we use more complicated actions. In the end you can tell good or bad stories about it (we’re more patient, could be a good one, or we don’t turn the ball over, or we don’t foul, which lengthens possessions). Unless we see a correlation between length of possessions and offensive efficiency we just might be stuck with a mystery, and perhaps even then.

Depends how you look at it I guess.
Defensively we’re pretty poor but that’s always a given with Beilein teams. We’re not Michigan State in that sense. It’s pretty much expected.
On the flip side, does taking longer to score matter if you score? I don’t think we have a healthy balance BUT if it takes 25 seconds for Duncan to get his 3 pt shot, then I’ll wait patiently for 25 seconds!

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