This is something I’ve been meaning to bring up and ask about: “Is post-up offense more efficient all of a sudden?” I remember in the Beilein years every offense that heavily used post-ups were inefficient dinosaurs and UM could pull upsets by guarding Caleb Swanigan with Zak Irvin and just shoot them out of games. But now all of a sudden all the best B10 offenses are driven by postups.
75% of teams find 3s more efficient? Seems like there could be a lot of noise in that stat. I wonder if you could filter out teams that hardly play through the post, and look at teams that make it a significant part of their offense.
I think this is pretty straightforward. It’s a talent thing. There’s a much more significant talent gap in college basketball which is why things like offensive rebounds, post-ups and other things that are considered inefficient in NBA basketball (where the talent curve is much more flat, especially at the replacement level).
The teams that win games with post ups have bigger and more talented players than most of the teams they play.
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So, I don’t think that’s completely true. One thing that happens a lot is people over-cite the points per play stats from Synergy (which they call possession) that are not the same type of possession as KenPom/etc. Synergy stats reset on offensive rebounds. So people see a “Synergy points per possession number” and immediately think it is bad. That’s why I try to use percentiles as much as possible.
Second, those Purdue offenses were really damn good for the most part… top-25ish easily IIRC. Just because teams score efficiently with post ups doesn’t mean that they are good at guarding teams that spread them out though 
There’s a reason so many of those Purdue/Michigan games were shootouts.
The downside there being that you then lose context for the efficiency of that shot in the wider scope of things rather than just how the player/team does at that specific thing compared to others doing the same thing. It’s too bad there’s not a better version of the synergy numbers that addresses the problem you speak of.
Well, I will reference both, but I just refer to it as points per play not possession.
There’s not really a better or different way because it is literally just how the video is broken down… You want to track how someone shoots out of ball screens, you don’t really want to evaluate their effectiveness if there’s a putback on their missed shot.
It’s absolutely relevant to whether said offense is effective for a team if it tends to lead to things like that. Which the above discussion is mostly about. Post up offense effectiveness in general. That’s not isolated to how good individual players are.
Well if you want to measure how effective an offense is overall, you would look at possessions. And you would want to look at something like KenPom for that and could then try to mix with what they emphasize as far as post ups or ball screens or something like that.
Synergy stats are really useful but they are just misused and used without enough context quite often.
Thus my comment wishing for something like that with Synergy-level detail. Just looking at Kenpom pages and general style of play doesn’t tell you much in terms of a style’s effectiveness vs other styles.
What the above says is basically equivalent to saying we don’t need Synergy stats, just look at a player’s offensive rating and his general play style.
Not what I was trying to say. I think if you want to measure overall effectiveness of players using Synergy data then you use the Synergy data to sort them into buckets based on what type of plays they use (ball screen, post up, spot up, etc.) and then compare their offensive ratings and usages.
If you want to compare what offenses are most effective, you could compare the adjusted offensive efficiency of teams that use a certain percentage of post ups with teams that use a lot of ball screens, etc.
If you want to measure how effectively someone scores out of post ups or out of ball screens individually, then it makes sense to measure as Synergy does (resetting the “possession” on an offensive rebound)
I saw the Syracuse/UNC game went to OT so I turned it on. UNC hits a layup and two NBA threes while Syracuse dribbles aimlessly without a pass and takes three contested iso jump shots that have no chance.
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Syracuse hasn’t won 25+ games or >10 conference games since their first year in the ACC.
Boeheim is three wins shy of 1,000, but he can only get that in the NIT, barring a run in the conference tournament. Dude needs to hang it up.
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Hmm wonder if jr will transfer or go to the nba, he had a bad freshman year
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He barely played too right? Didn’t he miss most of the season?
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I find these things endlessly interesting, but I’m curious - how is the metric “Impactful” defined? Is there some standard for measuring this?
His proprietary stats. The viz is cool but most times I’ve looked at this data I’ve been a bit skeptical of the takeaways.
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He has a predictive metric doesn’t he? Wonder how it performs in games where a key player is out.
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Guard U survives and advances!
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So teams get to request their region for the tourney now???
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