The regular season for Atlantic 10 Men’s Basketball has come to a close and everyone now turns their attention to Brooklyn. This season I have started tracking some advanced stats for both teams and players in the Atlantic 10. I wanted to see where my Dayton Flyers compared individually and as a team to their A10 peers. After a guest spot on the Hey10 Podcast, the fine folks at GiantKiller reached across the metaphorical Atlantic 10 aisle and asked if I would like to share these stats with you.
As I write this, the Atlantic 10 sits not only on the eve of their conference tournament but also on the day where the league announced individual award winners and the members of the All-A10 teams. These always inevitably stir up debate, with your favorite player being slighted. With these A10 awards and the conference tournament starting, we can look at some individual advanced stats to see which players were most important to their team’s offense and which were most efficient trying to score the ball.
Points per possession is used in basketball stats to see how efficient a player or team is when trying to score. To calculate this metric, you would take points scored divided by possessions. How do you calculate the number of possessions, you ask? A fair question reader. You would use this formula of Field Goals Attempted + 0.475 x Free Throws Attempted – Offensive Rebounds + Turn Overs.
Now, some players may have a high points per possession but due to the limited minutes this may not tell us much. Think of your favorite walk-on on your team who hits the buzzer beating three pointer on Senior Night. We can gauge just how much a team uses a player by utilizing the usage rate stat. This is an estimate of the percentage of plays a player is used by a team while he was on the floor. By comparing usage rate with points per possession, we see which players were getting the ball a lot for an Atlantic 10 team and if they were efficient when they got the ball.
Interactive Version of the Graph Here:
