The North Carolina Tar Heels sealed up their second national championship in five years. This is Roy Williams’ second championship, and the first to do it “with his own players”. The run was one of the most dominant the tournament has seen, with the Heels’ only challenge coming in the third quarter of a second round game versus LSU. Congrats Tar Heels! Next up, the Carolina Hurricanes in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

A month-and-a-half ago I postulated that UNC’s offense, not the defense, wasn’t good enough to win the National Championship. UNC has gone no more than 4 games in a row this season meeting its offensive goal of 0.95 points per possession. When UNC lost games this season, it scored 0.88 pts per possession or fewer. In those games, their defense was closer to its goal than the offense was. Therefore, it is UNC’s OFFENSE that really determines whether they win or lose.

Given that the NCAA tournament is a 6-game championship run, UNC was bound to have an "off" offensive game. That game was last night. During this tournament UNC has scored, respectively, 0.94, 1.09, 1.13, 1.01, 0.92 points per possession in each game. The sole reason the Heels were even as high as 0.92 last night was the trips to the FT line. As bad as the FT shooting was, it kept UNC on a more efficient pace than their play with a live ball.

Luckily the opponent last night only scored 0.70 points per possession. Given the pattern of scoring efficiency, UNC is due for a game above 0.95, possibly far above. For this reason, I feel UNC’s chances are extremely good of winning on Monday night, especially since UNC has not lost a game in which the offense clicked.

Michigan State would have to be extremely efficient on offense to win, so probably 3-point shooting for them is the sole means by which they have of winning. MSU shoots 26% of their shots from behind the arc.

No one shooter is stellar, though Allen, Summers, and Lucas are the ones to watch. Allen once hit 4 3’s in a game, and Summers hit 6, but these games were before Valentine’s Day. They were 8-16 from "3" against Louisville last week, and that is the only time they, as a team, have made more than 6 3-pointers in the last 18 games.

One problem for the Heels, though, is that they have not taken two steps yet. Last year, they avenged their Regional Finals collapse against Georgetown by 1 game. This year they have avenged their Final Four collapse last year by 1 game. If the team is continually recognizable on Monday night, they should win. However, they have a behavioral history of not taking the next step very well. They, themselves, are perhaps their own biggest enemies on Monday night. I like what I saw in the press conference last night, but this is why they play the game.

Not the game, the season. Entering the season, on the Heels of an embarrassing showing in the Final Four last season, this UNC team had one goal: win the National Championship. Unfortunately for some that hasn’t been a goal, but rather an expectation. I’ve long held that nobody can set winning the National Championship as an expectation. Too many freaky things happen at Final Fours to expect a team to perform a certain way. Because of that, my measure of success for this team has been to make the Final Four. Beset by injuries all season, the Heels stumbled along the way and earned much criticism for not being the greatest team of all time. I’ve had my own criticisms, but they weren’t based on all-time great comparisons.

I am elated and proud of this team. They have never been a particularly great defensive team, but they did what it took to completely rattle a very good Oklahoma team. The plan started with handling Blake Griffin, who is as good as billed. The Heels opted to double down on Griffin every time he touched the ball. Now, certainly Griffin has seen double teams all season. I am just bewildered at how poorly his coach and teammates responded. In the case of a double team, the teammate left alone is wide open for the return pass. Griffin should have passed it back out for either a shot or a pass to another open man who should shoot. All game long Oklahoma passed up open shots and never found any rhythm. In fact, their first made field goal outside of the lane came with just 5:13 remaining.

In the first half, the Heels played excellent defense, holding the Sooners to just 0.62 points per possession and 24% loss of ball. However once the Heels got up 61-40 with six-and-a-half minutes remaining, the Heels’ wheels nearly fell off. In a two-minute stretch the Sooners whittled the lead down to 12 points, and many Carolina fans, including myself, began to think about the Georgetown debacle two years ago. Thankfully the Tar Heels collected themselves with an appropriately timed “time out”, and burned the clock while taking smart shots down the stretch.

In the end, Oklahoma brought their game-long average up to 0.75 points per possession, which means they had a decent offensive second half. Their percentage loss of ball ended up being 18.8%, and they shot 44% from the field, 11% from “3”.

Carolina has now played four straight offensive games with stellar offensive numbers. With the exception of the so-so display against Radford, the Heels have played above 1 point per possession basketball in this tournament. Ever since the run ended by the Boston College loss, this is the longest streak, four, of plus-0.95 point per possession play. Yes, the Heels need to play good defense, but history shows that they are only beaten when the offense drops below their goal, 0.95 points per possess.

Final Fours are strange. People like Rick Fox, Shammond Williams, and Dante Calabria can attest to spooky shooting in Final Four domes. Just a year ago, a team wearing Carolina jerseys took the floor against Kansas and were unrecognizable to us, the faithful. Lawson and Hansbrough will be key members, however I think that to win the National Championship, we need a very strong game from either Ellington or Green. It won’t take 25-point games from the two, however if the Heels can present a reliable outside threat, watch out.

If they struggle early with their shooting (and I don’t expect this against Villanova, but do in the Championship, should they get there), it will be imperative for Roy Williams to call a time out to settle his team down. He has shown in the past 3 games that he is become willing to call a timeout for purely emotional reasons, and that is a good sign. All 3 possible opponents are skilled and will present some runs.

The real enemy that ended the past two seasons was the Heels, themselves. Can they stay focused, yet loose? Can they step onto the court and feel like they are playing just a normal game and run their stuff? Who knows? The scheduling of the early season game against Michigan State at Ford Field might provide such a familiar environment that we will, indeed, recognize the team in White on Saturday night.

This …is the most wonderful time of the year! I’ve warned my wife that if she has anything to say to me in the next three weeks, say it now. I’ll be parked in front of my TV watching The Madness.

To celebrate this splendid occasion, gogoraleigh and Tar Heel HOOPla bring you the complete downloadable tournament schedule for iPhones, Blackberrys, Treos, and other Outlook-dependent PDAs.

Updates will be made each night at midnight to reflect correct game times. On Wednesday, a new version showing team abbreviations will be available. This version will allow both teams to be displayed one iPhone screen line.

Downloads are found on the Calendars page.

Yesterday’s release of stats focused on whole-season offensive stats. Let’s look at some conference-only, defensive stats. The first, and most important, is defensive points per possession. That is, the rate at which teams allowed others to score. Low numbers are best.

As proposed in yesterday’s points-per-possession stat, NCSU was a pretty good offensive team, but they were not good defensively.

Yesterday’s stat that caused a stir was the possessions per free throw attempt. UNC was in the middle of that pack offensively for the season. However when one looks at opponents’ propensity to get to the line during league play, a huge disparity exists. UNC opponents rarely got to the free throw line.

Something interesting happens, though, when we look at the number of opponents’ possessions between foul calls.

Once again, UNC finds itself in the middle of the pack. We saw above that UNC is in the middle of the pack on defensive points per possession, and now they are in the middle of the pack on having fouls called on them. Why aren’t UNC fouls being translated into free throw attempts for the opponent?  Let’s look at another stat, the percentage of shots taken from outside the arc by the opponent in conference play:

Once again, UNC finds itself in the middle of the pack. I would assume that opponents just took a lot more shots outside the arc and didn’t bother taking inside on the Heels (UNC after all, has historically opted to guard the lane and give open 3-point attempts to opponents). However this stat doesn’t bear out the possibility.

Opponents propose that there is an officiating bias toward UNC, especially Tyler Hansbrough. If so, then why aren’t UNC fouls resulting in the normal number of Free Throw Attempts by the opponents?

As Part II of today’s essay on ACC stats, I want to do an overview of several team stats from the ACC season. In the first part a ratio was introduced to standardize the frequency by which a few teams get trips to the Free Throw line. If we invert the ratio, we get possessions per free throw attempt. A team that gets to the line frequently will have a low number, while a team that is a stranger to the line will have a high number of possessions per free throw.  

Next, let’s look at where teams shot the ball. This chart shows the percentage of shots taken from behind the 3-point arc by each team in the league. A low percentage shows a team that took a larger share inside the arc, while a high percentage indicates a team that relied on the “3” more than the league.

The next stat is the most important stat of all, points per possession. A possession is defined as the period during which a team has control of the ball. Thus, possessions end with either a turnover, a shot attempt, or a 1-and-1 or 2-shot foul situation. The goal, as defined by Dean Smith, is to exceed 0.95 points per possession.

Notice the strong correlation with this list and the final ACC standings. One outlier is N.C. State. The fact that they were the third most efficient offense, but finished 10th in the league. This shows that the Pack’s defense was what set them back. Another outlier is Florida State. They weren’t efficient, but assumingly gained much of their ground with their defense (opposition’s points per possession would reflect this). Also, these stats do include the entire season, so teams that got off to slow starts and finished strong will appear artificially low on this table.

The next stat is percentage loss of ball. Raw turnover stats are misleading because they don’t reflect the speed of the game played. 20 turnovers in a fast-break, up-and-down game is pretty good, while it is high in a slow-down, half-court game. A low percentage loss of ball indicates that a team is turning the ball over infrequently.

As you can see there is much more to basketball than just field goal percentage and turnovers. Standardized, we see that several stats explain much better how a team is really playing.

I commonly hear opponents and their fans lamenting the fact that opponents of UNC are far more likely to get fouls called on them. If this were the case, UNC should have a significantly higher FTA/Possession ratio.

UNC has always been an inside-first kind of offensive team. Given that players are more likely to be fouled when shooting in traffic, it would seem that UNC’s style of play is enough to get them to the free throw line more frequently than opponents. The best way to evaluate a team’s predilection for shooting inside vs. outside is to look at the percentage of shots taken that are behind the arc. Here are a few stats showing percentage of shots taken from “3” all season: UNC 27.7%, NCSU 33.1%, VT 31.6%.  So, UNC is clearly getting the ball inside more than this pair of opponents.

Looking at raw free throw attempt stats is intensely misleading. That stat doesn’t account for the number of games played, the speed of the games played, and several other factors. If a team that plays a fast pace attempts 20 shots in a game while a very slow-paced team got 20 free throws in a game, the slow paced team visited the line much more frequently given their fewer possessions. Consider these stats:

UNC got the ball 2,808 times and attempted 792 free throws. Their ratio is 0.282. N.C. State got the ball 2,354 times this season and attempted 615 free throws, for a ratio of 0.261. Virginia Tech got the ball 2586 times this season, and attempted 732 free throws. Their ratio is 0.283.

So yes, UNC attempted free throws more frequently than N.C. State did, but they only got there 8% more frequently (1-282/261). Given that NCSU took almost a third of their shots from “3” this season, a significantly higher proportion than UNC, it is surprising that there is only an 8% difference.

Virginia Tech’s coach Seth Greenberg believes that there is a different standard of officiating for UNC than for the rest of the league. His team got the ball 2,586 times this season and attempted 732 free throws. That’s a ratio of 0.283, which is 0.3% more frequent than UNC’s rate of trips to the line. Given that Virginia Tech jacked 3’s on 31.6% of their possessions while UNC only did so on 27.7%, it appears that Virginia Tech is more likely to be granted a free throw trip when they get the ball inside than Carolina is.

Fans and coaches get understandably emotional. Unfortunately their hearts are doing the thinking.

Just before the season started, the NCAA moved the 3-point line one foot farther away from the basket. The committee felt new distance, 20’9” would make the line a more equitable shot and balance the court better. Did it work?

During the regular season, ACC teams shot 34.8% from behind the arc. Problem is, they only shot  49.5% from inside of the arc, so the line is still devaluing action inside the arc. To put it differently, on possessions that ended in a 3-point shot, teams averaged scoring 1.045 points. On possessions that ended with a shot inside of the arc, teams only scored 0.989 points on average.

At this point, the “3” is still a better gamble on average than working it inside. The NCAA Rules Committee should keep moving the line back until the average points per possession inside vs. outside the arc are the same. In fact, the average outside of the arc should be up to 5% lower than inside (to promote smart possessions and off-ball movement)

Just after the Maryland game there was much discussion about the UNC defense. However my contention has been that we haven’t been consistent enough offensively. What has happened since that game? We’ve scored 1.08, 0.96, 1.03, and 0.95 points per possession. In today’s game sans Lawson we turned the ball over on 10.8% of our possessions, so we really played a good offensive game today…and WON!

We have allowed >0.91 points per possession in 5 of our last 6 games, though. That may be our worst defensive stretch since I started tracking this stuff 14 years ago. This needs to improve, however the overriding point is that defensive stats have much less to do with winning than our offensive stats.

We’ve gone 4 games meeting our offensive goals, and won all 4. The only trouble with this is that we are due for a clunker. Hopefully it comes against a bad team in the first round next week! Consistency wins championships.

The Heels answered their week off with a fantastic performance against a bad Georgia Tech team. The UNC offense was fantastic today. We scored 1.08 points per possession and kept them to 0.80 points per possession. What was different in this 30-point win? Well, the offense was different. We were 0.13 ppp above our goal offensively. We surpassed our defensive goal by only 0.05.

Point is that our defensive play has much, MUCH less to do with the margin of victory than our offensive play. Coach Williams obviously spent A LOT more time on our offense this week than the defense. What was different? Tons, including shot selection, movement away from the ball, screen execution, and the role of Ty Lawson. Nobody is impressed by his 4 points today, but we are a much better team with him playing like he did today. On Sunday he took 26% of our shots. Today he took 4%. That’s probably a little low, but the point is that he ran the offense today instead of nobody’s open I think I’ll jack it up - something that has been a growing problem, actually. Lawson had 11 assists and 2 turnovers. As a team UNC got 26 assists to 15 turnovers. In the Maryland game we had 15 turnovers, but only 5 assists to go with it.

The defense was better today, but the offense was remarkably better which explains the overall result. Before we get too excited, though, we have to realize that the UNC offense has been in an off/on pattern for the entire ACC season, especially the last 10 games. We have two games in the regular season left. If we can sustain 0.95 points per possession on offense, we will win the regular season outright. The key lies in the team playing as a team as they did today.