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?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.