Did you know that the Lobo men’s basketball team has had an issue with turnovers this season? If you’re reading this, my guess would be that you’re well aware, especially given how hot of a topic it seems to be right now, and have found yourself pulling your hair out several times this season because yet another Lobo dribbled into a trap/had a pass bounce off of his hands/threw a pass into the stands for what seems like the hundredth time in the game. And as much as I’d like to be the contrarian to provide evidence that it hasn’t been as bad as it seems or that it hasn’t really been affecting them much, I really can’t.
After all, consider the following:
- The Lobos average 15.87 turnovers per game, which is the 12th worst mark in the country (average is 13.01)
- The first nine games of the season, the Lobos had 117 turnovers, good for an average of 13 per game. The last six games of the season, that is, from the Rice game and on, they have had 116 turnovers, which is an average of 19.33 per game.
- They turn the ball over on 21.4% of their possessions, which is the 36th worst rate in the country (average is 18.6%). In their two conference games, that number has jumped up to 28.2, which is the worst in the conference.
It’s hard to spin any of that into a positive, especially when you take all of that into consideration together. What’s worse is that how good a team is at limiting turnovers is one of the best indicators to how good the team is on offense, so this is actively holding the Lobo offense back. As a quick illustration of this, I looked at some of the data from kenpom.com to see how much they’re being held back by these turnovers. To do this, I used the data for all 351 Division-I basketball teams to fit a linear model to estimate a team’s adjusted offensive efficiency from what that site lists as the “Four Factors”: Effective FG%, Turnover%, Offensive Rebounding %, and Free Throw Rate (FTA/FGA). The output of the model fit looked like this:
First off, we see that this model is a good fit, as the R2 value is .895 and all of the predictors are considered significant. We also can see that, from the estimates, the two factors that will affect a team’s offensive efficiency the most when they change by a single percent are Effective FG%, which will increase the efficiency by an estimated 1.09 points each percentage point increase, and Turnover%, which will decrease the efficiency by an estimated 1.16 points each percentage point increase.
So, what does that mean for the Lobos? Well, they have a Turnover% of 21.4%, which is 2.8 percentage points higher than the average of 18.6%. If they were to somehow decrease their Turnover% to the average while keeping all of their other values steady, we could estimate that they would see a 3.26 point increase in their adjusted offensive efficiency. If all that were to happen, then they would go from an adjusted offensive rating of 104.0 (which is 146th in the country) to 107.26 (which would be about 85th). That might not seem like a lot, but that little boost would give them an overall KenPom Pythagorean rating of .7385, which would be the best rating of anyone in the conference.
What’s wild about this all to me is that there’s no single guilty party on the team. In fact, of the 11 players who might see the court for the rest of the season (the 10 scholarship players and Tim Jacobs), only Elijah and Tim W. have above-average turnover rates. Basically everyone on the team needs to cut down on their turnovers. Cullen is the most obvious culprit on the team, but that is probably because he’s the one with the ball in his hands the most, so he has the most opportunity to make turnovers. Sure he needs to tighten that up, but so does everyone, including the backup point guards.
This obviously isn’t an easy fix, as Coach Neal can’t just say “Don’t turn the ball over” and the turnover issue will be gone. I’m almost certain that he would have tried that if it would have worked. Instead, it’s going to take the team working together to make smart passes, to not dribble into pressure, to make sure they’re always ready for a pass, and to not get flustered if they do make a mistake if they’re going to shake this turnover monkey off their backs.
You’ll notice that those are all mental things. After all, the style of play that they’re going for will naturally lead to some turnovers, which Coach Neal alluded to in his presser today and stated that he’s not going to yank guys for physical mistakes. Those mental mistakes I listed are what really deed to be fixed. That’s not going to be easy, but it’s not impossible. I said that it’s hard to spin any of that list at the beginning into a positive but if I tried, I’d point out that they had an average number of turnovers per game for the first nine games of the season so we know that they have the ability to do that. I hope that they find a way to get back there soon.