Season Post-Mortem V: Conference Stats

Yes, I realize it is August. And that it is probably a little late for post-mortems. After all, it's beginning to rot a bit.

But I finally got around to looking at conference-only stats for the Hoyas, player by player. One offensive stat in particular stuck out to me: turnovers.

I haven't really focused much on them in the off-season. The Hoyas have never been a good ball-handling team under JTIII, whether because of personnel or the time- and pass-intensive offense that they run. And they've won despite it. But I'm not sure that's possible given the turnover rates in-conference play last year.

Turnover rate (turnovers / total possessions used) in conference play:

Player                   TO Rate
Awful
Vaughn                      32%
Clark                       29%
Mescheriakov                27%
Wattad                      27%

Merely Really Bad
Summers                     24%
Monroe                      24%
TEAM                  23%

Borderline
Wright                      22%

Decent         
Sapp                        20%
Sims                        18%

Really Good     
Freeman                     12%

To quote Talia Shire, "You can't win!" Well, at least not with turnover rates like that.

For example, Jason Clark had a true shooting percentage of 58%. That's fantastic (he was our best 3 point shooter in conference). But his turnovers were so prevalent he was a below average offensive player.

The same thing happened to DaJuan Summers. In fact, only three Hoyas had an in conference Offensive Rating of over 100 -- Freeman, Monroe and Wright -- and the latter two declined significantly from the non-conference schedule.

To make the point even more emphatically, Henry Sims was our fourth most effective offensive player on a possession used based -- and that's solely because he didn't throw away the ball every chance he got.

(Ok, not solely. He also limited himself to mostly dunks. But you get my point.)