Baylor Bears Basketball: Improvements from 2009 to 2010

Expectations were certainly lower coming into the 2009-2010 season than they were in 2008-2009, and it’s pretty obvious why.

Gone were Jerrells, Dugat, and Rogers, who for all of their faults (and there were many) came to Baylor at a time when it was the least desirable D-I basketball destination in the state, if not the country. In came AJ Walton, Nolan Dennis, and Givon Crump—a decent haul but not exactly a murderer’s row.

Yet here we sit in late February locked into the Dance and with four more Big XII wins than we had last year.

There are 347 D-I teams. According to Ken Pomeroy’s excellent NCAA MBB site kenpom.com, last year we were No. 34 overall, No. 13 offensively, No. 103 defensively, and our pace was 159th.

This year we have improved to No. 18 overall, No. 7 offensively, No. 55 defensively, and our pace is 255th. It is worth mentioning that pace is adjusted out of the offensive and defensive rankings—higher scoring teams are not automatically ranked higher on offense, and vice versa. It’s efficiency that matters.

It’s clear that we have measurably improved over last season. Let’s look at where we’ve improved, and where we’ve gotten worse.

Big Improvements

Defensive Effective FG Percentage: 49.3% in 2009 (175th), 44.5% in 2010 (27th)
Offensive Rebounding %: 31.5 Percentage in 2009 (225th), 39.2% in 2010 (17th)
Defensive Block Percentage: 9.2% in 2009 (132nd), 18.9% in 2010 (first)

Big Regressions

Defensive Turnover Percentage: 19.7% in 2009 (199th), 17.7% in 2010 (314th)
Defensive Steal Percentage: 10.2% in 2009 (130th), 8.9% in 2010 (236th)
Defensive percentage of points allowed from three-pointers: 27.4% in 2009 (175th most), 32.9% in 2010 (23rd most)

Hopefully you’ve seen a pattern here, because there’s an easy explanation for why our style of play and metrics have changed so much from the 2009 to 2010 season.

Whereas last year, even when we were in a 2-3 zone, after Lomers, Rogers, and Acy we had no one bigger than 6′4″ on the court. Dugat was essentially our three and played 71.1 percent of the minutes. Rogers (82.1 percent) got heavy usage but none of our other bigs were on the court more than half the time. Therefore, we got killed on the boards, but we were a little better at forcing turnovers, and especially better at closing out on three-point shooters.

Now we’ve got Udoh playing 86.9 percent of the time, Anthony Jones (67.7 percent), Lomers (42.9 percent), Acy (55.1 percent)…in other words, we are playing a huge lineup.

Pomeroy actually tracks how big a team’s lineup is. In 2009, our average height was 6′4″, 203rd in the country, and our effective height (a measurement of how big each of our players is compared to the average at his position) was 0.8″, 113th in the country. This season, our average height is 6′6″, 20th in the country, but our effective height is a whopping 6.2″, good for second in the country.

Because we are playing such a big lineup, we are killing the boards. It doesn’t hurt at all that LaceDarius has all of the sudden decided to become a rebounder in addition to his usual three-point sharpshooting. Naturally, the counter-effect to our sudden rebounding (and shot-blocking) prowess is that our big lineup is having real trouble getting out in the passing lanes.

Don’t believe the announcers who claim that we “stretch out our zone” to make it difficult on offenses. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We play a very passive zone. Syracuse, like us, plays nearly exclusively a 2-3 zone, and they manage to force turnovers on 23 percent of the opponents’ possessions, or nearly six percent more of the time than we do.

I’m not advocating a switch to man or a lineup switch at all. This zone is working for us. We are clogging the lane, Udoh and friends are doing a great job blocking and altering shots, and we are forcing teams to shoot a really low percentage against us. We are blocking literally twice as many shots on a per possession basis as we were last year, and we’re the most effective shot-blocking team in the country. Obviously we owe most of that to Udoh.

When it’s time to dance in a few weeks, don’t be surprised if a hot shooting team knocks us out, because we are unable to limit possessions by forcing turnovers.

This article was written by Ursa Major of Bear Crawl.

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