Checking In On The Kansas Jayhawks: Non-Conference Player Review

As we move into the conference schedule, it's time to take one last look back to the non-conference. On Tuesday I took a look at our offense overall and tried to determine which of the four factors drives our offense the most.

Today we get a little more granular and look at which players are most responsible for driving our success. To do this we are going to break out one of the most handy tools in the toolbox: the scatter plot. Below the jump I have a scatter plot of our roster and each player's offensive rating and percentage of possessions used. To paraphrase from KenPom, offensive rating is a formula developed by Dean Oliver that measures how many points a player produces per possession. It is a super complicated formula, and you would have to read the Basketball on Paper book I talked about in my previous post to get all of the gory details. Possessions used is a stat that records the percentage of possessions a player ends while on the court via a made shot, a missed shot that is rebounded defensively, or via a turnover.

The average player uses around 20% of his team's possessions, and an average offensive efficiency is around 100. So basically anyone in the top right quadrant (high efficiency, lots of possessions) is a star player, anyone in the bottom right quadrant (lots of possessions, low efficiency) should probably not shoot so much or handle the ball so much, anyone in the top left (less possessions, high efficiency) are either people who should be featured more, or people who are putting up good numbers but could regress with a larger sample size, and finally the bottom left quadrant are people who aren't very good offensively, but at least don't ruin so many possessions with it.

Some notes:

• Thanks to The Only Colors, MSU's SB Nation blog, for the idea for this. Something about the state of Michigan and good CBB writing.
• poor Brady Morningstar
• As we already knew, the Morri are phenomenal. I really don't even have words for what they have done this year. I almost hope Markieff slows down a bit so that he won't be tempted to declare for the draft and then have Marcus go with him.
• A couple poor games have put Selby close to the break even line, but he hasn't completely adjusted to the college game yet I don't think, and I expect his dot to move up, and maybe a bit to the left.
• Granted he doesn't play much, but who had Jeff Withey as that good offensively. Anyone? Not that a 105.7 O rating is great, but still. I had to check his numbers about 5 times before I put it on there.
• Tyrel Reed really knows how to maximize his possessions. And he's only knocking down 34% of his threes. As his percentage goes up (which I expect it to) so will his dot.
• Speaking of maximizing possessions, Elijah Johnson is making a great case for more playing time. He only plays about a third of the team's minutes but it would be nice to see him get some more time, and I think he will against Iowa State and Nebraska.
• Travis Releford's injury is a big one, and hopefully he can get back to full strength.
• Our team is basically an embarrassment of riches right now, even though we aren't in the top 10 of offensive efficiency. Obviously the Morri are our go to players, but Selby looks like he's going to develop into that third scorer, and it's possible that Thomas Robinson could too, given that he is a more efficient scorer from inside than Markieff is.
• If he could cut down on his turnovers, Tyshawn would really explode. His 31.5% assist rate is amazing, he has shot over 50% from two, nearly 75% from the line, and 33% from three, all of which are better than I thought he would, and he plays good defense without committing fouls (which isn't part of O rating obviously, but still a good thing).