Statistically Speaking: Royce O'Neale Is Doing Awesome Things

Baylor plays tonight against Northwestern State, it will be on TV but only if you have Fox Sports Southwest Plus which I certainly do not. A brief primer on the Demons: They are just below middling in about every category, practically every member of their team belongs on the All-Name team and there is a 7% chance they beat us tonight according to Ken Pomeroy. I will give you a little more information in the Game Thread tonight, because for now I am making up for yesterday's absent stats post with one this morning. Also, if everything goes correctly you should be viewing a film study later this afternoon from MattIsBear.

So I have mentioned several times now, whether it be on the podcast or in posts, that Royce O'Neale is our most efficient player. I decided this was a perfect topic for our first stats post of the season, all of which will vary in format but stay true to being about just the stats and nothing else.

Here is O'Neale's line right now.

One of many stats that I personally love, is points per forty minutes (from now on I will use "pp40" for short). I think it is a telling stat about one's offensive production, as well as production potential. However like all individual statistics, it does not tell the whole story but it does offer us perspective on guys who are not averaging close to 37 or 38 minutes per game.

This stat is derived by multiplying the number of points per game by forty and dividing by the number of minutes played per game.

Royce O'Neale: 11.3 pp40

That really is not that great, it is not bad by any means, but not great. This is why with a player like O'Neale you have to take it a step further and look at the number of possessions he uses as well as the percentage of the team's shots he is taking. Though he is now a starter, he is only using around 15% of our possessions. To put that in perspective, Cory Jefferson is using 25%, meaning that on a quarter of possessions when Cory is in the game, they end on a made Cory Jefferson basket, defensive rebound off of a Cory Jefferson miss or a Cory Jefferson turnover.

Still tracking with me?

So only 15% of possessions with him on the floor end with Royce O'Neale doing something that gives the ball back to other team, whether it be a made basket, turnover or a missed shot resulting in a defensive rebound.

Additionally, he is only shooting on 9% of the possessions he is a part of during games. Now imagine if he upped that percentage to what the rest of the team is averaging individually, which is right around 21% (which makes logical sense that it would be right around 20%). Herein lies our problem - how do we quantify his efficiency in scoring points based on what we know above? There are a lot of ways to determine overall offensive efficiency but I wanted something that would show us what our players are doing to score baskets only. So, when there is nothing there, make something new.

So after a little bit of math, I have a new statistic I have been looking at for a while and feel comfortable enough in what you can derive from it to share: Overall Points Production per 40 minutes. That is a bit lengthy, so I've come up with a shorthand: Opp/40.

This figure is the result of meshing points per forty minutes, percentage of possessions used and percentage of shots taken to determine who is taking good shots, making them at a high rate and avoiding turnovers while trying to score. A simplified way of looking at this statistic is as follows: Opp/40 is the point total a player would average if he got the same number of opportunities as everyone else on his team over the course of an entire game. I will provide the logic at the bottom of the post for those of you who are really into it. Since I know this is already dense for many of you (looking at you Peter), I will just give you the chart of our player's Opp/40.

So as you can see - Royce O'Neale and whoah wait a second, Brady Heslip? Where did you come from?

Despite disappearing at times, Heslip leads the team in Opp/40 and it should come as no surprise. When you are second on the team in scoring, while averaging around 50% from behind the arc an 50% from the field, and only play about half of each game ... you're going to be high on this chart.

I have not played with this system to determine exactly what "average" "above average" etc. should be exactly, however I can say preliminarily that anything from 14-17.9999 is about average, 18-21 is above average and 21+ is excellent. 10-14 is below average and less than 10 is not good.

I will refine this as I play with more teams using these metrics, but from what I've seen (done some back testing on this), those number brackets are about right.

So to conclude today's stats post, I just wanted to point out that Royce and Brady are the kings of efficiency when they take their opportunities. What this means directly for the Bears is that over time, like Heslip who has shown his offensive prowess with the advantage of being in the system longer, O'Neale will begin to see plays drawn up for him as well.

*For those of you who care how I arrive at Opp/40 it is as follows*

To determine Opp/40 we need to calculate two different numbers first.

1) Points per 40 minutes with equal opportunity of possessions used.

2) Points per 40 minutes with equal shot opportunities.

To determine the first, we use pp40 multiplied by average possessions used % by rest of the team (this way it benefits players who are not using as many possessions, and hurts players using a ton of possessions to put them on equal footing). The resulting number is divided by that individual players' own possessions used %.

To determine the second, like the first we use pp40 but instead of multiplying by the the average possessions used, we multiply by the average percentage of shots taken by the rest of the teams as individuals (this again evens the playing field for players that take high percentages vs. low percentages of shots). Then the resulting number is divided by that individual players' own percentage of shots.

Finally, the Opp/40 is determined by averaging the two numbers so that not only are turnovers/missed shots taken into account with the % possessions used, but the sheer amount of shots taken are factored as well.

Please feel free to chip in with your thoughts here - I have by no means perfected this, and plan to chart it out throughout the season as a metric of who we can rely on to score in crucial situations just based on the numbers.

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