I was pondering prior to the Louisville game: what kind of possessions do we struggle with and how would you define it or chart it effectively? Basketball is not like football, where the way your defense plays only truly affects your offense in two ways: the score leverage and your field position. They are far more interconnected in games like basketball, where possessions are a much more fluid concept. Does the way you gain possession of the ball affect how you play on the possession? Probably, I'd bet. So consider this a first attempt to try to understand how the method by which possession is attained affects the next play. Think of it as a deep dive on situational basketball.
There are 3 ways a team can attain possession other than a jumpball: an opponent score, rebounds, and turnovers. If I can write a query to chart rebounds, what is to stop me from writing a query to chart turnovers too? I further categorized the defensive rebounds into transition/non-transition types and separated turnovers into live/deadball varieties. I'm currently working on classifying opponent scores into transition/non-transition varieties, I'm fairly certain we're not great in that situation. The first two blue rows ought to equal the next five gray rows, which all sum to the totals in gold. One of the best things we did in the first half was turning our live ball turnovers into fouls to stop the play. Louisville's best possessions in the first half were actually after we had just scored, what a curiosity. I wonder why that could be?
(Hint: Youthful Swagger paired with inexperience)
We turned it over 6 more times than them and they crushed us after every made basket and turnover. They turned as much as they could into a transition play somehow or another. The guys were exhausted after a 67 possession game.
This game was won in large part by Louisville turning every possession they could into a transition possession. They got easy buckets with our backs turned and the defense not yet set. They probably got 24+ possessions against a defense that wasn't ready in a game that had 66 possessions.
Yesterday was my birthday so I spent most of the day writing queries to pull most of this data, a birthday present to myself. Some of it isn't exactly validated yet, so don't be surprised to see some mistakes, but you know, timeliness.
Here are the links to the actual charts
Seminoles 1st Half Reb (con't)
Homework/background: Hurry Up Offense: How Pushing The Pace Affects Shooting And Rebounding Rates
Jeff Haley at Hoop-Math seems like he's interested in some of the same questions, really good resource for this sort of research too. I'm preeetty sure I'm not the first person to come up with the concept of Total Offensive Rebound Efficiency, but I can't believe nobody seems to at least conceptually use it much. It's a natural complement to initial fg efficiency that Haley seems interested in.