Spear Points: Breaking down Florida State basketball’s offensive resurgence

Since returning from a multi-week layoff, there’s been a different Florida State Seminoles basketball team than the one seen in losses to Clemson and UCF.

A few weeks ago I decided to take a deeper look into the problems that this team was facing. Mainly, I felt like the team had quite a ways to grow on defense if they were going to join the ranks of the teams that preceded them.

I included some throwaway line that predicted that their offensive efficiency might rise if a few more shots start falling for them — and boy was that the understatement of the year.

Before the break, Florida State was shooting a mediocre 33.9% from beyond the arc. Upon return, that number has jumped to a ludicrous 52.7%. Likewise, their free throw percentage has skyrocketed 22 percentage points to 91.7%. All of this has been good for a jump from the 40th best offense to the 12th according to kenpom’s offensive efficiency metric.

Now there is no way that these shooting numbers remain this high for the rest of the season. NBA teams can’t maintain those rates but these numbers are an indication of something else. This team is beginning to find and form its own identity separate from the one formed by its predecessors. While it might never be the defensive tour de force that we’ve become accustomed to it might well be head coach Leonard Hamilton’s best offensive team.

This team deserves all the coverage it can get. In order to release more videos in a timelier manner, I’m trying a new format to discuss how FSU was able to manufacture easy 3 point opportunities in the first half of the Louisville game. Let me know what you think of the format and be sure to include how you see this team has grown and changed in the comments below.