Season Preview Part I: State of the Program

Before we get into talking about our actual team, players and schedule, I want to try and figure out what the current state of the program is.  Now entering his 12^th season, we have a pretty good picture about what it means to have Jay Wright as the head of your program.  First, I want to be clear.  I am a Jay supporter and defender, and I do NOT believe he should even be on the hot seat this season.  Now if we fail to show promise and this year ends up as bad if not worse than last year, well then obviously I think he should start getting nervous.  But for now, Jay is our coach and he should be.  But, what does it mean to have Jay as your coach?

It means the following:

11 season: 231-115 .667%

9 winning seasons

99 – 69 record in Big East play; including 8 seasons at .500 or better

1 Conference Regular Season Championship (’06)

7 seasons posting 20+ wins

7 NCAA Tourneys

4 Sweet 16’s

2 Elite 8’s

1 Final Four

Ah, the Final four.  Would Jay still have a job if he didn’t have that on his resume? I for one am glad we don’t have to answer that question, as Final Four coaches do not simply grow on trees.

That being said, we have frankly sucked the last two years.  I felt my soul slip from inside of me every time I tuned in the last two years.  We have had several blue chip recruits fail to pan out, and so this year we find the program in very uncertain territory.  We have few upperclassmen, again, and a handful of sophomores who were less than impressive last year.  We have also seen players leave early who were not ready for the next level (boy is that putting it mildly or what?) and players transfer who were once highly regarded recruits.  It seems as if Jay wants to start over and clean house of any bad apples, which in light of the last couple of years seems like a sound strategy.

But taking a step back for a moment, I want to look at some broader trends and see if we can’t define the components of a Jay Wright Villanova team.  I am using data from 2003-2012 as that data is the most easily accessible, and it gives us 10 solid years of information.

Looking at the Data

Anyone care to guess what our biggest statistical strength as a program has been over the last 10 years?  3 point shooting - clearly not.  Steals - no.  Assists - no.  Defensive FG% - um, no.  It is offensive rebounding percentage, OR%!  Crazy, right?  Here is a graph of our 4 factors over time and their respective national ranks, out of 347 D-I teams.

It looks harder to read than it is.  Check out 2010 for example, and you can see how all of the data points are clustered together at the bottom.  We were an offensive machine that year, as our national ranking in all the 4 factors was really solid.  But overall you can see that OR% (in dark green) is always the lowest, meaning best ranked, out of all of the 4 factors.  This is not something I ever would have expected, but clearly it is our teams best attribute on a consistent basis, as we were only ranked outside the top 50 three times and we were in the top 25 one 4 different occasions.  The other positive trend shown here is our ability to get the free throw line.  We have remained steady and we have even improved in this area over time, thank you Scottie and Fisher.

Now, here are the same stats but on the defensive side of the ball.

Several things stand out.  First, we have improved our defensive rebounding over the years – which makes sense as we have also added size: Sutton, Yarou, etc.  The second thing is look at how BAD we were at creating turnovers the last two years.  Jesus, that is awful and trending in the wrong direction.  Finally, look at the trends for our foul rate (FTA/FGA in orange) and also our TO% (shown in red).  For the most part, we have fouled at a fairly high rate, but that has been offset largely by our ability to create TO’s.  However, in the last two years that trend flipped, and you can see that we created far fewer turnovers while also fouling much less frequently.  I think it reflects an overall lack of effort on the defense end, and it could very well illustrate the chemistry issues and effort issues over the last two seasons.  Fouling a lot is never a good thing, but if you are being aggressive and creating turnovers as a result, I think you can stomach the foul rate.

Conclusions

Jay Wright has had success at Villanova over his last 11 years.  We have won the Big East regular season once.  We have gained a 1 seed in the tourney.  We have made a Final Four.  Short of winning the ship, I think he has done an excellent job.

Offensively over the years, we have been an above average offensive rebounding team despite our often lack of perceived height.  Additionally, we generally have a knack for getting to the foul line, where as everyone knows we convert our attempts at a high rate.  In our best seasons, ’05, ’06, ’09, & ‘10 we take care of the basketball, but outside of ’10 our eFG% fluctuates.

Defensively, we have steadily improved on the glass while also causing a good amount of turnovers – possibly a result of a guard heavy team which will improve one’s Stl%.  Overall, we tend to foul at a high rate, but until the last couple of years this has been offset by our ability to create turnovers.

I think more than anything the declining TO% and the lower FTA/FGA are the most indicative of our teams struggles over the last couple of seasons.  While our offensive numbers have shifted, it is our defense or lack thereof, which has hurt us the most.  Getting back to being aggressive and causing turnovers should greatly improve our overall defensive numbers, while at the same time instilling that team mentality and chemistry which just simply hasn’t been there lately.