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 12th
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.
