006: 🏀 Points distribution and assists
A hodgepodge of observations through 11 men's hoops games.
Carolina beat The Citadel 100-67 Tuesday night at the Smith Center. Through 50 games with Hubert Davis as its head coach, Carolina is 36-14.
As a comparison, Carolina posted a 25-25 record in the last 50 games under Roy Williams. The Tar Heels won 37 of its first 50 games with Williams as the head coach.
The style of play is different under the two head coaches, and the style is even different from last season.
After a 5-4 start to the season, Carolina wasn’t sharing the ball or going through the post much at all. The lack of rim-runs or early offense felt foreign at times.
It’s not March 2022. The bang-bang mother f*cker is not walking through that door or coming off a stagger screen to drill a three-pointer.
Carolina has scored ~24 percent of its points from three-point shots this season compared to ~32 percent last season.
A caveat is these numbers ignore shot quality. I’m not here to breakdown if Carolina should run more Secondary Punch or the expected True Shooting Percentage of its shots. There are smarter people to do that, and you should read1 their work2.
A few other points distribution related notes:
Prior to scoring 45 percent of points from three-point land against The Citadel, only 16 percent of Carolina’s previous 212 points came from three-point shots.
In nine of 39 games last season, Carolina scored 40 percent or more of its points from three-pointers (UCLA, Marquette, Syracuse, Duke, Louisville, NC State, Virginia, Tennessee, and Purdue). It’s happened only once through 11 games this season.
Carolina’s free throw rate is 43.9 through 11 games. This is significantly higher than last season (30.3) and closer to a 2005-type number. Heels have made 218 free throws and opponents have attempted 157 free throws, good for a +61 margin.
Before recording a season-high 24 assists against The Citadel, Carolina had more turnovers (113) than assists (112) through 10 games.
The win against the The Citadel was the fifth time in 11 games where the Heels recorded more assists than turnovers this season. The assist-to-turnover ratio is 1.09 so far.
A 45.2 assist rate through 11 games is not great. Of course, poor shooting percentages don’t help those numbers and the sample size is small. On the flip side, Carolina has avoided turnovers on ~84 percent of possessions. That’s above average.
Carolina’s competition ramps back up over the next few weeks meeting Ohio State in New York on Saturday and Michigan in Charlotte a week from today.
Curious to see how the assist numbers and point distribution change through the next two-thirds of the season.