Save the Shield! A Vanderbilt sports blog

I’ve been trying for a while to get into using Ken Pomeroy’s stats, especially the main ones of tempo-free offense and defense. Each year I understand what’s going on on his page a little more, but the key to making knowledge your own is learning to apply it for new insights. So I guess you could say that today’s game against DePaul, coming on the heels of an 83-possession transitionfest against Mizzou, is sort of a watershed in my comprehension.

By my calculation using the 0.4 coefficient for free throws, today’s game comes out right at 60 possessions. That would make it by far our slowest game of the season, but a very typically-paced game for DePaul. And of course, in any slow-paced game people get really down on the offense, as a couple of threads on VandySports bear out.

But does that hold water? By my calcs today we were at 1.12 points scored per possession and 0.9 points allowed, right on our season average. DePaul is clearly a team that can impose their pace on anyone — they went only 62 trips with Tennessee, for crying out loud — but they’re only moderately successful defensively, and they didn’t really stop us from scoring today. They just slowed us down to their preferred pace.

We’ll probably drop a little bit from 24th in the Pomeroys, because our schedule up to this point was a stellar 11th (16th offensively, 23rd defensively). DePaul isn’t anywhere near that good, and when you reproduce your efficiency averages against a team that’s worse than the average team you’ve played so far, it hurts you a bit. Somewhat counteracting that is the fact that Mizzou, a team that Pomeroy’s numbers still love (12th), blew out Oregon, a team they like (59th). In any case, we won’t fall much.

It’s way too early to ascribe too much meaning to most of Pomeroy’s numbers, but I’m pretty confident asserting that our perceived offensive failings today had more to do with DePaul’s pace than with our offense’s deficiencies, or indeed with DePaul’s accomplishments.