KU Seasonal Stats - The Bill Self Years
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Here’s a spreadsheet where I aggregated season stats for all Bill Self seasons. The 2004-2005 stats don’t appear to be available, hence the hole there.
If anything looks interesting, call it out!
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@approxinfinity - this is AWESOME! Thank you for this great info. I’m a stats freak, though i don’t post it very much. The first thing i looked at was free throw percentage. I was surprised and a little disappointed that the numbers were as high as they were when we made an early exit in any of the tournaments. In my mind i pictured 75% when we made it to the Elite Eight or above and about 55% when we lost early. Maybe that’s why Bill spends zero time working on free throws in practice - apparently they don’t mean squat.
By the way, I’m currently leading my office pool, averaging 6.332 cups of coffee per day. I think I can get over 7 with some practice. Of course, productivity drops a little for me as I spend 1.53 hours per day in the “facilities”. Love my stats. Lol
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@nuleafjhawk haha, thanks bud! Glad you like it. I’m debating highlighting all the seasons in a color arc from best to worst or just the best three / worst three (thats what I’m currently doing, albeit slowly. if one of the longtimers wants to help with that private message me and I can add you as editor).
One thing that stands out is that we’ve had two of our top 3 seasons for points in the last 3 years, and 2 of our worst three seasons for points given up. This past year being the intersection of an average points for, and worst points again, resulting in worst scoring differential under Self.
The lack of three point shooting killed us this year. Notice that the last 3 years prior to last season were our 3rd most, 2nd most, and top three point made seasons, then we fell off this year. I think Self really banked on three point shooting from a few guys. He probably thought Dedric would be free to shoot 3s more with SDS and Doke in the mix, and that Q and Charlie would be able to hit the broad side of a barn.
One thing that I didn’t realize re: 3 pt shooting that blew my mind is that our opponents made more 3s than us our championship year! Maybe that’s why Self is stubborn about the high-low? “It’s been done!”
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@approxinfinity It would be very interesting ( to me ) to see the 3 point, free throw % and …steals from the past 5 or so National Champions.
To see if there’s a trend there - or who knows, maybe it’s just a lucky break, a key injury, a couple of oddball things that really doesn’t have to do with a specific type of play.
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for sure! maybe we can add another sheet for that.
the spectrum for each stat is turning out nice! almost like a heat map.
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OK! The heatmap is complete!
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@Gorilla72 Hey! So in response to your comment in the other thread:
“These are troubling times for Bill Self. Adapt or perish times.” I don’t understand this comment. Would you elaborate?
I think this heatmap illustrates the problem well. Look at all that red the last 3 seasons. Yes, we made an E8 and a F4, but those ended in double digit losses. Yes, we were very strong in a couple key areas, but overall Bill is trending in the wrong direction statistically, especially on the defensive side, if these stats are indicative of anything (i’ll leave that open to debate).
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Great stuff! I enjoy looking at those too.
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Great job @approxinfinity
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@BeddieKU23 thanks! I’d love to add sheets for other teams and I’d also love to isolate the same exact stats for KU in the tournament for each year.
If anyone knows somewhere that this data or other juicy data is already in a table please let me know! And also ping me if you want to contribute directly.
One thing that jumps out from our title year is that the only negatives were opponents rebounds, assists, and our turnovers. This was a team that played fast and loose, but played excellent O and could hang it’s hat on D.
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@approxinfinity The ball movement in ‘08 was phenomenal. It was a combination of ball movement and lockdown D that we haven’t seen since. I’m not sure if any of the stats correlate to ball movement, but to me that was the biggest difference.
