Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of The Fischer Effect.
In my previous posts on this blog, I dove into what made last year’s Tribe men’s basketball team historic. Unsurprisingly, much of their success revolved around their core players and consistent starting lineup of Nathan Knight, Andy Van Vliet, Bryce Barnes, Tyler Hamilton, and Luke Loewe. All of that is out the window now after four of those players have moved on. Between coronavirus and a roster in flux, there is no question that the 2020-21 season will be fraught with challenges for the Tribe. The real questions are how severe the challenges will be, and if the players and Coach Fischer have what it takes to overcome them.
It is hard to believe that this year’s roster could be in worse shape than last year’s following the tumultuous end to the Shaver era in Williamsburg. The departed Justin Pierce, Matt Milon, Chase Audige, L.J. Owens, and Paul Rowley combined for 60.3% of the team’s possession minutes during the 2018-19 campaign. The players remaining on the roster only played 39.7% of available minutes. Heading into last season, only Delaware and Elon had worse figures in the CAA for returning players.
This season, however, the current roster accounts for only 34.6% of last year’s available minutes, the worst figure in the CAA this season. Last year’s bench went almost the entire year without significant playing time and unfortunately remains unproven ahead of this season. Nonetheless, one silver lining may be that the Tribe are not the only team this year without experienced talent returning; Hofstra, Northeastern, Towson, and Charleston, all formidable teams, have returning minutes percentages under 40 percent. If the Tribe can rally together, they might not be definite CAA basement dwellers.
However, the silver lining might stop there. Ahead of the 2020-21 season, William & Mary has been awarded the lowest talent rating of any team in the CAA since at least 2008 by Bart Torvik’s ‘talent rating‘, which is based on recruit rankings and previous production. The Tribe’s .0133 rating is magnitudes smaller than the next smallest rating of .1997, jointly shared by the 2018-19 Delaware and 2019-20 William & Mary teams.
It seems the lack of depth on last year’s team is translating into a historically underpowered Tribe squad this season. William & Mary is now projected by Torvik to be the 320th worst DI team, out of 357, due to dramatic drop-offs in both offensive and defensive efficiency. However, it should be noted that half of the teams with a talent rating under one finished with winning records and the correlation between wins and ‘talent’ is low. It is up to the players to grow and the coach to prepare his team to ensure a successful season.
Luckily, key players for the Tribe have already shown the ability to grow. It could be argued that there was no more important player to the Tribe, besides Knight, than Thornton Scott. Under Fischer’s tutelage, Scott made a huge jump from year one to year two. His offensive rating, which is calculated as the number of points scored per 100 possessions while he was on the floor, improved by almost twenty points season-on-season. He also improved significantly as a rebounder, passer, and caretaker of the ball.
In short, when Scott was healthy, he was electric. He averaged an offensive rating of nearly 102 in his first 12 games and was a key distributor of the ball. However, it became clear Scott was dealing with a nagging injury by the end of January. This injury forced him to miss five key games, during which span the Tribe went 1-5 and missed out on the CAA regular season title. In his last seven games, Scott averaged an offensive rating of 78. Overall, the Tribe went 12-2 in games where Scott was healthy and 8-9 in games where he was banged up or out of the lineup. If Scott can stay healthy, he can add another dimension to the Tribe offense while filling the void left behind by Bryce Barnes.
For as much as Scott developed last season, Luke Loewe was probably the most surprising transformation of the 2019-20 season. Before last season, it was fair to say that Loewe was a below-average offensive player. In his first two seasons, Loewe averaged an offensive rating of 77 and consistently turned the ball over. In those seasons, his effective field goal percentage (a field goal percentage with threes and twos weighted correctly for how much each is worth) was a dismal 37.5%.
Under Fischer, though, Loewe has been something of a revelation. His 2020 offensive rating was nearly double his freshman rating, and Loewe was named to his first CAA All-Defensive Team for his efforts on the other end of the court. In a season marred by inconsistency, Loewe was a force to be reckoned with in almost every game. If Loewe can continue to play at this high level, he can take some of the burden off his teammates to perform.
One signal of hope is that Loewe and Scott are not the only examples of players that made leaps last season. In his limited time in Williamsburg, Dane Fischer has shown that he can generate results even when the deck is stacked against him. Despite getting his start with the Tribe amidst the tumult surrounding player departures and the will-he-won’t-he NBA draft decision of Knight, Fischer was able to identify and recruit two starting-caliber players in Barnes and Hamilton. As we have written on this blog before, these signings were perfect fits for the style of basketball Fischer wanted to instill. Even down the stretch, as results faltered, Fischer was able to get surprising performances from bench players like Quinn Blair and Miguel Ayesa. While W&M will, by all accounts, be without any new transfers this season, Fischer has shown a keen eye for talent evaluation that will be a boon to the Tribe for years to come.
Qualitatively, Dane Fischer did an impressive job last season. Quantitatively, Fischer also stacks up against the best coaches in the CAA. One way to measure a coach’s performance is to examine the difference between a team’s pre-season expectations and their final record. I will use a metric I am calling the ‘Performance-Talent Spread’, the difference between the Z-score of each team’s final record and pre-season talent rating. The higher the difference between these two scores, the better the team performed relative to their talent level. This could be due to some players being undervalued or the coach’s ability to put his team in a position to succeed.
Table 3 shows the results for the 2019-20 season. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fischer’s William & Mary scores the best on this metric last season. A spread of 2.53 indicates that the team performed two and a half standard deviations better than their talent level would predict. More surprisingly, however, is that Fischer’s 2020 effort ranks as the fourth best spread in the CAA since 2009. It is hard to believe at this point that rookie head coach Fischer is *that* good, but he has shown the ability to elevate a ‘sub-par’ team.
A keen eye would notice that the two teams with the highest talent levels are also the two teams that finished relatively poorly in the CAA standings. Indeed, with a correlation coefficient of -.13 between talent and winning percentage, the relationship between the two variables is weak and in the opposite direction than what would be expected. It seems a lot may come down to luck and coaching.
Another way to enumerate the impact of luck and coaching is to calculate the difference between a team’s winning percentage and their predicted winning percentage based on points scored and points allowed. Bill James’s Pythagorean Expectation is the most widely used and accepted way to predict team records based on performance, and I will use it to examine CAA coaching performances again.
Table 4 shows these difference between actual and predicted records for the 2019-20 season. This time, it is Coach Joe Mihalich and Hofstra that top the list of performances in the CAA, but the Tribe is not far behind. This honor is deserved for Mihalich, who led Hofstra to their second-straight CAA regular season title and first conference tournament championship since 2001. Fischer’s runner-up result in this metric does corroborate the other evidence that he had a major role in making the team what it was.
It should be said that a high value for this metric can be due to a high degree of luck, and William & Mary surely experienced their share of it (the two Northeastern games come to mind). A coach also has a major role in on-court performance, which is not captured by this metric. Nevertheless, Fischer was able to elevate a team with a net rating of only +2.5 to second place in the conference and a historic road record.
Fischer has shown last season that he was able to identify talent, assemble a team, and coach them into favorable positions. The only question that remains, however, is how sustainable is Fischer’s performance? Even though that will remain unknown for now, Fischer’s performance to date stacks up well against the coaches that have come before him. Even though the sample size is small, Table 5 shows that Fischer has the second highest average coach rating of any coach at a current CAA school since 2008, only behind iconic coach Bobby Cremins, who spent five-plus seasons at Charleston.
Only eleven coaches have had one or more seasons with a coaching rating above Fischer’s effort in 2020, including the previous three years’ CAA coaches of the year: Bill Coen at Northeastern, Earl Grant of Charleston, and Mihalich. Notably absent from this list is former Tribe coach Tony Shaver. Despite his many years of consistent success in Williamsburg, he never earned a rating above 0.2. Even if this rating represents Fischer’s ceiling as a coach, there are bright times ahead for Tribe basketball if Fischer can build upon the initiative players have shown and his own ability to assemble and develop his team.
Thus ends The Fischer Effect, John Kearns’ first series for No Bid Nation. Thanks to him for conceiving this idea, we’re excited to see what he comes up with next. For more with John, check out this week’s edition of The NBN Pod, available on all major platforms. Subscribe and leave us a review if you enjoy it!