It was clear William and Mary would have a sharp learning curve as the 2020–21 season began. With the high number of new players and freshmen, the hope was that the squad would be able to work into a groove. But the guys never found it.
Despite having the 26th-highest effective field goal percentage in the country a season before, the Tribe ended the season as one of the 40 worst shooting teams across D-I. Given the talent we know is on this roster, it is perplexing why there would be such a reversal of fortunes. Can we expect this poor shooting to bleed into next season, too?
SHOOTING STRUGGLES
Statistically, the offensive issues were not limited to one type of shooting or another; the Tribe ranked 249th in two-point shooting (47.9 percent) and a woeful 338th (eighth-worse in D-I basketball) in three-point shooting (28.7 percent). Compared to other mid-major teams, only three other schools (Fordham, Manhattan College, and Chicago State) could put together worse collective performances both in the paint and from deep.
The fact that William and Mary was one of the worst overall shooting teams in the country, especially close to the rim and from three, is concerning from a schematic standpoint. In his first two years, Dane Fischer has installed a variant of the dribble-drive offense designed to force defenses to decide between allowing drives to the rim or leaving shooters open on the perimeter. Such an offense should spread a defense if the team is successful at getting to the hoop, passing into advantageous shooting positions, and hitting open shots. Arguably, William and Mary disappointed in all three categories.
One silver lining in all of this is that the Tribe’s players have shown the ability to put the ball in the basket before. Looking at Table 1, which shows actual and expected shooting stats from the 2019–20 and 2020–21 seasons, four of the five returning players last season had an effective field goal percentage over .500 the season prior (Loewe, Blair, Ayesa and Harvey). Additionally, both Loewe and Ayesa had excellent three-point shooting seasons in 2020.
Last season, however, every player’s performance drastically declined compared to 2020. In 2021, only one player shot better than the NCAA average from three (Connor Kochera).
The struggles are not just limited to the observed statistics. Looking at expected points per possession, which considers offensive ability, defensive alignment, and shot selection, one can also see that every returning player except Quinn Blair saw their expected offensive performance decline from 2020 to 2021.
Importantly, though, only three players (Ayesa, Stone, and Milkereit) out of the nine who played enough to qualify underperformed their expected points production. This could indicate that the Tribe did not suddenly lose the ability to shoot the ball – instead, there may have been underlying factors that drove the entire offense to struggle.
Indeed, William and Mary as a team had the lowest expected points per possession (adjOFF SQ in Table 2) in the CAA, good for the 12th percentile in D-I basketball. While poor shooting ability will factor into the expected points model, equally important factors are the defense’s positioning in relation to the shooter, as well as shot selection. From 2020 to 2021, the share of the Tribe’s shots that came from behind the arc declined from 39 percent to 36 percent (from above-average to below-average, to boot).
In any expected points model, with all else being equal, a shift from high-value shots to relatively-less valuable two-point shots will harm offensive output. An expected points model will also discount a team who is forced into taking harder shots (for example, a longer two-point shot or a layup attempt with multiple defenders in close proximity). Given that the Tribe was the second-most blocked team in college basketball last season, I believe both defensive schemes against the Tribe and lackluster shooting contributed to this decline in offensive performance.
Looking at the shot maps for William and Mary and Drexel, the CAA champions from last season, shows exactly that. In these charts, deeper blue indicates worse shooting from a specific area relative to NCAA-average while deeper red indicates better shooting. Here are two takeaways: The Tribe shot very poor from three almost anywhere on the court (even in the corners) and the Tribe shot poor right at the rim (especially when driving to the left side of the hoop).
As a whole, the Tribe shot 55.8 percent within four feet of the rim, nine percentage points below league average and the seventh-lowest figure in NCAA basketball. For an offense designed to maximize open three-point shots and drives to the hoop, it is shocking — although, perhaps not surprising, if you watched much William and Mary basketball last year — that the team was extremely poor on both accounts.
This struggle from the left side of the rim is also something new. Looking at Luke Loewe’s shot charts from the last two seasons, he did not struggle from the left side of the rim until his senior year. What would cause such a drastic change from season to season?
COVID HANGOVER
A defining feature of William & Mary’s basketball season (on both the men’s and women’s sides) was an abundance of disruptive COVID pauses. Work by Evan Miya already shows that teams perform much worse than expected after a COVID pause, but not much has been said on the aggregate impact of COVID over the course of a season. One could imagine that the multiple pauses and lack of practice time held back the Tribe offense and prevented them from working their way into a shooting rhythm.
Table 3 shows the 15 D-I men’s teams most affected by COVID, as proxied by the average number of days between games above expected (which I assume is the average number of days per game in the 2019–20 season, 4.03 days).
To nearly no one’s surprise, it turns out William and Mary (and the CAA at large) was among the worst affected in D-I basketball. COVID pauses on average added 2.16 days between Tribe games, the 11th worst impact in college basketball.
One question remains: Do COVID layoffs negatively impact a full season’s shooting performance? First, looking at the simple relationship between added days between games and three-point, two-point, and rim shooting percentages, a couple important points are borne out. First, the relationship between the COVID gap and shooting for teams with teams with ‘less’ time than usual between games is usually opposite of the overall trend (see the trend lines to the left of zero on the x axis). Therefore, for further analyses I will restrict the sample to teams with a COVID-induced gap above average of zero and greater.
Second, each type of shooting is negatively-affected at the season level by longer COVID pauses. Third, the relationship is not equivalent across types of shooting; three-point shooting seems to be the most affected type and mid-range shots, surprisingly, are the least.
To statistically evaluate this relationship, I have run a simple linear regression model relating a team’s shooting percentage to its average gap between games and its shooting percentage from last year as a proxy for baseline ability.
Table 4 shows the main results from this analysis. Three-point shooting is the only type of shooting that is significantly* impacted by COVID, but the others still have negative coefficients. Overall, for every day added on average between games by COVID, a team’s overall three-point shooting performance is expected to decline by 0.7 percentage points. In William & Mary’s case, COVID contributed a 1.5 percentage point decline in three-point shooting. And taken as a whole, as seen in Columns 1–3 together or in Column 4, COVID has a very significant overall impact on offensive production. While it may not explain the entirety of the Tribe’s woes, it certainly explains some of the struggles.
*In this case we’re talking mathematical significance. The decline at .7 percentage points per day added between games on average by COVID is significant at the 0.01 level. In simpler terms, there is statistically less than a 1 percent chance that the observed effect was caused by chance.
CHICKEN OR THE EGG?
COVID aside, William and Mary portrayed some of the worst rim finishing and three-point shooting in college basketball. That doesn’t happen by accident. As Brendan talked about in the first installment of this summer’s “The Path Forward” series, the Tribe struggled to generate offensive production from their bigs, a fact that could contribute to the poor rim shooting. If defenses are unafraid of the dump-off pass or rebounding by Harvey or Wight (and unafraid of our three-point shooting as well), they can afford to double team our driving guards as they enter the paint. If the defense is successful, this could create a persistent interruption of our offense if we are unable to find the open players on the outside and hit the shots.
This seemed to happen throughout the season. In the clip below from the Dec. 19 game against High Point (a game infamous for the Tribe struggling offensively), we can see how defenses keyed in on preventing easy drives to the basket, even at the expense of allowing open shooters. In this possession, not one, not two, but three defenders were tasked with occupying the space Covington wanted to drive through. But even in these situations a dribble-drive offense can succeed if they can exploit open shots. In this case, Yuri does find the open man, but Milkereit is unable to release the ball quickly and is instead forced into a difficult pull-up jumper.
Watch again how the High Point defenders focus almost entirely on Loewe in this possession, leaving Covington wide open on the outside.
However, it is important to note that it is not just the lack of respect to our three-point shooting that allowed defenses to prevent effective drives to the basket. In this possession, there is relatively more space for Covington to move into compared to the High Point game. However, Northeastern forward Chris Doherty is able to sag off Harvey, step up, and force Yuri to make the shot over him. In this case, Covington tries to force it.
However, the outcome when a William and Mary guard was able to get one-on-one with a defender was usually positive. Loewe is able to blow past his defender, freshman Coleman Stucke, and get to rim with relative ease. In this instance, Doherty is unable to rotate over to help, leaving Loewe with a relatively easy layup.
It must be said that much of the strife that the William and Mary offense experienced in the 2021 season could have been avoided with better three-point shooting and more production from the center position. With credible threats from these areas, opposing defenders would have been drawn out further from the rim. This would leave room for effective drives.
On the shooting account, there is at least one silver lining: William and Mary is due for a regression back to the mean. Without COVID disrupting their season, players like Kochera and Covington will be more likely to perform at the levels that we know they are capable of. And if Miguel Ayesa can right the ship, assuming he sees the floor, the Tribe offense immediately becomes more of a threat from three. For the team to take the next step, big strides will need to be made on (1) finding open men off the drive, (2) hitting those shots, and (3) integrating the center position in the offensive flow. In these areas, incoming freshmen Tyler Rice, Langdon Hatton, and Julian Lewis, as well as graduate transfer Brandon Carroll, have a chance to make immediate contributions.
Have any WM teams since, let’s pick a random year and say 2003, had such a poor shooting season? I feel like having one of the worst shooting seasons in the 21st century could also be partially attributed to a variable like who is in charge… but maybe I’m holding a grudge.