Teams with more efficient half court offenses vs. transition offenses
After listening to a talk from the head coach of Western Illinois, JD Gravina, I was struck by a comment Gravina made that teams practically always have more efficient transition offenses compared with their half court offenses on a per possession basis. I wasn’t sure how often the opposite happened – that a team scored more points per possession in the half court than as a transition team.
| Team | Record | Transition PPP | Half Court PPP | Pace rank | Overall PPP Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Little Rock Trojans | 21-11 | 0.792 | 0.813 | 328 | 131 |
| Boston University Terriers | 15-14 | 0.722 | 0.783 | 343 | 174 |
| CSU Fullerton Titans | 14-16 | 0.755 | 0.792 | 215 | 207 |
| Colorado State Rams | 8-22 | 0.748 | 0.782 | 347 | 284 |
| Drake Bulldogs | 27-7 | 0.904 | 0.945 | 30 | 18 |
| Grand Canyon Antelopes | 7-20 | 0.680 | 0.743 | 311 | 289 |
| IUPUI Jaguars | 20-12 | 0.777 | 0.806 | 319 | 112 |
| Loyola (MD) Greyhounds | 7-24 | 0.664 | 0.703 | 326 | 316 |
| Miami Hurricanes | 25-9 | 0.858 | 0.884 | 146 | 29 |
| Middle Tennessee State Blue Raiders | 23-11 | 0.877 | 0.883 | 349 | 32 |
| Northern Kentucky Norse | 11-18 | 0.732 | 0.746 | 284 | 255 |
| South Dakota Coyotes | 28-6 | 0.932 | 0.939 | 196 | 14 |
| UTSA Roadrunners | 7-21 | 0.679 | 0.684 | 145 | 321 |
| Virginia Tech Hokies | 22-12 | 0.842 | 0.913 | 216 | 34 |
The above transition & half court points per possession (PPP) data is from Synergy Sports. The team ranks in pace & overall PPP data is from Her Hoop Stats.
It’s quite a collection of teams, with varying levels of success through the season. There’s also no clear connection between having a more efficient half court offense & a team’s overall pace of play. Seven of these 14 teams played among the 50 teams with the slowest pace, and eight among the 100 teams with the slowest pace. But Drake had the thirty fastest pace of play, and three other teams ranked among the top 200 teams in pace.
Additionally, there is no correlation between having a more efficient half court offense and having either a better or worse overall offense. Five of the teams in this group were in the top 34 offenses nationally, but two ranked in the bottom 33 teams. Five teams ranked among the bottom 100.
If I learned anything from this dive into numbers, it’s that more teams have a half court offense that outperformed their transition offense than I expected. If I had to guess before looking at these numbers, I would have expected no more than two or three teams to have the flipped half court/transition efficiency.