Should you be worried about Marquette’s offense?

Insert Betteridge’s Law here. No.

I get that the offense looked quite stagnant for long stretches against Wisconsin. I also get that there have been rough spots against the top quality teams. But a cursory glance below the hood would show the same engine used to power last season’s high octane attack is still there and running quite well.

For starter’s Bart Torvik has the unweighted, Adjusted Offense at 117.2, which would be 21st best in the country. At this point last season, and including the fireball that was the full Baylor game, Marquette was at 113.2, which was good for 16th best. So Marquette’s current offense is currently operating 5 full points better than last season’s over the same timespan, and hasn’t had any outlier performances to skew the small samples, either.

But I do get the angst. Watching live on Saturday was frustrating in the sense that it felt like every drive was stymied, and every open shot bricked.

And that’s where I want to focus on today, open shots.

Using Synergy’s database, we can tell you that as of 4 p.m. on December 4th, the unguarded catch and shoot spot up jumper was the most valuable non-transition shot in D1 basketball, with the median team scoring 1.093 points per shot. For reference, the average jump shot is worth .939 points, with the average runner worth .786 and dribble jumpers worth 0.807. Which is to say, no matter what team you are, creating unguarded catch and shoot situations is good offense, and likely to yield positive results over time.

Marquette is still waiting for that “over time” piece to kick in.

Through 8 games, Marquette ranks 308th in the country, averaging only 0.903 PPP on unguarded spot ups, while also posting a a top-35 mark in attempts per game, shooting 11.6. That means if it was shooting at just the average rate, it would be scoring 2.2 more points per game.

Here’s how that compares to the rest of the Big East.

Of course, this is where I’ll inevitably hear, “they are getting so many open shots because Stevie Mitchell and Sean Jones are terrible shooters and are being left open on purpose.” But that’s not the case. Those 2 have less than 17% of MU’s total opportunities.

And while it is true that neither has started the season well and will be the second coming of Steve Curry any time soon, their current levels, compared to their past performance, tells me there is still a big reversion coming for them. Here are their current unguarded spot up PPPs compared to their full season 2023 numbers.

I mean, there is a chance 5/7ths of the team just lost the plot on shooting, but more likely, it’s a small sample variance that is particularly noticeable when a few bad games have been stacked together. And you all know my beef with the Maui shooting numbers, which still accounts for over a third of the data.

Why the focus?

I get asked this from time to time, why focus so much on the unguarded stats, both for offense and defense? Because even though the defense can’t control 3PG%, it can definitely account for how many open shots it allows. And rewatching the Wisconsin game, Greg Gard was more than content to give up clean looks from the perimeter in order to send extra help inside.

Here’s a double using Wahl, Joplin’s defender. Look how much space this creates for Joplin to fire (a miss).

Here’s Wahl again helping defend a Kolek paint touch, and giving Joplin another uncontested look from distance.

Here is Storr way overhelping and leaving Joplin wide open at the top of the arc.

And one more, here’s Wahl yet again, covering for Crowl and tagging Oso, leaving Joplin unaccounted for in the corner.

Greg Gard made the bold gamble time and again to use Joplin’s defender to load up inside, confident that Joplin wouldn’t beat them with the shot or off the dribble. Joplin went 1-9 from 3.

We have all seen help coming from Stevie or Sean’s defender, and that also happened against Wisconsin, but I’d never seen Joplin get the non-shooter treatment. And don’t mistake this for finger pointing, there were a hundred other things that didn’t go right, it wasn’t all on Joplin.

What I am saying is that when opponents feel confident enough to leave someone that shot 40% from 3 last season wide open on multiple possessions, of course it’s going to make the offense look clunky if you don’t make them pay.

And when Kolek is being defended with 2 or 3 players every possession, it closes driving lines and makes kickouts to shooters even tougher. (Jop and Kam combined to shoot 1-6 on unguarded 3s vs Wisconsin).

Can this team shoot?

Of course, if we get to conference play and we still see this squad mired in sub-300 PPP, with the sample size in the hundreds for combined shots, then we can start to panic about any Final Four dinner reservations. For now, Shaka has been consistent in saying they trust their guys to get out of the slump and history is with him.

Get a few shots to drop from the left wing and get Jop on a heater in the right corner and the offense can take the next-level leap.

Until then, the process is sound, time to trust the result to follow.