One down game is a blip. Two is a trend. Three is a worry. Four is a time to write about it.
Not sure if that’s an actual saying, but after Marquette posted another below-average Adjusted ORating, I had to dig in a bit. On the surface, Marquette’s issue on Saturday wasn’t the offense. Scoring 1.06 PPP on the road is usually quite good, if not great. And the defense was significantly more at fault for the Seton Hall loss.
But the defensive trends look decent, outside a few standing worries like rebounding. It’s the high octane offense sputtering for the past 3 weeks that requires more attention, IMO.
Remember that AdjO takes the final points per possession number and adjusts it based on how good or bad the opposing defense is. So facing a very good defense, like Providence means a terrible PPP of 0.79 gets upgraded to a mediocre .952. Conversely, scoring “only” 1.1 PPP against Georgetown’s abysmal defense gets downgraded to 1.01 PPP.
Below you’ll see the game by game trend of Marquette’s AdjO rating, per Bart Torvik’s site. That dotted black line is the 5-game average, and it has taken a nosedive after pretty much staying level through the first 11 games of the season. The thick yellow line is the season average, and while it’s still significantly above the national average (and good for 32nd in D1) it’s fallen 3 full points in just 4 games.
It doesn’t take fancy math or cool charts to see the struggles of course, and a quick glance at Twitter or a message board will show you #mubb fans are all seeing pretty much the same things. So I wanted to take another stab at breaking down what might be causing the downturn.
Paltry 2pt Percentage
If you have read the Nevada Smith profile you should know that the primary offensive philosophy is scoring close 2s.
And it’s not just talk. Last season Marquette was a top-10 offense, with the 2nd highest D1 finish in KenPom since 1999. And did so with a fine, but not great shooting team, ranking 101st in 3pt%. What it did at an elite level was take great shots close to the rim. It hit 58.2% of its 2s, 4th best in the nation and 5.5 percentage points better than the 2nd best Marquette team since 1999. It completely dominated the rim.
This season’s team doesn’t look that far off when you just look at the season-long average, 56.3% which is still a top-20 number. But there has been a pronounced and sudden downturn of late.
Through St. Thomas (the 12th game of the season), Marquette’s 2pt FG% was actually up from last season’s gaudy number, to 60.3%. Yes there were cupcakes propping it up some, but MU shot 59% against Kansas and 59.5% against Purdue from inside the arc. It was not just being done against Rider and NIU and Southern.
But in a more limited sample, since the Providence game, Marquette has only hit 45.9% of 2 pointers. (For reference, MU hit 58.7% of 2s last season in Big East play.)
Putting some more numbers together, the only big changes between the last 4 games and the first 11 is the precipitous drop in 2pt%.
Looking at where the shots are coming from, it doesn’t look like there has been a huge change in shot profiles. Using Synergy’s data, Marquette averaged 30.6 shots per game at the rim in the first 11. It’s currently taking 31.8. It just is missing a lot more.
And it’s not like it’s just 1 player going through it. The difficulty has been wide spread.
Some of it might be reversion to the mean, another just a small sample quirk, but the only player who has seen his 2pt% increase is David Joplin, and it’s still below 50%. So take the collective struggles, and you can easily see it’s not just a matter of one bad game or one injury.
For Marquette to get back into gear, it will take a team-wide improvement. The good news is even incremental improvement makes a big difference. And the quality and location of the shots taken isn’t that far off from the start of the season. Adding 12 makes over the past 4 games, just 3 a game, boosts the 2pt FG% to 54% in that stretch.
I don’t expect Oso to have another 4-game stretch below 60% this season. Or Kolek or Kam below 50%. Those 3 in particular have a long history of excellence at the rim, even this season.
Kam Cooling
And although I think I’ve shown the collective nature of the issue, I did want to pick up a bit on Kam Jones in particular, as he’s going through a particularly rough stretch.
He started the season on an All-American pace, he was that good. In his first 10 games, his ORtg was over 125, he was shooting lights out from 3 and getting to the line more than ever. He almost never turned it over and had a career high assist rate. No matter how you sliced it, he had taken a leap on top of his sophomore year leap.
Over the last 5 games, he’s come crashing down to Earth in almost every way. His ORtg is at 80.5%, he’s hitting only 25% from 3 and he has a career high TO rate, over 17.5%. As shown above, his usual wizardry at the rim has also disappeared, and he’s barely at 40% from 2-point range.
You can see the full comparison, below.
And while any 5-game sample is too small to make overarching hypotheses on, it’s now 1/3rd of the season. He’s getting tremendous looks from 3, and missing a good chunk, which in turns makes him press the issue with his dribble, and created the uptick in TOs that have been momentum killers.
The good news is that like with the 2PT FG issue, I don’t think the process is broken. He’s 6/23 on catch and shoot 3s in that span, where he hit 37% last season. If he can contain the careless turnovers and remain aggressive, maybe lean into contact as much as he did to start the season, we’d see the confident Kam that has dazzled for 2+ seasons once more.
Bigger 3
One last note, and maybe not simply on offense. Hoop-Explorer posts Player Impact scores for every game, which is a great way to see what the super advanced RAPM stats (regressions using box scores, on/off splits and lineups) say about each player. (See it for yourself here.)
Below is the report for the Seton Hall game, where you can see Oso was particularly impactful, while Tyler was much less so.
In fact, this was Kolek’s worst game of Kolek’s season by a big margin, and 2nd worst in the past 2 seasons.
With this in mind, I aggregated the Big 3’s individual impact scores and then put them in a 3-game rolling average to take out any single game noise. And the results matched the eye test really well.
Marquette has 3 All-American level players in Tyler, Oso and Kam. When they were at their best, like at the start of the season, Marquette is an elite squad that is national title caliber. When they are not, like the past month-ish, Marquette’s floor and ceiling is significantly altered. As I touched on last month, it doesn’t have the bench quality to make up for getting less than the Big 3’s collective best.
Time To Panic?
While an adjustment from a top-5 squad to top-15 is a rough negative transition that understandably can make one disillusioned, I will buy any and all stock you might be selling. And trust me, I am not a seashells and balloons seller of hope. I have been the most pessimistic of the MU media group when it comes to predictions for years, and this season was no different.
But this defense is better than I could have imagined, even if it has lapses from game to game. And the offense isn’t living off of last year’s laurels. It was once again elite for a good chunk of this season.
Chase’s injury does bring huge questions for an already thin team, no doubt, but barring a season ending injury, this is still, IMO, one of the best Marquette teams of our lifetimes. Now it’s time to show the Final Four talk this summer wasn’t all talk.
Paint Touches 
K