On Marquette’s historic time of possession gap

Back in the summer of 2021, before Marquette had even the semblance of expectations, I got the chance to poke Nevada Smith’s brain.

One of the things that really stood out from that conversation was that he, like most of the analytically driven people in basketball hadn’t found an all-in-one defensive metric similar to ORating or even RAPM. He was also very much against steal rate without context, as some big thieves ended up giving up more points than they took away with their over the top aggressiveness.

However, one stat that he did mention he looked at regularly was KenPom’s defensive possession length. That refers to how many seconds elapsed with a team playing defense in an average possession. The idea behind Nevada’s line of thinking , if I interpreted it correctly, was that while you can’t control how fast or slow another team wants to play, forcing teams into more late shot clock situations should theoretically yield lower quality shots, as they try to beat the buzzer and have fewer alternative recourses.

So, since that day, I’ve looked at Average Possession Length a bit closer than I had before, particularly on defense. And something strange is happening this season, that I had to call out. Marquette has extreme splits this season.

On offense, the average MU possession takes 14.9 seconds, which is good for 6th fastest in the country. This makes sense, as MU loves to run and isn’t shy about taking a good quality shot no matter how much time is left on the clock.

On defense, the average MU possession takes 19.2 seconds, which is the 361st slowest out of 363 teams. There are a few hypotheses behind this, but going back to Nevada’s comments, would align with the goal of what Marquette wants to do defensively.

Take those two numbers together, and you have a -4.3 second gap in average possession length, which is huge. Across Division I, the average gap between O and D is 0.04 seconds. So just on the face, it’s a pretty curious number. But I went a step further and pulled that data for every team this season and sure enough, Marquette has the widest gap between it’s O and D APL in the country.

The next closest is Kennesaw State at -4.00 and the closest high major was Alabama at -3.3, a full second of difference despite the fact Alabama plays quicker on offense by 0.3 seconds. So not only is Marquette an outlier, it’s an outlier by a fairly extreme amount.

Using a simple bell curve distribution of all D1 teams and adding in the Big East colleagues, you can see just how out of the norm Marquette resides.

But it’s not just a this year or a Big East gap. Marquette’s current -4.3 possession length difference is tied with Gonzaga in 2019 for the widest variance since 2019.

And while going through the data from the last 6 seasons, there were 3 names that were most often near the top of the gap. Gonzaga, Nate Oats (with Alabama and Buffalo) and Marquette with Nevada Smith. Seeing these 3 programs/staffs linger near the top of the variance gaps most years tells me these kinds of variances are intentional. Sure the personnel from year to year may change some of the numbers, as would opponent quality, but for the most part, these are results of offensive and defensive philosophies.

Why single out Nevada instead of Shaka Smart? Check out Shaka’s last 6 seasons and tell me if you can identify when Nevada Smith joined his staff.

Shaka has mentioned a few times that he has changed his offensive style at Marquette, and nowhere is that more evident than seeing MU’s teams playing 3+ seconds faster on offense than Shaka’s Texas squads.

Switching from KenPom to CBB Analytics, we have another way to break down time of possession even more granularly. There, they chunk out every possession by 10 second increments, and even add in efficiency stats.

On the left side, you can see that Marquette has only had 251 possessions end within the 20-30 second bucket, composing 13.9% of all possessions, and that ranks in the bottom 1 percentile.

For the same row on the right side, you can see that 521 opponent possessions have finished in the same 20-30 second bucket, which ranks 360th our of 362 teams. Similarly, over 8% of possessions have taken 30+ seconds, which requires an offensive rebound or non FT foul to be called. That ranks 359th in the country. Personally dying through some of the multi-rebound possessions this season, “glad” the math checks out.

Basically, what this is all telling us is that Marquette doesn’t have very many extended length possessions, while giving them up 37%+ of the time. Again, some of this is by design, and the number of shot clock violations forced, while not quantifiable, seem to be much more prevalent this season. The token full court pressure, as well as the 2/3 zone that converts to man around 15-second in, similarly aren’t meant to turn teams over, but rather slow them down.

Last thing, without a rigorous analysis, and simply going through 6 season’s worth of top-of-the-chart numbers, there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between possession length variance and performance. As in, having a large or small gap isn’t necessarily tied to efficiency. DePaul sucks it can’t stop a stiff breeze, not because its offensive possessions are 1.7 seconds longer than it’s defensive ones.

Where there does appear to be method to the madness is in preventing transition opportunities. Marquette’s scoring 1.24 PPP on possessions that end within the first 10 seconds. It also ranks 15th in the country for percent of possessions that end in the first 10. Which is phenomenal. Marquette is maximizing it’s best asset, pushing the pace before defenses are set, and doing so often.

Doing some rough math, Marquette has been on offense 428.1 minutes, and on defense 449.5. It’s not often that you live through extreme outlier events like this one, just wanted to call it out while it was top of mind.