When I wrote my nonconference grades not even a full month ago, I gave Chase Ross an A- that was qualified with a minus solely because of the team results.
He had been the sole bright spot for most of the games and was playing at a level that I didn’t think was possible, with the advanced metrics to prove it.
That grade has not aged well.
Mother of all slumps
Since posting that, Chase has put up an ORtg of 70.7 which is the worst on Marquette by over 20 points, and is actually ranked 593 out of 602 high major players with at least 30% of minutes played. That stat is shocking enough, but hurts even more when you factor in his usage (how often Chase is involved in ending a possession via a make, miss, foul or turnover).
During that span he’s used 25.8% of possessions, 2nd on Marquette behind Nigel and almost 7 points ahead of Royce. So not only has he been very bad, it impacts the team significantly as he takes a lot of possessions and plays the most minutes.
In Big East play, Chase is shooting 10% from 3 (2/20) and a mind boggling 34.8% from 2. Both numbers are frightening, but the 2 point percentage is scarier to me because we’ve seen (lots of) really good Marquette players go through shooting slumps from 3 before, but the misses from inside the arc defy all plausible explanation. I mean it, watch this video.
And hey, bad misses happen to the best of them, but it’s now happened a few times in a 2 week span, for a player that has a great history.
And one more.
Again, this isn’t meant to be gratuitous. Chase probably missed a few easy ones that I don’t remember because he made 35 other great plays over the course of the nonconference season. But when you add the comedic misses, to the contested misses, to the 3-point misses, you have an All Big East caliber player who is completely lost.
Using Hoop Explorer’s RAPM, Chase ranks 83rd out of 86 eligible players in Big East conference play, with a score of -5.3. And again, he was at 6.7 in the non-con. If we stick with Hoop-Explorer’s data, I gather the game by game Impact Scores and tally them up in an interactive dashboard (https://lookerstudio.google.com/s/sv93iTY42ss).
The chart for Big East play impact has to be seen to be believed.
What happened?
While the common (and logical) answer is, he was feasting on cupcakes before, and now that he’s playing all high majors we see his true level, I don’t think the data bares that out.
For starters, we can see that he’s put up good numbers on shots at the rim in the past, mostly against high majors. Using Synergy, we can note that he’s seen a huge surge in shots at the rim, averaging 5.4 a game so far, up 64% from last season.
However, his efficiency has tanked, down almost 8% points on FG% into a range that classifies below average in Synergy.
And that’s where the weirdness intensifies. Through the first 8 games of the season, Chase was shooting 68.3% at the rim (boosted artificially by opponent quality and more transition opportunities off steals). In the last 7 games, that average has gone down to 37.2%. In terms of points per shot that fell from 1.37 down to 0.74.
If you want to put that 0.74 in context, of the 1,378 DI players who have taken 40 or more shots at the rim, that efficiency would rank 1.373rd. When you are worse than all but 5 players at anything in DI, something is seriously off.
So what now?
Marquette has no shot at the NCAA Tournament, so it’s not like a return to form from Chase would change a ton in the big picture, but Chase has a lot of money at stake for his professional future. In December, I was taken aback when ESPN didn’t list Chase in their top-100 draft prospects. This week The Athletic did the same, and I couldn’t even muster a Tweet to push back.
I do think this is a funk. I do think Chase is significantly better than he has shown recently. And I still believe he’ll play in the NBA, even if not directly out of college via the draft. But this season is far from over and I do think he can get back closer to his earlier self.
For starters, he needs to get to the line more. Way easier said from my computer, of course, but drawing fouls is a skill and Chase showed us over a full month that he possessed it. In nonconference play, Chase averaged a free throw rate of 64.9%, best of any Big East player with significant usage and 5th best overall. Since then, he’s at 24.2%, a 40 percentage point drop.
Chase is shooting a career best 77.2% from the line, so more trips there is the clearest and easiest efficiency boost, but again, it’s not like he stopped attacking the rim. His 2s per 40 are up, just making a lot fewer of them.
I’m not sure if there are any coaching adjustments to be made, but reemphasizing that he’s a human wall and he should go through defenders wouldn’t hurt.
And the other big thing would be to start making 3s. He’s not forcing bad shots, which is good to see but is only 2/9 on unguarded spotups since the Wisconsin game, having hit 6/13 in the first 8 games. We saw it with Jop and Kam and we’re seeing it with Ben and Chase. Shooters with long and positive trajectories get in deep slumps they can’t shake.
I wish I had an answer other than keep shooting, because I’ll be the first one yelling at my TV watching it fly and brick. In general, though, the layups and the turnovers and the threes all point to a significant lack of confidence. No words on a post or cheers from the crowd will change that.
Last thing, had Chase made 5 of the missed layups from the videos above, uncontested bunnies he hits 90% of the time, his season long PPP would be up to 1.22, just a tad above last year’s efficiency and a career best. His conference mark would be a meh 1.11, but not abysmal.
Sure, if I made every shot I missed we’d never lose, but the point is that getting even a handful of the most basic baskets to go in makes his season look much different, without anything else changing. Chase should stay aggressive, keep attacking and trust that all his work this offseason will pay off the rest of this season and many more to come.
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Paint Touches 
Maybe missing all those layups is in his head, and that’s why he’s missing from elsewhere. (But why oh why is he — and everyone else — missing all those layups?)
mentioned it before and saying again especially after watching some of those clips…missing dunks and layups isn’t about the competition. It’s either mind or body and I’m going with #2. He looked to have more lift against X. And when you look at the 3’s and FT’s missed front rim I think it was a leg issue. Obviously speculating but it feels like it passes the eye test