Tricky_Falcon wrote:
Also on an unrelated note we always talk about Dakich not using his bench if you watch college basketball most teams do not go deep into their bench. You are not going to see more than seven or eight players get significant playing time. Dakich's rotation is no different than any other college basketball team. If you don't believe me look at other teams minutes played thus far. You will find 7-8 players on each roster that have logged over 300 minutes in the season so far.
I decided to take a look at the MAC stats to compare how we are with PT to the other teams in the MAC. I used 350 minutes as the cutoff point for what determines a "regular" player, although that's probably not the best way to define regular since some teams have played 3-4 more games than others, but it's what I used.
Here are the overall stats on MAC Minutes:
Looking at that we were middle of the pack in most categories. Tough to take a lot from that. It could be worth noting, that my cutoff of 350 made us have a fairly typical number of regular players. However, most other teams had at least one guy in the 200-350 range, where our next highest was actually 170 minutes by Dusan. Of course he's been injured a few times and may have been in the 200+ category if healthy.
Since I didn't see much there, I decided to take a look at just our top 5 minutes guys and see how they stack up:
With this table we can see that we do expect a lot of minutes out of our top 5 guys, in comparison with the rest of the league. Of course I didn't calculate % of minutes on this one, because I was too lazy...it's possible that we've played more OTs than other teams forcing this to be skewed, but I doubt we've played enough to be statistically relevant.
Well looking at the minutes it appeared that we didn't really expect our top guys to play that much more than others, but it still seems that way when you watch our games. I got to thinking, maybe our non-regulars just suck, and that's why the impression is formed. So I decided to take a look at how many ppg other teams get from their non regular players.
Now looking at this set of stats it looks as though we are again among the worst in the league at getting production from the bottom end of our roster. One of the teams behind us (KSU) only has 2 non-regular contributors to their team, so their average per player would be much better.
Looking through these stats it seems apparent that we use our bench pretty similarly to most MAC teams. Sure we seem to expect more from our top 5 than most, but overall our top rotation of 7 guys plays pretty similar minutes to most other teams. Our problem seems to be that outside of our top 7 we get almost NOTHING from the other guys, whereas most teams are getting at least some semblance of production from those guys.
I still think, watching the games, that there are times we should be playing our end of the bench guys more, but statistically we're about average. Especially when you consider that 3 of those non-regulars are fairly highly touted Freshmen that are not getting much PT to develop. It is patently obvious, however, that whenever those guys are getting in the game we aren't getting much from them, at least in the terms of points.
Also, we lead the nation in foul percentage (we commit more fouls than any one else in the country 
) Commiting fouls and not rebounding are not things you expect to see from a team that plays as hard as we do. Can someone explain to me how this all happens without being a function of poor coaching? 
