By Aris Barkas/ barkas@eurohoops.net
Basketball at its core is a pretty simple game, however, there’s a simple truth to that. Everything that happens on the court is interconnected. You might have heard that “offense sells tickets, but defense wins championships,” a quote that comes from American football. In basketball, the truth is that often a good defense leads to an even better offense and a bad offense simply destroys any defensive plan one might have.
Still, it’s quite evident that after the change in the EuroLeague format and with the level of play getting better season by season, the numbers on the offensive sides are on the rise. And while it’s easy to say it based on simple numbers, we turned once more to the good people of “Statathlon” and asked them to prove it, using advanced analytics.
The results of their research provide solid proof that offensive efficiency is taking over as the primary goal of every team and if that helps tickets, even better…
Points per game
The most simple metric that demonstrates the rise of offense is points per game and since the change of the format from 24 to 16 teams, the numbers have been steadily climbing.
- There has been a remarkable change in the league average of points scored per game. From 75.92 points per team during the 2015-16 season, the average team now scores 81.91 points per game. This means there is an increase of approximately 8%.
- Nine out of the 16 teams this season – until yesterday’s games they were 12 out of 16 – are averaging at least 80 points per game, while four of them have posted an average of more than 85 points per game. Over the previous three years, only CSKA Moscow and Real Madrid had achieved this.
- There are 11 teams that have competed in each EuroLeague season since 2015. More than half of them (seven in total) have never had a better scoring average than this season.
Accuracy
So why more points are scored? The offensive players are getting better and better and this means that they are missing fewer shots.
- Over the last four seasons, average 2FG% and 3FG% have both been increasing (2FG% at a faster pace though), while FT% increased by 1.5% after three seasons but now has seen a decline.
- Teams now make approximately 1.8 more two-point and 0.2 three-point field goals per game and 0.3 less free throws than they did four seasons ago. Those two changes seem to follow an increasing and decreasing trend respectively.
- Making more two-point and three-point field goals instead of free throws has a positive impact. True shooting percentage and effective field goal percentage (which take into account that not all attempts are equal) suggest that this year teams are performing approximately 3% better in terms of overall shooting efficiency than the 2015-16 season.