" title="Spartans Weblog">Spartans Weblog

A statistical look at Michigan State basketball, with a dash of football talk

Reader Feedback Thursday

Posted by kj on Thursday, January 31st, 2008

First, a few links:

Joe Rexrode notes that winning in Champaign is not going to be a cakewalk.

Eric Gordon hurt his left (non-shooting) wrist but will play tonight in Madison.

Dave Dye points out how unselfish the Spartans are–ranking 5th nationally in assists per game.

This last link leads to the reader feedback question of the week:

For a team that generally has very good ball-handling skills, why does MSU turn the ball over so much?

This is a team with three legitimate Big Ten-quality starting point guards, at least two of whom are almost always on the floor. And their top post player handles the ball pretty well, too.

The Bleacher Guy notes that Izzo has framed the question of reducing turnovers in terms of toughness. But is toughness really the question when it comes to making intelligent decisions with the ball?

Here’s my previous take on the topic:

Tom Izzo runs one of the most complex offenses in college basketball. It relies heavily on set plays, rather than individual play making. This has two benefits:

1) MSU doesn’t take a lot of bad shots, resulting in higher shooting percentages.

2) When everything’s clicking, the MSU offense can be nearly unstoppable–talented players running precise plays that are impossible to defend.

It also has two downsides:

1) A higher number of turnovers as players often make bad decisions when forced out of the offensive sets.

2) When players aren’t playing well in the offensive set pieces, everything can fall apart because there’s not individual playmaking to fall back on.

Clearly, over the course of the Izzo era the benefits of Izzo’s offensive philosophy have outweighed the costs. But the continuing turnover problem and the occasional offensive catastrophes are becoming serious issues. If these problems persist, Izzo may need to rethink this philosophy a bit and give his players some additional freedom on offense.

But I’m not sure this theory is sufficient to explain how persistent this problem has been the last two seasons. Let’s here what alternate theories the Spartans Weblog readership has to offer.

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No Responses to “Reader Feedback Thursday”

  1. Spartalyticalon 31 Jan 2008 at 6:58 pm 1

    The turnovers are driving any conscious Spartan fan nuts this year. We seemed to be getting things under control by the end of non-conference play, but then whammo. The Big Ten is such a defense-emphasized conference, that I do think that’s part of what we’re seeing. However, there’s plenty of blame to go around when it comes to unforced turnovers and sloppy play. It’s not sexy, but it can be fun to watch a defensive struggle, It’s not fun to watch a team throw the ball away and look like they have no idea what’s going on. The Spartans have played both roles at times this conference season. All three point guards seem to have lapses now and then where the wheels just come off the bus. It will be interesting to see how this club handles the state of Indiana in a couple of weeks. I’m actually not certain claiming one game will be tougher than the other.

  2. wifeofaspartanon 01 Feb 2008 at 6:29 am 2

    Lately the freshmen seem to be combining for about half of our turnovers (ie 9 of 18). Just when the bigs are really cutting down on turnovers, the freshmen are having more.

    Not sure if it is the tough b10 defense flustering them and causing poorer decisions and hurries? They all seem to be very hard working and really trying which may make them a little more turnover prone as they are trying so hard and consciously trying to speed up to match the game and learning
    small decisions which you probably really can only learn in an actual game decision.

    The funny thing about the 3 big men is that they seem to be rotating who will contribute the turnovers and the other 2 will only have 1 or 0 TO between them. This last game Suton had 3 but i think he had no TO the prior 2 games. They are improving in that they no longer seem to have half or more, especially if you count Morgan’s in with the bigs.

    RayMo is certainly consistently good for a few. The last game the box score said 3 i think and it seemed like he had 5 or 6.

    The traveling violations seem the most correctable and the throw aways by the freshmen should get better as they become more experienced.

    Having them in bunches could definitely hurt us badly. We do not want to lose the B10 title thru one or two bad games chock full of turnovers.

    Izzo said on his radio show he would take emails, phone calls, any ideas on how to reduce them :)

  3. GBBoundon 01 Feb 2008 at 9:58 am 3

    I wish there was a source somewhere that broke down or listed the types of turnovers a team experiences. Looking at play-by-play details on ESPN is not helpful. What percentage of turnovers are:
    1) forced vs. unforced
    2) of the passing variety (i.e., those that lead to what Izzo calls “interceptions for TDs”, thrown out of bounds, over and back, etc.)
    3) offensive fouls
    4) individually-derived (i.e., travelling, double dribble, palming, etc).

    Knowing the breakdown might help in answering the question with a little more clarity.

  4. kjon 01 Feb 2008 at 11:12 am 4

    I agree, GBBound. I’ve thought about tracking MSU’s turnovers by type for a game or two. But then the problem is not having a baseline to compare the distribution of turnovers to.

    The only distinction we can draw based on the stats currently available is whether the other team stole the ball or it was some other type of turnover.

    MSU ranks 213th nationally in offensive TO%.

    They rank just 90th nationally in steal % by their opponents.

    This implies that a higher-than-average percentage of their turnovers results from other things: throwing the ball away, stepping out of bounds, traveling, offensive fouls, etc.

    Steals are not necessarily forced turnovers, but I’d think they tend to be more than other types of turnovers. So, again, it seems like MSU’s problem is more in the area of decision making than some fundamental flaw in their basketball skills.

    But I’m at a loss in terms of what could be done to address the poor decision making. I suppose it if was simple, Izzo would have fixed it by now . . .

  5. Danon 01 Feb 2008 at 3:45 pm 5

    I don’t have exact numbers on hand, but I’ve noticed an ungodly number of travels and offensive fouls (moving screens in particular). There are occasional walk-right-into-a-trap-and-do-something-stupid turnovers too, but the biggest problem is traveling. (With the number of screens we set for Neitzel, moving screens are going to happen once in a while.)