Digging Deeper

At the tail end of last season, Jordan Sperber, analytics guru, blogger, and video coordinator for the New Mexico State University men’s basketball team, penned an insightful reflection on the concept of “offensive balance.”

Rather than retreating to conventional wisdom on the subject – the idealized notion that balanced scoring where everyone shares the ball and no one player dominates is inherently “better basketball” – Sperber dug deeper, revealing that it’s a bit more complicated than what the typical fan may imagine.

Using Loyola Chicago’s inspiring Final Four run as his starting point, Sperber constructed a statistical baseline, charting last season’s the top five scorers for every team in the country and developing a matrix to separate balanced squads from the unbalanced. Continue reading…