It’s been a bad year for basketball in Canada’s Silicon Valley. The Kitchener-Waterloo Titans are off to a dreadful start at 3–14 and look to be taking a massive step back in their second season in the NBL Canada. Attendance is down over 8%, the coach is criticizing his players in the media and, to make matters worse their upcoming schedule doesn’t look too friendly either. The Titans’ next 6 games will be all on the road, facing the River Lions, Highlanders, Riptide, Storm and Lightning (twice). KW is 0–6 away from the Aud this year so a return home with a 3–20 record is not out of the question.

So what’s the deal here? Why are the Titans posting the lowest winning percentage since 2012–2013’s ill-fated Montreal Jazz? In order to make sense of all of this, we’re going to look at how the KW Titans stack up in Dean Oliver’s Four Factors of Basketball Success.

Dean Oliver, a pioneer of basketball analytics, determined that there are four factors to winning basketball games (in order of importance): Shooting, Turnovers, Offensive Rebounding and Foul Shots. All four categories need to be accounted for offensively and defensively, so effectively there are 8 stats that we are going to look at for the KW Titans.

Shooting

To measure shooting, we’re going to use Effective Field Goal % (eFG%), a metric similar to Field Goal Percentage, but adjusts for the fact that 3 pointers are worth 50% more than 2 point shots. As you can see, the Titans are dead last. Not a great start, but not a surprise either. The Titans are currently last in the league in Points Per Game (98.8), Offensive Rating (104.4), Field Goal % (42.4) and second last in 3 Point % (31.2).