by Dan Loman

Which is better in college basketball - having a dynamic, do-it-all lead guard, or a group of players that share playmaking duties more equally? Is it more beneficial to have a playmaker like Kris Dunn or Fred VanVleet carry the offense, or to have a more team balanced approach to creating shots? Leveraging the BracketVoodoo analytical engine, we dug into the past few years of NCAA data to determine if either approach was more indicative of team success both during the regular season as well as in the NCAA tournament.

Building upon our Playmaking Rate metric, which quantifies the degree to which each individual player creates offense for his team, we devised a Playmaking Concentration index for each team, which measures the dispersion of the Playmaking Rate among the players on a team. This index can theoretically vary between 0 and 1, with 1 representing a team where essentially a single player is responsible for all of the playmaking, and 0 representing the case where all of the players on the team share equally in creating offense. In practice, the observed range of this metric tends to be between about .45 (e.g. the 2015 Providence Friars, where Kris Dunn is creating about half of the offense when he is on the court) and .10.

Below we plot the Playmaking Concentration versus team success (defined here by kenpom.com’s Pythagorean Rating) for 551 high mid-major and BCS team seasons over the last 6 seasons. As it turns out, there’s no correlation between Playmaking Concentration and how good a team is. You’ll find good and bad teams on both sides of the spectrum:

Team Ranking vs. Playmaking Concentrations

But at BracketVoodoo, what we care about even more than what makes a team good and bad is what makes a team good and bad when it matters, i.e. during the NCAA Tournament. And when looking ahead to the NCAA Tournament, there’s evidence that teams with the highest Playmaking Concentrations have performed significantly better than teams on the other end of the spectrum.

To analyze this, we looked at the 207 teams in our data set that made the NCAA Tournament between 2011 and 2015 (we don’t have access to all of the necessary data for smaller conference teams) and measured their actual performance in the tourney versus a baseline calculated based on historical performance for their seed. The graph below plots this performance for each team versus their Playmaking Concentration for that season.

Tourney Success vs. Playmaking Concentrations

As you can see, there is a high degree of variability here, but at the same time, there is a real correlation between Playmaking Concentration and NCAA Tournament performance. Teams with a higher Playmaking Concentration generally perform better in the NCAA Tournament. In fact, teams in the top 20% won almost half a game more than the baseline on average. Teams in the top 10% won over ¾ of a game more than expected, including 4 of the top five over-performances. On the flip side, teams with bottom 20% Playmaking Concentration underperformed by about ¼ of a win on average. That’s a difference of about a win per team between top teams and bottom teams!

Digging a little deeper into the top and bottom, here are the tournament teams in the last five years with the 15 highest and lowest Playmaking Concentrations. Of all teams with the lowest Playmaking Concentrations, only 2011 FSU and 2013 Oregon - 10 and 12 seeds respectively that reached the Sweet 16 - won more than a game above expected for their seed/ranking. On the other side, while having a high value on this metric is no sure ticket to NCAA tourney success, a few dark horses have come out of this group to make a deep tourney run and even win it all.

Top 15 Playmaking Concentrations

﻿Team Seed Result Wins vs Expected UConn ‘14 7 Champs 5.10 Michigan '13 4 Finals 3.44 Syracuse '13 4 Final Four 2.44 North Carolina St. '15 8 Sweet 16 1.26 Wichita St. '15 7 Sweet 16 1.10 Utah '15 5 Sweet 16 0.89 Arizona '15 2 Elite 8 0.61 Ohio St. '15 10 Round of 32 0.38 BYU '11 3 Sweet 16 0.19 Saint Louis '14 5 Round of 32 -0.11 UNI '15 5 Round of 32 -0.11 North Carolina '12 1 Elite 8 -0.35 Villanova '11 9 Round of 64 -0.56 Missouri '13 9 Round of 64 -0.56 Providence '15 6 Round of 64 -1.14

Bottom 15 Playmaking Concentrations

﻿Team Seed Result Wins vs Expected Georgetown '13 2 Round of 64 -2.3871 Villanova '14 2 Round of 32 -1.3871 St. John’s (NY) '11 6 Round of 64 -1.1371 Wisconsin '13 5 Round of 64 -1.1129 West Virginia '12 10 Round of 64 -0.621 Villanova '13 9 Round of 64 -0.5565 Kansas '11 1 Elite 8 -0.3468 Gonzaga '12 7 Round of 32 0.1048 UCLA '11 7 Round of 32 0.1048 Iowa St. '13 10 Round of 32 0.379 Colorado '12 11 Round of 32 0.4706 Ole Miss '13 12 Round of 32 0.4711 Gonzaga '15 2 Elite 8 0.6129 Florida St. '11 10 Sweet 16 1.379 Oregon '13 12 Sweet 16 1.4711

Wisconsin entered the 2013 NCAA Tournament as a 5 seed led in playmaking by senior forward Ryan Evans, who wasn’t necessarily known as a playmaker. They were summarily bounced in the first round. Over the next two seasons, Wisconsin benefitted from the increased playmaking responsibility of Traevon Jackson, along with the development of eventual Naismith Player of the Year Frank Kaminsky and first-round pick Sam Dekker as they advanced to the Elite 8 and the title game.

Arguably the biggest upset of the 2013 Tournament, however, came at the expense of the Otto Porter-led Georgetown Hoyas. Porter is a great player, but not really a playmaker, and his Georgetown team famously fell to the small, unknown 15-seed Florida Gulf Coast.

Another big disappointment the last two seasons has been current #3 Villanova. Despite entering the tournament as a 2 seed and a 1 seed each of the past two seasons, the Wildcats failed to advance to the Sweet Sixteen in either of these years. And in both of those seasons they were in the bottom 10% in Playmaking Concentration. In 2014, Villanova ranked second-to-last among high major and BCS teams in playmaking Concentration, as Ryan Arcidiacono paced the team with a playmaking rate of .24. Though the Wildcats’ balanced offense finished as a top-25 unit, they failed to keep pace with the Shabazz Napier-led UConn Huskies in the Round of 32. This season, though they still have a below average Playmaking Concentration rate, the Wildcats are at least much closer to the middle of the pack.

While some may view a low Playmaking Concentration as indicative of having a more balanced offense, it may also mean that these teams don’t have a reliable go-to guy when they need a basket. That’s not to say that teams that rely on one or two players for playmaking aren’t prone to March Madness upsets. For example in 2013 Georgetown’s second seeded counterpart Missouri also fell in the first round to a Kyle O'Quinn-led Norfolk St. team, and in 2014 previously undefeated Wichita St. fell to Kentucky in the second round. Phil Pressey and Fred VanVleet had two of the highest playmaking rates in the country those years but neither the Tigers nor the Shockers could advance to the second weekend in their respective tournaments. However, three of the twelve Final Four teams in this time frame, including a national champion and a runner-up, also appear in the top 15 in playmaking Concentration.

Surprisingly, the team with the highest Playmaking Concentration among this group was Syracuse in 2013. The Orange were led that year by point guard Michael Carter-Williams, who assisted on nearly 40% of Cuse’s baskets while scoring with an unassisted percentage of 75%. Syracuse made a surprise run to the Final Four as a 4 seed, and Carter-Williams was named Most Outstanding Player in the Eastern Regional, helping propel his stock as a lottery pick in the 2013 NBA Draft.

Syracuse was defeated by Michigan, the other 4 seed in 2013 to make a surprise run to the final weekend. Led by AP Player of the Year Trey Burke, who was first on the team in playmaking by assisting or scoring over 48% of the Wolverines’ field goals unassisted, Michigan advanced to the Title Game where they would eventually lose to Louisville.

Finally, who could forget UConn’s legendary 2014 championship run on the back of 6'1" senior point guard Shabazz Napier, who assisted or scored over 40% of the Huskies’ shots unassisted that year. After averaging 18/6/5 during the season, Napier was considered one of the best players in the country and had already built a reputation for hitting clutch shots. UConn won the title and Napier won the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award, displaying the value of having such a dynamic playmaker to lead the team.

When considering teams to make a run in your bracket this year, you may want to look at teams that have individual playmakers that can lead their team to unexpected places. We’ll dive into this more as the tourney gets closer, but taking an early look at some top ranked teams, 2nd ranked Michigan State, led by potential All-American Denzel Valentine, is currently just outside the top 20 in Playmaking Concentration, while 4th ranked Virginia sits dead last of the 116 teams we’ve analyzed. ◊