Offensive Profiles: In-System Strength

Be good when it's good

Intro

In previous years, I’ve outlined the analytics framework I call The Triangle. If you need to get caught up, here’s the 4 main articles that outline the concept of the Triangle, as well as the 3 points of the Triangle.

The Triangle
Terminal Serving
First Ball
Transition

From this framework, I also built Team Profiles. These are diagnostic tools. Tell me my weak points, so I can work on them. They are also profiles of the different ways that teams can be successful. Tell me my strengths, so I can highlight them.

Terminal Serving Strength
Terminal Serving Weakness
First Ball Strength
First Ball Weakness
Transition Strength
Transition Weakness

Above all, the point of these tools are to improve your play on the court. Just running the numbers isn’t enough. How is that going to change how you’re going to train? How will it change the strategies you teach your players? Etc

This summer we’re taking another deep dive into the numbers as I share another layer of Team Profiles: Offensive Profiles. I’ll add the links here as I roll out this series:

Passing Strength
Passing Weakness
In-System Attacking Strength
In-System Attacking Weakness
Out-of-System Attacking Strength
Out-of-System Attacking Weakness
Balanced

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What Is An Offensive Profile?

I categorize 3 main components of Sideout Offense:

1. The ability to pass the ball In-System.

2. The ability to score when you do pass the ball In-System.

3. The ability to score when you don’t pass the ball In-System.

Do you pass well (or poorly)? Do you attack well (or poorly) when you’re running offense? Do you attack well (or poorly) when you’re out-of-system? Or are you about equally good (or bad) in all 3 areas?

A team can have a relative strength in one of these areas, a relative weakness in one of these areas, or be about equally proficient in all of these areas. The key here is the word relative. The team that’s 18-2 is probably better in all 3 of these areas than the team that goes 8-12. But the point of a profile is to compare the aspects of a team not to other teams, but to the other aspects within the same team.

What Do You Mean By In-System Strength?

A team with an In-System Strength profile is a team whose In-System Attack proficiency is relatively stronger than the other two Offensive Factors: Passing and Out-of-System Attacking.

I define a strength as an aspect that is at least 1 standard-deviation above the other two aspects. For example, a team that’s a bit above-average in In-System Attack has an In-System Strength if they are a bit below-average in Passing and Out-of-System Attacking. But a team that’s weak (say 1 standard deviation below) in both Passing and Out-of-System attacking could be merely average in In-System Attacking and still classify as an In-System Strength profile. The point is that it’s relative to the other aspects within that team.

Remember me???

Why 1 standard deviation? I don’t know, it seems about right to me.

But more importantly, it’s not even about the specific statistical quantification. If you’re a high school coach, you don’t know what the standard deviation is for all of these aspects- although I will share some data as we go. But most coaches have a sense for the strengths and weaknesses of their teams. Where do you seem to gain an advantage? Where you do seem to have a disadvantage?

Some teams are balanced. That’s informative as well. Don’t assume you team is clearly skewed in one direction without taking some time to think about it.

Also, don’t assume your team has a strength in an area of the game, just because you WANT them to have a strength in that area of the game. You may value scrappy defense and smart transition play, but it may not have translated into results on the court. Yet.

How Common Are Teams With An In-System Strength Profile?

In the 2023 NCAA Women’s season, 12 of the top-100 teams profiled with a Passing Weakness. This was the most common non-Balanced profile

11 Teams - Passing Strength
6 Teams - Passing Weakness
12 Teams - In-System Strength
6 Teams - In-System Weakness
11 Teams - Out-of-System Strength
7 Teams - Out-of-System Weakness
51 Teams - Balanced (no extreme strength or weakness)¹

Here were the teams with an In-System Strength profile.

It’s important to note that these are not necessarily the best in-system teams in the country; they are the teams most reliant on their in-system attacking to produce sideout offense. There were quite a few teams ahead of Duke and Auburn in overall In-System attack, but they didn’t profile here because of other factors.

How Successful Were Teams With An In-System Strength Profile.

There were plenty of successful teams with In-System strengths. Kentucky, Yale, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Lipscomb were all over 80% Conference Win%.

If you just correlate conference Win% to InSys Index², there’s almost no correlation. It was 0.10. As we see with most of these profiles, there’s multiple ways to win. I do notice that there’s no team with an InSys Index over 1.0 with a losing record, but that has to be counter-balanced by the cluster of teams who are right around -1.0 with very good records. Eastern Illinois, labeled on the graph below, is a perfect example of a very successful team who was relatively ineffective In-System.

A final way to look at success is to look at the profiles of the most successful teams in the country. Of the teams that made the Regional Semifinals³, 3 teams had an In-System Strength. That’s slightly more than you’d expect… but I’m not sure it tells you that the way to post-season success is to focus on your In-System attack. After all, as we’ll see in a subsequent post, Texas had an Out-of-System strength profile and they beat both Tennessee and Wisconsin on the way to the championship.

So What Are The Takeaways?

My 3 takeaways from looking at this analysis…

1. I don’t think it’s the worst idea to have “be good attacking In-System” as your top priority. If you’re at the NCAA level, you’re going to be in-system half the time, and your systems can help determine your success at that level. There’s worst places to start.

2. I didn’t see a clear trend between these teams that were very good in-system and offensive style. I’d like to dive into that a little more and try to find a common thread. I thought maybe, “these teams will have dominant middles that they can use in-system,” but interestingly enough, Carter Booth from Wisconsin’s 3rd-team selection was the only All-American middle in the group. (Not that AA awards are necessarily the definition of how effective a players is)

3. If you’re not going to be be great In-System, you better win the Terminal Serving game. Losing the In-System battle doesn’t guarantee that you’ll lose the whole First Ball battle, but it’s halfway there. We know we want to win 2/3 of the Triangle, so if we’re in the negative In-System, we want to make sure that we win the Terminal Serving game.

I’ll unpack these concepts more as we go and next week we’ll look at teams who had a relative weakness In-System.

1. These numbers add up to more than 100 because some teams classified in more than 1 profile.

2. Which is kind of a made-up state that just compares the In-System Standard Deviation to the other 2 categories. In theory, a higher In-System Index means a team is relatively more reliant on passing.

3. Aka “Sweet 16”