Offensive Profiles: In-System Weakness

Because who needs easy scoring opportunities?

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

---

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 Weakness?

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

I define a weakness as an aspect that is at least 1 standard-deviation below the other two aspects. For example, a team that’s a bit below-average in In-System Attack has an In-System Weakness if they are a bit above-average in Passing and Out-of-System Attacking. But a team that’s strong (say 1 standard deviation above) in both Passing and Out-of-System attacking could be merely average in In-System Attacking and still classify as an In-System Weakness 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 Weakness Profile?

In the 2023 NCAA Women’s season, 6 of the top-100 teams profiled with a Passing Weakness. So this was not a common 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 Weakness profile.

It’s important to note that these are not necessarily the worst in-system teams in the country; they are the teams least reliant on their in-system attacking to produce sideout offense. Purdue, for example, was only a little below-average in-system, but they were well above-average in the other two categories, so they had a relative weakness in-system. Cal, Michigan State, and UCSB, on the other hand, were all in the bottom-11 of this sample.

How Successful Were Teams With An In-System Weakess Profile?

Well there were only 6 of them, and you can see it runs the whole gamut. Purdue and Arkansas had great seasons and UCSB was nearly undefeated in-conference. On the flip side, Cal was closer to the bottom of their conference.

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.

I labeled the teams toward the edges and you can see Baylor over there on the left… the least-reliant team on In-System offense but one that was over 0.500 in-conference. And on the flip side, you have Florida, one of the teams who was most-reliant on in-system offense with an almost-identical record.

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, 2 teams had an In-System Weakness. Considering there were only 6 teams with that profile, that’s a disproportionate amount of post-season success. But… there’s a lot of small sample size effects there too. I know I keep repeating this, but mostly this just shows that there’s a few different ways to assemble successful teams.

So What Are The Takeaways?

Since an In-System Weakness is just the flip side of the In-System Strength profile, my takeaways are nearly identical. Purdue’s had a great program for a long time and Arkansas pushed Nebraska pretty hard- they nearly made the Final 4 with this profile.

It does make me think a little bit about how these Offensive Profiles interact with the Alternate Passing Profiles. In theory, you’d love to have a really high GP% team synch up with an In-System Strength. And if your team has more of an In-System Weakness, you care less about your GP% and more about saving aces at all costs. I’m not sure we as coaches have quite the ability to turn the knobs on your teams like that but… it’s worth noting that Arkansas was the best ace-saving team in the country despite being only a bit better than average in GP%.

Arkansas was a team that a lot of people cited this year as the classic, “the whole was better than the sum of the parts,” and maybe that’s another ways to say that their strength in one area of the game hid their weakness in another area and vice versa.

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”