Offensive Profiles: Passing Weakness
Offensive Profiles: Passing Weakness
Extending the Triangle
(Yes, I accidentally swapped the order of Tuesdays post and this one. Oh well.)
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:
The ability to pass the ball In-System.
The ability to score when you do pass the ball In-System.
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 Passing Weakness?
A team with a Passing Weakness profile is a team whose passing proficiency is relatively weaker than the other two Offensive Factors: In-System Attacking 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 Passing has a Passing Weakness if they are a bit above-average in In-System and Out-of-System Attacking. But a team that’s very good (say 2 standard deviations) in both In-System and Out-of-System attacking could still be above-average (1 standard deviation) in Passing and classify as a Passing Weakness. The point is that it’s relative to the other aspects within that team.
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 A Passing Weakness Profile?
In the 2023 NCAA Women’s season, 6 of the top-100 teams profiled with a Passing Weakness. This was the least common team 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 a Passing Weakness profile.
It’s important to note that these are not necessarily the worst passing teams in the country; they are the teams least reliant on their passing to produce sideout offense. 6 of the worst-10 Passing teams2 in the top-100 RPI didn’t qualify as a Passing Strength profile because they ended up with a specific offensive strength or balanced profile.
How Successful Were Teams With A Passing Weakness Profile?
There were some successful teams that profiled with a Passing Weakness, including several tournament teams in that small group. But you don’t see multiple teams with 90% conference Win%, like we did in the Passing Strength profile.
If you just correlate conference Win% to GP Index3, there’s basically no correlation. It was 0.05. This doesn’t mean that being bad at passing is good, or that you should necessarily focus on your offense at the expense of your passing, but it’s an indication that there’s multiple ways to have success.
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 Semifinals4, no teams had a Passing Weakness profile. That’s not necessarily the strongest indicator, because, with only 6/100 teams profiling with a Passing Weakness, you’d only expect (all else being equal) about 1 team to make the Sweet 16.
But, you could take this as a piece of evidence that you don’t want to have your passing as a weakness. From previous research, we do know that Terminal Serving is a bit less correlated to winning than First Ball Attacking, for example, but since passing is linked to Sideout, it’s probably not ideal to have a Passing Weakness.
So What Are The Takeaways?
My 3 takeaways from looking at this analysis…
As I mentioned, the correlation between Conference Win % and GP Index is basically 0. That means you can be successful while relying on your passing or not. You want to be good at passing, but you don’t necessarily need to out-pass your attack quality.
Your system plays into this. If modifying your system (from 5-1 to 6-2 or vice versa) to get elite attackers on the court means your passing takes a hit, you can still be successful and that could very well be the best solution for your team.
There’s probably diminishing returns for your reception ability. Going from average to above-average is probably more important than going from good to great as a passing team. In previous analysis, I’ve seen that there’s essentially no diminishing returns on attacking. Let’s see if that holds up in this study.
Okay, next week we’ll have some additional analysis before we look at Attacking. Stay tuned!
Webinar Reminder
At the end of the month (May 26), I’ll be hosting a mini-Offensive Concepts webinar, where I break down some of the reception tactics I use as part of my offensive system. So if you can’t make it out to a live event, you’ll want to make sure you’re a Premium Subscriber, so you can get access to this webinar.
These numbers add up to more than 100 because some teams classified in more than 1 profile.
Mississippi State, Ohio State, Rice, Northwestern, Clemson, Washington
Which is kind of a made-up state that just compares the Good Pass Standard Deviation to the other 2 categories. In theory, a higher GP Index means a team is relatively more reliant on passing.
Aka “Sweet 16”