Is it fair though to compare an entire year to just a few games. Having only played a few games one or two bad games can really skew the numbers. I'd like to see the comparison at the end of the year. Without looking it up, however, I have to believe we are averaging more points per game than last year despite the shooting numbers being worse. Not sure how everyone else feels but whatever the numbers are, the product on the floor is a lot more fun to watch.
You can have your own opinion on whether it's fair or not. You should be able to reach pretty much the same conclusion just by looking at our rank this year in those categories. I was responding to a comment stating we were better on both sides of the court than last year so it made sense to compare to last year.
The claim about one or two bad games seems odd considering we've shot above 30% from 3 just twice this year, with one of those being 30.9% against Duke. The other was against GSU where we shot 45%. With that game we are shooting 29.6% from 3. Without we are shooting 27%. So if anything one good game is skewing our numbers up in that area. In general to me it feels like the one or two games skewing the data are more likely to be skewing it up rather than down on the offensive side of things.
We are averaging more points per game by about 1.5 points per game although our rank in that category is worse. I imagine scoring goes down across the board as teams get to conference play is the reason for that. Anyways, that is largely a byproduct of increased pace where we are averaging 3.5 more possessions this year than last. By itself that is a neutral stat, but an increase in it will make the total numbers for offense look better and defense look worse. You would expect the increase in total points to be more than 1.5. For good offenses you'd probably expect 3.5 possessions to translate to around 4 ppg more. For bad offenses you'd expect that to translate to ~3.2. It would be right at 3.5 for us based on where we were last year. That it translates to just 1.5 more points mean we are just a worse offense running faster. Keep in mind, a faster pace also means more possessions for our opponents. It's why based on efficiency of our opponents you'd expect us to be giving us ~4.6 points less per game this year than last but we are actually giving up just 1.2 points per game less.
There are some areas we are improved. Defensively we are better. Rebounding we are better (particularly offensive rebounding). We are better at generating FTAs. But offense in general we are worse. We shoot worse, assist less, turn it over more. Any of those things could change as we get into ACC play proper. We could become more comfortable offensively and our numbers there improve. We could also run into teams that are better on offense and have more information on how to attack us defensively and get worse defensive numbers. It could be both. It could be neither. It'll have a chance to play out.
