The question has reigned supreme in sports for years — defense or offense? Is there any truth to the old adage that one sells tickets but the other wins championships? Are their superior ways to play or does it all boil down to execution?
In baseball, some teams build around a high-octane lineup designed to outscore opponents, while others stock their pitching staffs and are content to manufacture individual runs.
In football, it’s even more complicated, with offensive playbooks spreading the spectrum between aerial bombardments, the west-coast short-yardage offense, up-the-gut or sideline-to-sideline running games — the pool of intricacies is bottomless. Defensively, it’s the same – do you build a Tampa-2 squad to minimize big plays, a two-gap 3-4 with speedy pass rushers or the old faithful 4-3?
In basketball, it’s no different than any of the other major sports. There are many ways to play, many styles to incorporate and strategies to apply. But if one thing separates basketball from the others, it’s that it can be much easier to adjust on the fly.
With just five players on the court at any one time, it can be much easier to rotate players around and create on-court combinations that suit certain styles: smaller guards for a fast-break assault, or big men and good ball-handlers for the half-court game.
But a team is always best at one thing, and the Boston University men’s basketball team has never been a Phoenix Suns-type squad that shoots six seconds into the shot clock. On a Dennis Wolff squad, that one thing is defense.
So while some may haphazardly label the BU offense plodding, the correct term would be calculated. Every Terrier possession is built around getting the best possible shot through the use of a labyrinth of screens and handoffs. Sometimes it works, such as when Corey Lowe feeds Tyler Morris for a 15-footer as he curls off an Omari Peterkin pick. Sometimes the set is broken and it doesn’t work.
“There were too many instances in the last six or seven minutes of games where we’re playing to not lose as opposed to playing to win,” Wolff said. “The other team starts to play a little harder on defense. As a group you need to execute better.”
But when a team focuses on maximizing every possession, a win usually means simply making more work than not — and that is efficiency. And often, the most important time to be efficient is in final minutes of a tightly contested game.
“On the flip side, there were ones that were right there for us,” Wolff said. “I’m going to be saying to myself, if we could replay 25 plays all year and have half of them come out in a different way, we’d probably have six more wins — and that’s probably being conservative.”
That efficiency might seem intangible in the same vein as leadership, but by combining all positive (points, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals) and negative (missed field goals, missed free throws, turnovers) statistics, a neat and tidy number can easily express just how efficient a player, or team is.
This number is a PER, or Player Efficiency Rating. As a point of reference, the top PER in the NBA is currently owned by Kevin Garnett at 29.8 through 55 games, and the front-runners for NCAA Player of the Year, Kevin Durant and Greg Oden, both freshman, are currently at 27.75 and 21.4 respectively.
Those numbers, it should be remembered, are in another stratosphere from America East basketball. But among their conference peers, those young Terriers that have historically been at the top of the efficiency ladder.
In the last seven years, America East Rookies of the Year have had an average PER of 13.6, with the lowest coming from the University at Albany’s Jon Iati in 2003 (6.67), and the highest from Northeastern University’s Shawn James in 2004 (19.6). In 1999, BU’s last ROY Paul Seymour finished the season with a PER of 10.34 through 29 games.
Within those parameters, BU has four legitimate ROY candidates in Corey Lowe (PER of 10.375), Carlos Strong (8.11), Scott Brittain (8.11) and team efficiency-leader Tyler Morris (12.75). Comparatively, the University of Vermont’s Joe Trapani, who many consider the best rookie in the league, has a PER of 11.31 in 22 games.
Taking these stats into consideration, the rookies that Wolff has depended so heavily on have put up very efficient numbers. The problem has been getting consistently efficient performances from each one.
“We have to be able to sustain good play on the offensive end and what’s going on now,” Wolff said, “and as good a year as all three of those freshman guards have been, it’s almost like we’re getting one and a half of them at each game, and we need all three of them.”
As a team, the Terriers have been among the best in the league in efficiency. Their PER of 6.96 ranks them third in the conference, behind Albany (6.53) and Vermont (7.04). And that first round matchup against Binghamton University has the Terriers matched with a similarly efficient team (6.76).
Of course, the PER is not perfect. Just like any stat, it cannot express things such as leadership, experience and chemistry, but it is still a strong way to quickly evaluate a player’s, or team’s, performance — and is a good measure of what it takes to win. If the Terrier rookies can each be as efficient as they’ve shown they can be, along with the ever-efficient senior co-captain Omari Peterkin (11.23), then they will give themselves enough successful possessions to give BU its first tournament win in years.
