Oregon Men’s Basketball Stats Review: Offense

The Oregon men’s basketball program has consistently been the top half of the Pac-12 conference throughout most of head coach Dana Altman’s career. Late season surges, particularly in the conference tournament, have been a staple of the team’s identity. While 2024 was considered a disappointing season by the Ducks’ recent standards, it still included a patented Pac-12 Tournament Championship that earned the squad a birth in the NCAA tournament. The team fell short of the Sweet Sixteen when they were eliminated by Creighton in the second round.

Oregon finished fourth in the Pac-12 regular season with a 12-8 record, but how did their overall performance compare to their conference peers? I compiled team and player stats from sports-reference.com for Pac-12 conference play over the past three seasons to see what story the numbers tell us. Todays write up concerns the offense, I’ll be going over the defensive numbers next week.

Below are the per-game statistics in Pac-12 play for Oregon over the past three seasons. The season column indicates the calendar year when the season ended. The cells are color coded to compare them to all Pac-12 teams over the past three years. Green indicates a better performance, yellow a result near the median, and red indicates a poor performance.

To go further with individual contributions, I also collected data from sports-reference.com on single players. For the sake of comparison, I restricted the numbers to Pac-12 games only and censored any player who had less than 100 minutes of playing time in conference games during a single season. The numbers below represent the production a player would have if they played 40 full minutes at their “typical” production. For example, ‘PTS’ is computed as total points scored divided by minutes played then multiplied by 40. Note shooting accuracy is still simply shots made divided by shots attempted. The Ducks’ 2024 numbers are shown below in a similarly color coded table.

Tristan Holmes and sports-reference.com

After computing the summary statistics for the team and individual statistics, I drew a few conclusions.

• There is simply no way to analyze the Ducks 2023-2024 season without taking the exceptional injury situation into account. While Barthelemy and Diawara passed my cut off for comparing 40 minute adjusted game stats, Oregon was generally relying on only a 7 man rotation for the majority of their conference games. While the team’s offensive numbers were generally near the middle of the Pac-12 this season, and on the good side of the median for this data set, a single player having an off night could have an out sized influence on the outcome of the game because there was nobody who could fill in for them in the rotation.
• This team would have had no chance at a late season run if N’faly Dante hadn’t gotten healthy. His limited number of games, along with Mookie Cook’s lost season (he did have some playing time but no more than a few minutes in any particular game), seem to be primarily responsible for the poor team performance in offensive rebounding. I’m also inclined to think that the team ‘2P%’ is misleadingly low as Dante was taking the majority of the team’s high percentage shots this season. Finding players to replace Dante’s production in the paint is Altman’s clear challenge as the team enters B1G play.
• Looking at the individual player stats, you might think the Ducks were a middling team from 3 point range, but as a team they were well above the median. The interesting thing is that while Oregon didn’t have any exceptional perimeter shooters, they also had nobody who was weak. The median accuracy from three point range for all players in the data set was exactly 1/3, and all of Oregon’s players were above this. Essentially, if any player except Dante had an open look from three point range they should take it. This resulted in nearly a full standard deviation improvement in three point accuracy for the team over the past two seasons.
• Out of the 36 teams in the data set, the 2023-2024 Ducks committed fewer turnovers per game than all but 2 of them. This is quite a credit to freshman point guard Jackson Shelstad. If he stays healthy, he is a solid keystone to build the rest of the roster around.