The ability to measure your performance is very important. Coaches must be able to utilize statistics in a way that will allow them to both better understand their team’s performance as well as to educate their players. We go back to the importance of having a great imagination to be an effective coach, w we put that to use in coming up with stats of importance for both molding the execution of your offense as well as the development of certain roles on your team.There is a wise old saying: “What gets measured gets done.” Another one is: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
The most valuable chart that we keep is our POSSESSION EVALUATION CHART. This is one that we don’t necessarily share with the players but helps the staff get a good grasp on how effective we were in execution. We first saw this chart in Dean Smith’s Multiple Offense & Multiple Defense. It allows you to have a great understanding as to how efficient your team was on both ends of the floor. Too many judge an offensive performance by how many points you scored.
What this chart does is show you offensive efficiency relative to each possession. A team can walk the ball up the floor and score 55 points and be a more efficient team than a constant fast breaking team that scores 72. The key questions is how many points do you average per possession? For us, the goal is .90—nearly a point per possession. If we are .90 or better we have had a very good game in terms of execution and finishing.
Defensively we are looking for .70 or less. The same holds true for turnovers. A fast breaking team that puts in 92 possessions and turns the ball over 14 times has done a better job of taking care of the ball than the slow attacking team that has 12 turnovers but only had 70 possessions. The one thing we did add to Coach Smith’s chart was free throw category. We think getting to the free throw line (and keeping your opponents off the line) is critical. Our goal is to get to the free throw line .25 per possessionor more while keeping our opponents to .15 or less. This is absolutely a great chart!
For a sample copy of this chart, email me at rstarke@lsu.edu.
