Through this season our biggest issue has been our inability to value the basketball. You know as a coach how much this kills your team but it is sometimes hard to put it into a concrete value or number of how your team is effected. I came up with some numbers yesterday and shared them with the team to hopefully help them understand the negative value of a turnover.
By using our season box score, I roughly calculated the number of offensive possessions we have had on the year. I did this by looking at our shot attempts, offensive rebounds, turnovers and approximating free throws into a number of possessions. My guess was that we have had 1314 possessions on the year or an average of 55 offensive possessions per game.
A few things I could then figure out:
1. We turn it over, on average, 17 times a game. That equals 31% of our possessions and brings us down to only getting a shot 38 possessions a game. That is not enough to win basketball games.
2. Right now we average 1.29 points per possession. That includes all possessions including our 399 turnovers on the year.
3. In possessions in which we get a shot, we average 1.85 point per possession.
Therefore, we can put a value on a turnover as costing our team 1.85 points. In a game in which we turn the ball over 20 times we are losing over 36 points. If an individual has 5 turnovers, he is costing our team 9 points.
If we can drop our average turnovers from 17 to 14 we win 3 more games this year and are 17-7 and not 14-10.
Now we have a negative value to associate with a turnover.
