Scott Rich

Cal's good at forcing the opposition to take two-point baskets, go one-on-one as manifesting in this low assist rate.

So that's what they're doing on the defensive end of the floor.

On the offensive end of the floor, they're very fundamentally sound.

They're a team that turns it over very, very rarely, only a 14.4% turnover percentage.

That's one of the top 35 rates in the country.

And they shoot it well across the board.

They shoot 36% from three.

They shoot nearly 80% from the line.

So you think, okay, these are all fantastic, fantastic metrics.

Why is this a average power conference team?

They don't get a lot of offensive rebounds, so they aren't getting very many extra possessions.

They're one of the worst offensive rebounding teams in the country, 294th in the country in offensive rebounding rate.

And also, despite the fact that they shoot well from three, they don't take a lot of threes.

They're middle of the pack in the country in terms of how many threes they're taking per game.

So they seem to be another one of these teams that you can force into taking so-so two-point jumpers.

They're, again, this two-point distance metric that Ken Palm has rolled out that has been the en vogue analytic tool of the year.

They're another team that is very poor in that metric.

They are

prone like smu to taking a lot of mid-range jumpers you know not following the analytics that free throws and threes or sorry layups and threes are all you do so this is a team that by all accounts is fundamentally sound they're very very experienced even if that experience wasn't at cal we'll talk about that when we talk about the players they do everything well but there's

They don't seem to squeeze that extra juice out of the orange in terms of maximizing their efficiency, which is why they're, again, a barely top 75 net team, a team that's more in the muck of the ACC.