Cincinnati Basketball: Statistically This Is UC’s Best Offensive Team In Years
By Chris Bains
The deafening sound of groans was pretty much the only thing you could hear on Saturday afternoon as the Cincinnati Bearcats slogged their way to a 65-60 win over UConn. Both teams combined for just 53 points in the first half while shooting a coma inducing 37.5% from the field, including just 15 made two pointers, to go along with 15 combined turnovers.
At that point the old guard in the UC fan base fell back on their usual complaints, that Mick Cronin runs a stagnant, unproductive offense while apparently forgetting that the Bearcats boast the 9th best scoring defense in college basketball and UConn the 11th. But throughout this season Cincinnati is actually running a more efficient, higher scoring, and faster offense than they have during any time during the Cronin era.
Since the 2010-11 season, UC’s first trip to the NCAA Tournament in this regime, no Bearcats team has posted a higher offensive efficiency (points per possession), more points per game, or a higher true shooting percentage than this one. That last one is especially encouraging, as it accounts for Cincinnati’s shooting percentage across twos, threes, and free throws and the Bearcats are better across all areas as a whole this season than they have been in the past, especially from beyond the arc.
The only statistic that truly concerns me, and it’s something I’ve been harping on since last season, is that this team is still glacially slow. To their credit, they’ve gotten faster this year but hovering around 300th in college basketball in possessions per game despite ranking 67th in points per possession makes little sense. Higher efficiency + more possessions = higher scoring. The Bearcats are scoring five points per game more in 2015-16 than during their next best season but it could be so much better if they picked up the pace even more.
Building on that point, the obvious argument against these stats is that despite the uptick in raw scoring, the Bearcats still don’t rank in the top 100 in college basketball in four out of five of these categories. Sure, on the whole, the offense could be better. But has it improved over the last several years under Mick Cronin? Hell yes. And as young, pure scorers such as Gary Clark and Jacob Evans mature, and they add more prolific scorers to the roster such as Jarron Cumberland, of the 52-point variety, you can expect UC to steadily climb in the rankings over time.
At the end of the day, games between UC and UConn, and UC and South Florida for that matter, are outliers in a season in which the Bearcats are displaying better offensive numbers despite being ubiquitously known for lock-down defense. But when Cincinnati faces an equally proficient team in this area, it stands to reason that both would struggle to put points on the board. Essentially, whether or not the Bearcats eventually become a top 50 or 25 offensive team, you can probably expect them to grind their way to even 50 or 60 against the UConn’s and South Florida’s of the world.
But again, those are outliers and as long as Cincinnati continues to get better and better offensively, there should be little to worry about on a macro level with this program.