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The Low-Usage All-Stars: Scoring isn’t everything

By Will Schreefer

Nov 18, 2016; Waco, TX, USA; Baylor Bears forward Jo Lual-Acuil Jr. (0) reacts after a score against the Florida Gulf Coast Eagles during the first half of a mens NCAA basketball game at Ferrell Center. Mandatory Credit: Jim Cowsert-USA TODAY Sports
Nov 18, 2016; Waco, TX, USA; Baylor Bears forward Jo Lual-Acuil Jr. (0) reacts after a score against the Florida Gulf Coast Eagles during the first half of a mens NCAA basketball game at Ferrell Center. Mandatory Credit: Jim Cowsert-USA TODAY Sports /
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A look at the best players in college basketball — who make contributions without the ball in their hands.

As the age-old cliche goes — there’s only one basketball. What it means — beyond the obvious rule that the sport can only be played with one ball on the floor at a time — is a bit flexible. But one boiled down definition is this: while it’s a team sport, with five players on the floor, only one person can score — or get credit for scoring — on a given possession.

And while it may never be very insightful analysis, it can serve as a segue into the discussion topic of this article. We’ll be taking a look at some of college basketball’s ‘low usage’ superstars — guys that don’t get (or take) the opportunities to put the ball in the bucket that much, but do the other things that contribute to winning a game.

To get there, though, we’ll have to start here — Box Plus-Minus (BPM). While it’s certainly not a catch-all tool, the all-in-one metric is one of the top public measures of overall player quality out there, especially in the data-light world of college basketball. The metric’s creator, Daniel Myers, has contributed to some excellent, full-er explanations of how it’s calculated and what it measures. The short version is this: the analysis ‘relies on a player’s box score information and the team’s overall performance to estimate a player’s performance relative to league average.’ It’s a per-100-possession stat; +5 means a player is 5 points better than an average player over 100 possessions, while a -5 means the opposite. It uses all typical (and some atypical) box score measures to distill a player’s production into one number. It’s not perfect — but it is one of the best tools we have to capture everything a player does on the floor.

This article will discuss some of college basketball’s best players, as ranked by BPM, that use less than 20 percent of their team’s possessions. These low-usage “superstars” are doing many of the little things on the floor that contribute to winning OUTSIDE of scoring. We’ll be taking a look at what it is they’re doing so well, whether it’s sustainable, and what we can expect for the rest of the season.