Gary Parrish makes an interesting case for this year’s North Carolina team as the best Roy Williams coached Tar Heel team ever.  He thinks that they will be better than both the 2005 and 2009 national champions. This is a bold claim, but he’s absolutely right given the criteria he’s using. Parrish makes the point that when all is said and done, this team will have more NBA draft picks and All-Americans than any of those other UNC teams. This is probably accurate. That said, it’s not a very good way of measuring how skilled a team is. Both NBA draft picks and All-American selections are measures of individual, subjective perception. These are measures that are grounded, ultimately, in opinion. It’s a fair way to look at teams, but for my money, I would rather evaluate and rank these teams by their actual on-court performance. So, for that, let’s take a look at out old friend, tempo-free efficiency statistics.

2011-12 Tar Heels Will Probably Not Be Roy William's Best Team Ever

Given the fact that the 2011-12 North Carolina team has yet to play a single game, we are going to have to make some assumptions to compare them to the 2009 and 2005 teams. Fortunately, this shouldn’t be too hard since this year’s team is mostly identical to last year’s team. UNC has already lost Leslie McDonald to injury, but should return Reggie Bullock back from his own injury.  No rotation players were lost to graduation or the NBA Draft aside from Justin Knox, and the team gains a number of skilled freshmen, headlined by P.J. Hairston and James McAdoo. So, let’s start with the 2010-11 team as the baseline and we can adjust from there. That team put up a 112.1 in adjusted offensive efficiency while posting an 88.5 in adjusted defensive efficiency. This would put the adjusted efficiency margin at +23.6 points per hundred possessions. This is quite good. But how does it compare to the two national title teams?

The 2009 team posted an adjusted offensive efficiency of 124.2 and an adjusted defensive efficiency of 89.6, putting the adjusted efficiency margin at an incredible +34.6. The 2005 team managed an 126.6 adjusted offensive efficiency and an 86.7 adjusted defensive efficiency, resulting in the absolutely ridiculous adjusted efficiency margin of +39.9. Yeah, those teams were pretty good.  So let’s go back to this year’s team. Starting with that +23.6 number, can Roy Williams really wring enough improvement out of his current players to make up the ground to get to +40.0? It seems doubtful. Looking at reasonable but optimistic improvements in current players and even considering immediate positive contributions from the incoming freshmen, everything would still have to go right for the 2011-12 team to come near the efficiency levels of the 2009 team. To match the 2005 team, every player would have to have improve by huge leaps and bounds and the freshmen would have to turn out to be super studs. Even then, I’m not sure that this years team could challenge the insane efficiency of the 2005 UNC squad.

Will this year’s Tar Heel team be very good? Yes, almost certainly. But will they be the best Roy Williams coached UNC team? Almost certainly not.

KCarpenter (269 Posts)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 2:31 pm by KCarpenter and is filed under acc, microsites. Tagged: acc, efficiency statistics, roy williams, unc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.