Because I'm a geek I went through and
Quick follow up, because I'm a geek and wasn't able to draw a direct correlation between Nojel's minutes played and the team's offensive performance. I looked at the performance of Tre and Sasha in the 20 conference games played last year and tried to determine any correlation between their performance and team points per game.
Surprisingly (at least to me), there looked to be very little correlation between Tre's ppg, rpg, apg, etc. and the team's offensive performance. The only strong correlations that I was able to find were 1) In games where Purdue's offense performed well, Sasha shot more threes at a higher percentage 2) 60% of the first, second and third quartile of scoring games were at home, 80% of the last quartile of scoring games were on the road.
Is Sasha's 3pt shooting a causal relationship? i.e. Was the offense was better because Sasha shot the ball better? I don't know but I suspect it was a significant factor. Could it be that Sasha shot the ball better because the offense was better and he got better looks? Could be and my guess is that it played a role, but it also seemed that there were times when he couldn't miss when the offense was rolling and times when he missed a lot of the open looks when the offense struggled.
- In the five highest scoring conference games Purdue averaged 83.6 ppg Sasha averaged 6.6 three point attempts per game and shot 42% on those attempts.
- In the second quartile of highest scoring conference games Purdue averaged 69.6 ppg Sasha averaged 7.2 three point attempts per game and shot 39% on those attempts.
- In the third quartile of highest scoring conference games Purdue averaged 61,4 ppg Sasha averaged 4 three point attempts per game and shot 35% on those attempts.
- In the second quartile of highest scoring conference games Purdue averaged 50.4 ppg Sasha averaged 4.8 three point attempts per game and shot 17% on those attempts.