Scoring Differential and Winning Percentage

 The first blog of 2023-2024 Missouri HS basketball was about defense.  If you don't play defense, you don't win games.  Of course, the converse of that is if you don't score baskets you don't win either.

Coaches do worry about both aspects of the game but kids tend to just think offense.  Isn't that where the glory is?  Scoring points?  The point guard would like to score a bunch of points but he or she might serve the team better by giving out dimes, passing to a teammate who has a higher percentage shot.  And the complete player is putting in the same effort on both ends of the court, offensively and defensively.

So defensive points allowed per game represents about half of the statistical explanation for winning percentage (refer to the last blog) and then offense represents the other half, right?

When we look at point differential (points scored minus points allowed per game), we see about 90% of a winning percentage is explained by differential.  Duh?  Makes sense that if you score more than the other team, you win.  If you score less, you lose.  That last 10% is probably kids being kids.  Sometimes they have a bad night.

Here's a look at the same 150-plus teams, but ranked by scoring differential.  In this sort of school-by-point differential, Green City, Cooter, and Lafayette County are the top teams and their records are in the up 80% winning percentage.  The worst teams, giving up 30 ppg are winning less than 10% of their games.  Pretty obvious, right?  So what's the correlation between point differential and winning percentage?  The table below the school ranks shows that correlation: 



About 90% of the winning percentage can be predicted by scoring differential:


                                                               Winning Percentage


So you might be saying "So what?".  You score more points than the other team, you always win and you are right.  But there is a predictive factor called Pythagorean Winning Percentage that has an even higher correlation to predicting winning percentage and I will talk about Pythagorean Ratios in the next blog.

Beyond the next couple of blogs, I may try and post some pre-season rankings based on historical data but I promise you I will start the Gramps class rankings for boys and girls by mid-December at the latest.  As I have said before, you won't find anyone ranking every Missouri HS team in the state.

I hope you enjoy reading the blog and learning more about how your teams on these important statistics.  If you liked what you read, re-tweet, or whatever the heck you do now that it is called "X" and tell your friends about Gramp's blog and HS ratings.


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