Yesterday, in my daily-ish notes, I made a bit of an unmerited claim:
Something that hasn’t gotten a ton of attention but is also mildly self-evident is ISU’s reliance on Tyrese Hunter playing well.
To my credit, I was admittedly pointing out something mildly self-evident, but the numbers I used to back it up were weak:
In games in which Hunter’s offensive rating, on KenPom, is at or above 100 (average), the Cyclones are 10-1, and 4-1 against teams around and above the NIT level (basically, as good as Memphis or better). When Hunter’s below that mark, the Cyclones are just 6-4, and 3-4 against competitive opponents.
Wins and losses, more or less independent of the quality of the opponent, aren’t the best way to measure Tyrese Hunter’s offensive impact. I knew that. I published it anyway. Mea culpa.
What I was really trying to get after was that Iowa State’s offense, I perceived, was more dependent on Tyrese Hunter playing well than it was on Izaiah Brockington playing well. This is a little twisted—Brockington’s got the higher usage rate, Brockington takes more shots, Brockington should be more important to the offense. But he’s not. Or at least, he isn’t in the way I tried measuring it today, after a night of sleeping on the matter.
Today, I went through the KenPom box scores for each of Iowa State’s 22 games to date and plotted each rotation player’s offensive rating against the team’s points per possession. Since offensive rating is independent of opponent quality, it isn’t necessary to lump the two together (we’ll demonstrate this more fully below). Here are a few of the plots:
The plots themselves don’t immediately illustrate too much. Each of these players’ good games on offense (right side of the plot) correlate with Iowa State’s good games on offense (top of the plot). There are exceptions—Brockington had a rough night against Grambling State—but generally, as you’d expect, the offense performs better when everyone plays better, and everyone plays better when the offense performs better.
There’s something beneath these, though, and this is what I was talking about yesterday with Hunter. Perhaps I only see it because I’m looking for it (don’t worry, we’ll back it up with numbers in a moment), but doesn’t Hunter’s graph look tighter than Brockington’s? Each has a high usage rate, which means individual game samples are high, which means the variation between games is lower than that of Conditt, whose chart is spread all the heck all over the place. But in terms of the correlation—the degree to which Hunter or Brockington having a good game indicates the team has a good game—Hunter’s is tighter. Measurably tighter. Here are the correlation coefficients between each player’s offensive rating and the team’s points per possession:
| Enaruna | 0.69 |
| Hunter | 0.65 |
| Conditt | 0.49 |
| Kunc | 0.43 |
| Grill | 0.41 |
| Brockington | 0.34 |
| Jackson | 0.30 |
| Kalscheur | 0.07 |
| Jones | -0.06 |
Yes, this would indicate that Tristan Enaruna is as important to Iowa State’s offense as Tyrese Hunter. Actually, a little more important. Maybe he is! Or maybe correlation doesn’t, in this case, imply causation. Or maybe—just maybe—in some cases it implies causation, and in some cases it implies reverse causation. In other words:
The idea behind Iowa State’s offense being dependent on Tyrese Hunter doesn’t just say Hunter makes the offense better, full stop. It means Hunter makes those around him better, therefore making the offense better. As the team’s primary distributor, Hunter playing well is less reliant on his shooting, relatively speaking, than it is on his passing and ball protection. When Hunter plays well, the Cyclones play well, and that ends with Enaruna making baskets. In other words, Hunter drives the offense drives Enaruna, making Hunter’s high correlation coefficient, by our hypothesis, a product of his impact on the offense, and Enaruna’s high correlation coefficient, by that same hypothesis, a product of the offense running well.
Let’s look at the smaller sample of just Big 12 games, to really hammer this home:
| Hunter | 0.94 |
| Enaruna | 0.67 |
| Conditt | 0.60 |
| Brockington | 0.49 |
| Jones | 0.41 |
| Jackson | 0.40 |
| Kunc | 0.31 |
| Grill | 0.28 |
| Kalscheur | 0.22 |
Again, Enaruna’s high, but this is where the case for Hunter gets numerically convincing. That correlation coefficient’s close to 1. The sample size is only nine games, but that’s a high correlation coefficient.
It’s an imperfect exercise, based on a small sample and of methodology that could require more intellectual scrubbing (I think this is an indicative measurement, but I don’t know that). But it backs up, again, something mildly self-evident. Iowa State’s offensive success is reliant on Tyrese Hunter playing well. He, more than anyone else, is the Cyclones’ barometer. He’s also likely determining the weather.
