Feb. 15, 2012
By Adam Lucas
Thanks largely to Kendall Marshall, the 2011-12 Tar Heels have been one of the most assist-happy clubs in school history. Jeremy Jones has the numbers to prove it.
In addition to being a diehard Tar Heel, Jones is a member of the Smith Center stat crew. That puts him in a front-row seat--literally--to study some of the more subtle trends and nuances of the Carolina season. Not content just to crunch the numbers at home--and you should know that Marshall's assist figures are almost identical at home and on the road, which means he's not getting any home cooking at the Smith Center--Jones also studies the Tar Heel road games.
One of his latest creations is a chart with the complete breakdown of every assist handed out by the Tar Heels this season. Sure, you might know that Kendall Marshall handed out 16 assists at Maryland. But Jones knows who received those assists (Tyler Zeller received seven of them and John Henson caught five) and what kind of baskets they led to (14 led to two-point hoops, with two going to three-pointers).
He was kind enough to let us examine his research. Some trends:
Other than Marshall, who has been assisted on just 20 percent of his field goals--which you would expect since most of his scoring comes from driving the ball straight to the hoop--Harrison Barnes is by far the Tar Heel who is creating most of his own shots. Barnes has been assisted on just 39 percent of his field goals this season. The next-lowest assisted percentage among the rotation players belongs to Justin Watts at 50 percent.
Conversely, the other active Carolina shooting guards need Marshall to set them up. Reggie Bullock has been assisted on 76 percent of his field goals and P.J. Hairston has been assisted 84 percent of the time. Dexter Strickland, who was focusing much more on his penetration as a junior, was being assisted just 53 percent of the time before his season-ending knee injury.
Carolina's most frequent assist-to-scorer combination is--not surprisingly--Marshall to Henson, which has worked 63 times. The next-highest figure is Marshall to Zeller (60).
Duke and Virginia did a solid job of taking away the Marshall-to-Henson pass. Marshall picked up just three assists to the Tar Heel big man in those two games. He had five assists to Henson in the Maryland game alone.
Zeller and Henson each have a dozen assists to their fellow big man. As a testament to Carolina's preference for the outside-in style of play--and also perhaps to its recent struggle with the spot-up three-point shooting game--the Tar Heel post duo has just 16 assists on three-pointers all season.
Barnes's last nine field goals and twelve of his last 13 baskets are unassisted.
Although he's shown the ability to take the ball and drive it to the basket, the percentage of his hoops on which James Michael McAdoo has been assisted (63%) is not all that different from Zeller (66%) or Henson (69%).
The longest stretches without an assist against any one opponent this season were at Florida State (10 baskets without an assist) and last week against Duke (7 baskets without an assist).
Stilman White knows where to find Reggie Bullock. Five of White's 15 assists are to Bullock, including four that led to a three-pointer.
Bullock and Hairston, who appear to work well in tandem, do seem to have a connection. Bullock has six passes to Hairston for a three-pointer, just shy of the eight assists Marshall has made to Hairston for a trifecta. The four assists Bullock has received from Hairston trail only his five receptions each from White and Henson and 34 from Marshall.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of six books on Carolina basketball, including the official chronicle of the first 100 years of Tar Heel hoops, A Century of Excellence, which is available now. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter and Facebook.
