This is a stat I've never fully understood. Not how it's calculated--I'm confident I have that down--but what makes some teams have a high level of assists for versus assists against.

I'm curious because when I've had very good teams (it's been a while) they've tended to rank very highly on this measure. But it seems to be more than just pure passing skill. Does it have to do with tempo? IQ? Style of offense/defense? Or something else I'm missing?

Three biggest factors would be tempo, team passing and low distribution for your PG. I really don't look at them though.

I generally do not like for my PG to have a lot of TO's, therefore, I generally have my PG's distribution set anywhere from 0 to 5. The result on most nights is I have a PG with 5 to 10 assists and between 1 and 3 TO's. Ironically, my other players tend to have more TO's (they make up for the difference).

While I have never check for any correlation, I generally feel that if I have more assists than TO's, my team is in position to win. Likewise, I want to create more TO's for my opponent.

Just my 2 cents.

Toonces

IMO PG distro has zero affect on TEAM's assist / to ratio, unless you want to include giving touches to lousy PG's, but if my PG merits distro, he gets it, have not seen any indication of any affect on assists / to ratio for the TEAM (distro does affect the individ pg's ratio)

Quote: Originally Posted By oldresorter on 10/21/2009
IMO PG distro has zero affect on TEAM's assist / to ratio, unless you want to include giving touches to lousy PG's, but if my PG merits distro, he gets it, have not seen any indication of any affect on assists / to ratio for the TEAM (distro does affect the individ pg's ratio)

I'm glad you posted this OR, because this is basically what drove my question. In the past season or two my teams' PGs had more distro than I had given them before, and I noticed that our assists for and assist ratios went up. It seemed counterintuitive to me, until I started thinking that with more scorers on the floor, there are more passes going around. Or something.

As for tempo, I'm not sure I quite grasp that either. Should an uptempo offense produce more assists, or fewer, than a slowdown? Granted, when you go uptempo you have more possessions, but when you slow things down there are more passes per possession.

Quote: Originally Posted By antonsirius on 10/21/2009Toonce

Don't be such a yahoo, siruis.

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So there's a vote for "no effect from tempo." Well, at least I know there wasn't anything obvious I was missing...

anytime I've looked at data the tempo has a direct effect on the TEAM assist % per basket. Slow tempo has historically produced a higher % of assists per basket than uptempo does.

an example:

Playing slowdown may result in 50 possessions per game. You may score 20 FG on those 50 possessions. And often you'll see something like 15 assists on those 20 baskets.
20/50 = scoring on 40% of possessions. 15/20 = assisting on 75% of baskets.

If playing uptempo you could see 75 possessions per game. If you score 30 baskets you're still scoring on 40% of your possessions. But in HD you generally don't see the same 75% of assists/baskets with uptempo. Very often you'll see close to the same 15 assists that were produced with 20 baskets running slowdown.



edit: I just looked at three of my teams from last season. While that's an extremely small sample, it pretty much falls in line with the studies I've done looking at hundreds of teams.

One played strictly uptempo: 492 ast / 960 fgm = 51%. 427 turnovers for ast/to of 1.15. A very senior laden team I would expect fewer turnovers with the better IQs.

Another played strictly slowdown: 358 ast / 468 fgm = 76%. 353 turnovers for an ast/to of 1.01.

A third team played a mix of slowdown and normal tempo: 411 ast / 608 fgm = 68%. 397 turnovers for an ast/to of 1.04.

That's 100% correct. Whoever says tempo has no effect on asst/to ratio has not been paying close attention. That said, I haven't seen any compelling evidence that tempo has any real impact on offensive efficiency (which of course is what matters, as opposed to ast/to ratio, which is just window dressing).

Tempo very much affects overall Asst/TO ratio. No doubt about it.

Dalter - I rarely go uptempo anymore because the little data I've looked at for my teams does show lower efficiency going uptempo even against bad teams -- even when I've had veteran teams with high stamina. Also, I see a sizeable impact on my teams' defensive performance (the other teams' off efficiency). I'm not sure if this is a stamina issue or if the increased turnovers lead to fastbreak points.

Both my turnovers and my turnover RATE increase going uptempo and turnover rate is the strongest driver of offensive efficiency based on the data I've looked at (outside of the obvious stuff like eFG%).

Of course, your mileage may vary. I need to start pulling together all the data on this stuff from both my teams - this was just from one team but formed really the basis for how I try to build/coach my teams.

Generally A/T ratio and assists in general are just poorly calculated, there aren't enough assists on the whole.

People are correct to say faster tempo="more" TO's though, for certain.

Also, motion offense seems(though it might just be me) to produce fewer TO's IMO, one reason I think it's so popular.