alright, so here it goes: if i imagine church with 40/40 bh/pass, he is slightly better - a couple tenths of a turnover at least, perhaps a half at most. before anyone rushes to show me a similar PPG / MPG big with 40bh/pass and more than 0.5 fewer TOs - let me stop you - it is irrelevant.
quick thought experiment for any reader - WHY is church's TO rate so high? there are, of course, a number of factors. in this case, several significant ones. follow up - of all the reasons church's TOs rate is so high - do you think his bh/pass is a majority or minority contributor to the total?
you can probably guess this by now - but if you said his bh/pass is the majority explanation, you'd be in the majority of coaches, but you'd also be wrong.
let's step back a second, and take a look at oklahoma state. they are a solid team, but definitely not a great one. they are playing a 31 SOS with about 1/3rd sims but a relatively solid slate of humans. again, not a great schedule (in terms of difficulty), but one roughly in line with their caliber of team.
let's look at their team bh/pass/iq wise. for their starters - pg is excellent. sg is excellent. SF is mediocre, very low iq with solid ratings. PF (church) - crap bh/pass. square - crap bh/pass. of their 5 starters, 3 are primary scorers - the pg, pf, and c.
now, numerous turnovers are 'team turnovers' that are going to be assigned to the team in a way that 'makes the stats look good'. these team turnovers are based on the collective ratings of the team and the opposing defense, the type of offense and defense, and all kinds of stuff. how are these turnovers normally distributed? primary, to the guards. however, due to the situation with this starting lineup, that is not the case.
on the starting line, normally, a lot of the TOs would be going to the 2 and 3 - but neither of them shoots much - so the game is looking for someone else to assign to. the PG is scoring a lot, so he'd be the likely suspect - but he also is 1) straight up elite for A+ title favorite teams, in terms of his TO prevention, and 2) he shoots a lot, which lowers assists and turnover stats (the game lowers assists for high scoring pgs, as TJ correctly pointed out a couple days ago in a similar thread - but to avoid insane assist:to ratios, they also lower TOs).
so, who does that leave? if the game is actively moving TOs away from the 1, 2, and 3 - who is left? the 4 and 5. the 4 and 5 also have bh/pass numbers so the team TOs are getting assigned to them an outsized rate, given the reality that the team TO generation *primarily*, from an offensive standpoint, turns on the bh/pass ratings from the 1-3.
meanwhile - if your theory is that these guys are taking a lot of TOs because they suck and this is hurting the team - i point to you to the 12 TOs per game given up by the cowboys (did i get that right? probably not - i first wrote 'hokies' before quickly realizing that was definitely wrong - but i'm gonna stick with the cowboys).
if these two bigs and their 4.1 TOs were really hurting the team, if having 2 high end scorers with garbage bh/pass at the 4-5 really hurt teams - then why is OK state putting up a very respectable 12 TOs per game?
the short answer is, they are not. so in summary:
1) turnovers, like so many stats, have a major part of their existence which comes from 'team' actions, in this case, team turnovers - and those turnovers are distributed in a way that the game feels is appropriate to make the stats look good. this isn't the ONLY consideration, but its a major one - and that makes individual stats like, well just about everything but scoring, significantly deviate from the players' actual contributions to the team turnovers, which are real. in turnovers, this effect is very significant. in other areas its more modest, like fouls drawn. thus - you simply *cannot* look at individual player stats in a vacuum - and doing so is one of the #1 causes of misconceptions by the coaching community at large.
2) ok st is doing really quite well on TOs, despite 2 of their main scorers being bigs with awful bh/pass. this demonstrates those bigs aren't really hurting the team as much as they just have a ton of TOs assigned to them.
3) the reason this specific case is particularly skewed is because the 1, 2, and 3 are all actively having TOs assigned away from them in favor of other players, while the 4 and 5 are having TOs assigned towards them. the reasons for this are higher scoring and elite bh/pass/iq at the 1, lower scoring and elite bh/pass/iq at the 2, very low scoring at the 3, and high scoring plus crap bh/pass at the 4 and 5.