It began with a conversation over Morgan & York sandwiches about why Michigan is always behind the rest of the country in free throw rate. The question is how do players, and teams, consistently "draw" fouls. And it bothered me that the rhetorical answers sounded more like Stephen Bardo/Dan Dakich truthisms than scientific wisdom.
- To the aggressive go the spoils.
- Star players earn respect from the refs.
- You gotta be a man to play in the Big Ten
- Fouling that guy is smart because he's only a 60% free throw shooter
- That's the kind of call you get at home.
Except one. The simple answer is you earn whistles by going to the rim (and Michigan doesn't go to the rim). This turns out to be as true as it is obvious:
An r-squared of 0.35 says these things are connected, but it's clearly not the only thing going on. So I figured I'd do this: substitute an expected free throw rate based on % of shots at the rim, then look at other numbers and see if there are any patterns.
And where better to start than the Dakisms, each with a ring of truth:
- More off-balance defenders around you equals more opportunities for one to foul you.
- The nature of good rim players is they can contort themselves to turn attempted blocks into glancing contact
- The Big Ten does seem to officiate more loosely than other conferences (we notice this at tournament time every year)
- Hack-a-Shaq is a thing, though when you account for the value of a foul to count both against one of your player's five and in the bonus/double-bonus math, it's not quite the 0.60 PPP you think it is.
- Home court advantage is a proven thing, and was a wild runaway thing in the Big Ten through January (a span over which Michigan had the misfortune to play 6/9 conference games on the road).
Not to mention refs are a breed of fallible humans who have their own ideas of what for and when to blow a whistle, and are influenced more or less by yelly coaches, and grew up hating Michigan, and are committed to screwing us because of something Bo said about Jim Delany, and there's a great conspiracy…
Let's try math instead.
[After THE JUMP: Math.]
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