This year could have been an all-timer. Instead, the injury bug bit hard and scuttled the whole thing.
What do you think Zach Freemantle is worth during a basketball game? Not in terms of his ORtg or a PPG/RPG/APG game line, but what effect does he actually have on the final score? What about Jerome Hunter? Not the value of every three he passes up to choose a shot he can actually make instead, but the impact of having him healthy and on the floor?
Put another way, if you assume you need 80 minutes at the 4/5 positions, what do you get out of taking the 66 minutes per game distributed among Abou Ousmane, Gytis Nemeiksa, Sasa Ciani, and Lazar Djokovic and giving them to Frosty and Jerome instead? What knock-on benefits do you see from giving backup minutes to those four guys, pushing Dailyn Swain to the three more, and using Des to spell Dayvion and Quincy a bit instead of riding the three of them for just a hair shy of 100 combined minutes each time out?
I know basketball is too intertwined a system to parse this out in any statistically rigorous way, but that doesn’t keep us from executing it as a thought experiment. And, for the sake of this experiment, let’s say that each of the missing men is worth at least one basket on each end per game.
Just for grins and giggs, I’ll explore that a little bit. I think it’s exceedingly evident how Zach Freemantle is worth at least one bucket. He was averaging 15.1 PPG when he went down last year on an EFG% of 61.5%, which would have put him in the top 50 nationally if he had played enough games to qualify. Dude gets buckets.
I know Freemantle’s not known as a defensive stopper, but one thing he does is seal up the glass extremely well. His DReb% last year was 25.3%, which was in the top 50 then and would be leading this year’s team by a staggering 7 percentage points. On a current Xavier squad that ranks 211th in the nation in DReb%, just the ability to kill a possession with defensive rebounding would be worth a bucket a game on that end for Zach.
Jerome Hunter is, in many ways, the exact opposite. Do I need to explain how subbing him in for, say, Sasa Ciani, takes a bucket off the board? I’m going to do it anyway. His defensive numbers don’t pop off the KenPom page, but – at 6’8”, 215 – he can defend from the perimeter to the paint and uses his remarkable strength and admirable lateral mobility to make life miserable for opposing players. He’d be a guard dog among traffic cones in this current front line.
He hasn’t always been deployed to exploit his offensive skill set in his time at Xavier, but he grew into his own last year. He was an animal on the offensive glass and shot 60% from the rim and 58% from the mid-range. All this came together for an ORtg of 119 flat; no big man on Xavier this year is within 10 points of him.
So take one bucket off the board for the opponent and add one for Xavier for each of these guys. That is – assuming each of the buckets is just a two-pointer – an eight point swing per game in total.
Just in terms of outcomes, that is a stunning reversal for Xavier. It flips the results of nine games to this point in the season, giving X wins against Washington, Oakland, Houston, Delaware, Villanova (away), UConn (home), Creighton (away), Creighton (home), and Providence (home). Without trying to solve for how the vibes of the season change or how the additional sharing of the workload keeps some players more productive, the season goes from dead and buried to in the conversation for a one seed.
Xavier is currently 82nd in wins above bubble; with those close games flipped, they’d be 2nd. Not in the league or the city or the state; second in the country.
That is, of course, not how the world works. Instead of trying to scrape together our pennies for a potential Final Four trip, we’re listening to the barely restrained rage of the head coach who has tried every arrangement of deck chairs he can think of without getting the results he needs. Miller couldn’t recruit starter-level players with only reserve minutes to offer, and by the time it was clear two starters were going to be unavailable all season, only reserve-level players were left to use for starters’ minutes.
The season was lost to injury before it began. We’re banking on Sean Miller’s ability to use the portal and recruiting and (hopefully) the health of two veteran starters to build back better next season. In the meantime, it’s probably not particularly productive to speculate on what might have played out. Still, what a ride this could have been.