Why John Henson Scares Me

EDIT: Hello, people from The Devil's Den. Aptly-titled! Just an FYI, I ran my NBA-style regression on these numbers (which I used to get extremely accurate numbers in the 2011 NBA finals) and Henson's "Roland Rating" here on offense honestly looks more like -1.5 than -17.5 when we adjust for randomness.

This is going to be a very short blog post. As a Tar Heel fan, John Henson scares the heck out of me.


Some of you who read this will scream out "PLUS MINUS IS FALLIBLE." And true, correlation does NOT imply causation. But this discrepancy appears to be very significant. Around 90% of Henson's on-court/off-court performance was tracked by StatSheet last season, and there are some interesting results.


The Heels seem to be about 3.2 points per 100 possessions better on defense with Henson on the floor.
Offense, on the other hand, is a very scary story, that I saw with my own eyes all season long:


(These are slightly estimated & rounded, based on UNC's average pace)

The Heels are nearly EIGHTEEN POINTS worse (per 100) on offense with Henson on the floor. Poor foul-shooting and over-shooting from inside the lane without passing to more efficient teammates are what appear to be the cause, just from watching.


Now, with this in mind, it might seem like the Heels would be worse with Henson (offensively) in every game, but that figure is more like 68% of the time. So this data at least suggests that there is maybe more to the picture than meets the eye.




I saw that Henson played miserably in his 11 minutes against William & Mary (who UNC ended up clobbering). So I removed unranked and non-ACC teams, and got the following:

So. Yeah. Any ideas?