Why Wasn't Cole Anthony the Savior for UNC?

    The 2019-2020 season was certainly one to forget for Tarheel fans. The team tied for last place in the ACC with a 6-14 conference record and 14-19 record overall. This was their worst season by far since 2001-2002. 

    However, it didn't always seem as though the season would turn out this way. Early on, the Tarheels picked up nice wins against Alabama and #11 Oregon in the Battle 4 Atlantis. Coming out of Thanksgiving break, they were sitting at 6-1 and tracking towards another dominant season with a nice postseason run. This promise seemingly disappeared with a blowout loss to #6 Ohio State in which the Tarheels shot 27.4% from the field and another poor offensive performance against an excellent Virginia defense. To make matters worse, leading scorer Cole Anthony suffered a knee injury before the next game against Wofford. The Tarheels proceeded to suffer an embarrassing home defeat to the Terriers and it appeared like they desperately needed Anthony back. There seemed to be a popular narrative that if the team could just tread water until Anthony came back, they could make a late-season NCAA Tournament push. Yet, when he finally returned to the court on February 1st, the team still struggled. Why wasn't he the savior that he was expected to be?

    The most basic place to start looking is at points.

    In this graph as with all following graphs, the light blue line represents North Carolina's entire team statistics, the black line is the team average, and the red line represents Anthony's solo statistics. Games 9 through 21 are specifically marked because game 9 is the last game that Anthony played in before his injury and game 21 is the first game he played in after recovering. As we can see, when healthy, Anthony played a large role in the Tarheel's scoring with above or near 25 points on several occasions. However, we also see that as a team, North Carolina's scoring didn't take a dramatic hit when Anthony was out. There was just as much scoring volatility as when Anthony played, and they scored over their season average of 72.2 points per game on several occasions. If Anthony was as crucial to this team as many made him out to be, we would expect a lot more below average scoring performances from the team. Late in the season and well after his return from injury, the Tarheels had several consecutive games where they scored above their average. However, Anthony was relatively consistent in his point totals after he came back and wasn't the sole cause for the team's scoring boost.

    While scoring wasn't affected too much by Anthony's absence, we'll next look at its impact on the team's shooting efficiency by analyzing effective field goal percentage over time. Effective field goal percentage gives an added value to three point shots because they give a team more points than a two-point field goal if made.

    Effective field goal percentage is something that the Tarheels struggled with as they finished the season shooting 46.4%, good for below 300th in the country. Anthony himself was slightly below this team average at 45.1%. We see in the graph that he had early season volatility followed by some struggles immediately after his return. Yet, he certainly flashed promise shooting well over 50% for a several game span towards the end of the season. This hot streak also coincided with 3 of North Carolina's 6 conference wins and the uptick in the team's total points scored. While he was out, his team remained right around their average with the exception of a great performance against Miami (more on that later). Since Anthony's cumulative EFG% was so close to the team's, his absence neither helped nor hindered the team's shooting efficiency for the most part. However, his enhanced efficiency for the stretch towards the end of the season certainly helped in his team being able to get a few conference wins.

   So far, it seems as though the team scored at roughly the same volume and efficiency level with and without Anthony. Did the way they scored change at all during this period without him? First, lets look at the volume of three-pointers taken.

    It seems like the Tarheels tried to compensate for Anthony being out by shooting slightly more three-pointers than their average until right before and through Anthony's return. This didn't pay dividends as Brandon Robinson at 36.9% and Christian Keeling at 32% were the only other players with decent three point volumes shooting over 30%. 

    While three-pointers were definitely up a little, I expected a more profound impact to be found on team assists. This is because Anthony is certainly a scoring guard and without their alpha, I thought the Tarheels would've shared the ball more with a balanced scoring load.

    This didn't happen as dramatically as I would've thought. Yes, the team was above their season average for many of the games without Anthony (especially the aforementioned Miami game where the team played very well and got a rare win). However, we see high assist totals later on the season with Anthony back, so there isn't much of an indication that the team completely reworked the offense with him out.

    One more non-graph area to look into is adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency. These metrics measure how many points a team scores per 100 offensive possessions and gives up per 100 defensive possessions. I used Bart Torvik's website for this, and the values were adjusted for opponent quality in these same metrics. North Carolina's adjusted defensive efficiency was 98.3 over the whole season and 98.5 when Anthony was out. Hardly significant. There was a bit more disparity when it came to offensive efficiency with the season-long statistic being 108.2 which then dropped to 106.3 with Anthony injured. However, a 1.9 decrease over a small 9 game sample could very well be attributed to random variation as opposed to the loss of Anthony. Yet again, there was not a completely dramatic drop as may have been expected.

    Ultimately, the reason Anthony wasn't able to come in and rescue his struggling team is because it appears as though the team didn't play that much differently with or without him. They scored about the same number of points and with roughly the same shooting efficiency. If he truly was to be North Carolina's savior, they would've seen a much more precipitous drop in scoring and efficiency than they actually did. It seems as though they were able to break up his scoring volume across several players who cumulatively had about the same efficiency as Anthony. Thus, when he came back and resumed his role as the scoring leader, it resulted in basically the same production just now from one player as opposed to several. 

    Anthony's return wasn't entirely full of disappointment as he did have a hot streak towards the end of the season where he maintained his high scoring volume but did so at a tremendously high shooting efficiency rate. This definitely contributed to his team picking up a couple of wins, and undeniably provided value. However, his efficiency struggles immediately after returning and in the final few games averaged in with the hot streak and resulted in him not being as efficient overall after his return as was needed. He didn't need to shoot quite as efficiently as during the hot streak, but he needed closer to the 50% mark each game if he were to truly put the team on his back like some expected. Of course, this is an extremely tough ask of any player, much less a freshman scoring guard.

    Lastly, the offense surely underwent some minor tweaks to compensate for the absence of Anthony. Yet, from a broad overview, there wasn't much change as the Tarheels only shot marginally more three-pointers and didn't see a huge uptick in assists. Thus, it was impossible for Anthony to come in and be the hero that many expected him to be when his presence didn't consistently change the team from a statistical perspective.