Clemson's Depth, Deconstructed

One thing everyone can agree on when it comes to tourney play: depth matters. Particularly in conference tournaments, and particularly when your team misses out on the first-round bye. I've heard many an announcer extol Clemson's virtuoso depth this season, and it got me thinking...how does Clemson stack up to the rest of the league in terms of depth?

In the chart below, I've plotted the number of regular players each ACC team has against their percentage of minutes played for the season (stats culled from Kenpom.com). I've set 10% minutes played as the cut-off in order to avoid including guys who see a lot of minutes in garbage time, so no Bobo or Narcisse.

Unfortunately, the chart is too jumbled to be very instructive. What we can see is that 9 of the 12 ACC teams run out between 10-12 players a game, Clemson is one of 3 teams that only plays 9. At first glance, this seems to put us at a considerable disadvantage. But one thing i realized as I constructed this chart is that depth can't be defined by just the number of players getting regular time, but also the minute distribution amongst the players getting on the court. In other words, if a team only plays 9 but all of them are on the floor 60% of the time, no single player is accumulating a lot of time. At the other extreme, if your team has 9 players, but 5 are playing 90% of the time, than your team really has no depth at all. I would call this a "virtual depth"--it doesn't show up in the raw player total but it can still keep your team from tiring as quick.

But how do we visualize this? One way is to plot a linear regression for each team depicted in the above chart; the slopes of these regression lines should allow for an extremely rough comparison of both "virtual depth" and raw player depth. The idea is the straighter the line, the better the minute distribution for the team. This can be thrown off by outliers, but to get a very general picture it should be reasonable.

(Colors for the trendlines match the chart above.) So what shows up in this chart? Well, among the teams with 9 players, Clemson looks like the best, with North Carolina clearly lagging behind. This was probably the most surprising observation--in terms of both minute balance and number of players, North Carolina doesn't have a lot of depth. Enough to give one pause before crowning them the 2009 NCAA champs? Also surprising: the team with the most depth in the ACC, both in terms of minute balance and number of players, looks to be NC State.

On balance, it looks like Clemson trails at least NC State, Duke, Miami, FSU, and Virginia--landing somewhere around average for the conference. Two things to keep in mind though: 1) I'm not considering balance of contribution, which is different from balance of minutes, and 2) this doesn't take into account team conditioning. I tend to think the latter isn't that important at this level of a play, any coach worth his contract in the ACC is going to get his team in top condition. The first point, however, is really important. A team can further mask depth deficiencies by distributing contribution (whether it be offense of defense) across as many players as possible. If your team has one or two guys that provide all of the scoring, then it doesn't matter how much other players get in the game, when they get tired the team is going to struggle. This would seem to be a point in Clemson's favor, as they appear to have more offensive balance relative to other ACC teams.