As I was preparing to write the full FSU preview post, I was flipping through some various stats in KenPom, where two things caught my eye.
The first was Sean Mosley's absurdly high shooting percentage rank. Plenty of people have noticed that Mosley has morphed into the second-best player on the team, but I hadn't seen it expressed statistically up to this point. I was utterly surprised to see Mosley's ranking for true shooting percentage, though: he's 25th overall and 9th among high-major players.
True shooting percentage doesn't really take into account shooting percentage at all, but is a good measure of overall offensive efficiency. The formula is points / (2 x (field goals attempted + .44 x free throws attempted); thus, it's sort of an overall shooting percentage. He's never really been called a great shooter before (have you seen his stroke from deep?) but he's never wasteful, and that gets him up to that ranking. I'll be intrigued to see how his extreme offensive efficiency holds up next year when he's the main option.
The other thing I noticed was Jordan Williams' rankings for rebounding percentage (the percentage of available rebounds a player grabs when he's on the floor). He's 55th in the nation in offensive rebounding percentage, 7th among freshmen, first among ACC freshmen, and 3rd in the ACC overall. He's about just as good defensively: 59th overall, 7th among freshmen, first among ACC freshmen, and 3rd in the ACC overall (different players above him in the two categories despite having the same ranks).
Yes, Williams is extremely effective in rebounding when he gets on the floor, one of the most efficient in the country already. He won't get enough credit for it in all likelihood, and I don't know if he would hold up for 30 minutes a game at this rate, but it's still great to know he already has the ability to dominate the glass. Slim down and get fitter, and he'll be a monster on the boards.
The downside to that isn't really a big problem so much as a humorous one: he's still yet to get an assist, all year, despite playing 281 minutes. Four players on Maryland don't have assists - David Pearman and Ersin Levent (the walkons), Steve Goins (has played like two minutes due to injury), and Williams, a starter who has logged the fifth most minutes on the team. Can you figure out which one doesn't fit?
No one in the ACC who has played close to Williams' minutes (281) has zero assists - the nearest player is former Maryland tease DeShawn Painter, who hasn't dished a dime in his 106 minutes.
If you are reminded of former Wizard Oleksiy Pecherov's near assist-less year last season, you aren't alone. It's not a big deal - he's a center, he's not exactly running the offense here - but I think it'd be nice to have an assist at this point, no? I wonder if he leads the country in the reverse assist percentage.
Oh, and if you're wondering, I will be tracking this periodically throughout the season. We have a shot at history here.