It all comes down to what leads to the most efficient offense, on a per possession basis. I agree that good transition offense is hard to beat in that regard. But depending on team makeup, a half court game could be more efficient for a number of reasons. Maybe, while turnovers still happen in a slower tempo playing style, they happen less. Maybe for a good rebounding team, allowing your players to get into position leads to more offensive boards. Maybe going further into rhe shot clock and making an extra pass or two leads to higher percentage looks. I don't have the stats but I bet if you looked at our efficiecy this season you'd see that efficiency go up tre further into the shot clock we go (probably with a dip at the end as we get into desperation heave territory). I bet you'd see the opposite for last season's team.
And I think Ayo v. Dee is a much worthier discussion. I lean Ayo but it's close.
Well thought-out points, though I don't necessarily agree. But as you've brought up before it's kind of academic until we get personnel straightened out, and also until we start making more stops. As long as we're letting the other team get set up and don't have a guard who can make teams pay for pressing us, we're going to be entering our offense with 18 seconds left on the shot clock. Which is related to this:
I understand everyone's desire to play fast. Fast is fun. I'm in the camp of we don't currently have the makeup of a fast paced team, that's JMO. But, just for fun I took a look at Kenpom to see what, if anything it would say about pace of play as an indicator of success.
Of the Top 50 teams in AdjT, only 12 are also in Kenpom's overall Top 100 teams. In fact, exactly half of the Top 50 in AdjT are ranked 200 or higher.
Interestingly, 3 of the 4 teams we struggled against are inside the Top 20 for AdjT. AZ (I'm actually fine with our performance in this game but it was still an L), Marquette, and UTRGV (won but it wasn't pretty).
I'd caution against a couple of things on those metrics. First, most teams have only played ten at this point so this year's data probably isn't the best to break down. But there's another issue with using Pomeroy's tempo numbers that's a bit problematic, which is that it has two inputs that are pretty different in terms of what a team can and can't control that wind up spitting out a single number. There's the average possession length on offense, which is typically heavily dependent on playing style. And then there's the average possession length on defense, which has modest influence from playing style but is also heavily dependent on the overall and defensive quality of the team. Roughly ten to fifteen percent of D-I teams get a bid from either the at-large pool or a high- or mid-high-major auto-bid each year. Last season, three of the top (i.e. shortest average length) 100 teams in defensive possession length were at-large selections (with Ohio maybe qualifying as the fourth, depending on how you feel about MACtion). On the other hand, 14 of the top 100 teams in offensive possession length got those bids.
My guess from all of this is that the defensive component of tempo is heavily dependent on the quality of each team, whereas the offensive component is pretty random, meaning that offensive style probably doesn't impact offensive performance that much one way or the other. (Or to put it a different way, everyone involved in this argument is somehow wrong.)
Just as an aside, Illinois has a weird profile this year -- we're basically right down the middle in tempo, but are among the slowest on offense and the fastest on defense. Part of it is related to sample size, and as you've noted we've played some really fast teams so far. But we've been ground to a halt by teams pressing us on offense, and have been really poor at preventing transition buckets off of turnovers on defense. None of that makes me feel really great about the way things are going, though maybe it should, since we've won a few games in spite of everything that's gone on.
