I have never felt that it was possible to illustrate how well we were doing offensively based on the number of points we scored. The tempo of the game could limit us to fifty points yet we could be playing great offense. In some games we might score eighty-five points and yet be playing poorly from an offensive viewpoint. This would occur, for example, in a "run-and-gun" game.

From a defensive point of view, one of my pet peeves is to hear a team referred to as the "defensive champion" strictly on the basis of giving up the fewest points per game over a season. Generally, a low-scoring game is attributable to a ball-control offense rather than sound, successful defense.

To more adequately judge the effectiveness of our offense and defense, we devised a statistical evaluation system while I was an assistant to Bob Spear at the Air Force Academy in 1955. We called it possession evaluation.

Possession evaluation is determined by the average number of points scored for each possession of the ball by a team during the game.

[snip]

I often have heard coaches comment after a game that their teams out-rebounded the opponent by "X" number of rebounds. These coaches read the statistics and merely counted the number of rebounds per team. From our point of view, the total number of rebounds is not an accurate basis of determining a team's rebounding prowess in a game and I pay no attention to it.