I rely on stats for hashtag Analysis often, but sometimes they don’t tell the entire story.
Witness the gap between Rodney Chatman’s pedestrian stats and Vanderbilt’s 11-5 record in the games he played — compared to 8-12 without him. That’s particularly telling given that 10 of the 16 games that Chatman appeared in were against SEC teams, three more were in the NIT, and one was against BYU in Hawaii. Whatever it was, something about Chatman and his 98.3 Offensive Rating was actually making a significant difference.
Somehow, the explanation wasn’t defense: that’s not to say that Chatman was a bad defender (quite the opposite, in fact), but the alternatives to him (Tyrin Lawrence and Shane Dezonie) were mostly fine on that end of the floor.