The cursed ball is no longer cursed

First-round offense and shooting were nearly as good as we've seen in the tournament

For the last two tournaments, one of the most important stories was the ball. Teams get to choose what ball is used in their home games and the NCAA used a ball in the tournament that nobody uses during the season. Last season, first-round scoring was nearly four points per game lower than the season-long average. Teams made just 30.9% of their 3-point attempts, the worst rate since at least 1997.

Anecdotally, coaches and players didn’t like the ball. All of the decline in scoring and shooting was blamed on the ball. Then, this season happened.

And, so far, everything is the opposite. As the action concluded Friday night, average first-round scoring, at 73.3 points per game, finished at the second-highest level since 1997.

Scoring was up this season, mainly due to the new charge rule which has effectively eliminated charge calls involving secondary defenders. But the tournament average has been fueled by excellent shooting as much as anything. After last year’s disaster, teams made 35.6% of their 3’s in the first-round this year, the fourth-best figure since 1997.

And as one would expect, there hasn’t been much talk about the ball. We can’t say there hasn’t been any talk about the ball, as Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd brought it up during his post-game comments after beating Long Beach State. He initially (and rightly) focused on the strangely tight nets at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center but pivoted to the ball issues.

"These are brand-new basketballs," [Lloyd] said. "And I know they'll probably throw, 'Well, the shooting percentages don't change.' There were more mishandles for both teams in our game yesterday. The basketball is brand-new, inflated a little different, different than what the guys are comfortable with every day.”

Far be it for me to contradict an elite ball-knower, but the shooting percentages really don’t change, and the turnovers aren’t really out of line with the regular season:

It’s hard to know why exactly the ball issues are suddenly cured. It could be that the NCAA has made the balls less slippery than they were the past two years, or it could be that the balls were fine all the time and any statistical changes were to due to random noise. People are usually a little overconfident establishing cause and effect. Maybe there really wasn’t a cause here, or at least, the ball-effect was quite small.

It could also be that the rest of the tournament becomes lower-scoring and the players just fooled the ball for a couple of days. But if so, they really fooled it. For the first-round, offensive rating was at its second-highest level since 1997.

So far, the quality of tournament basketball has been about as good as it’s ever been, even with a ball people couldn’t stop complaining at this time last year.