Pace can tell us a lot about a team, but not whether it will win. Here’s why

There are few stats more tied to a basketball team's identity than pace. North Carolina would run a fast break up by 50; Virginia makes you wonder if your TV is paused. But can a team's pace tell us if they're going to be successful? Not even close.

We looked at the correlation between 30 college basketball statistics and win percentage. Pace was at the bottom of the barrel.

First, a refresher on the statistic itself: Pace is a measure of how many possessions a team will have during a standard 40-minute game. Last season, the average pace among all Division I teams was 69.7. 

With that out of the way, let’s clarify exactly how small of a relationship pace has to win percentage. The short version of how we did that: we compared a lot of basketball statistics and saw which matched best.

The longer version: we used correlation coefficients, which measure the relationship between two sets of variables, using a scale of -1 to +1, with -1 meaning a perfect inverse relationship (as one set of numbers rises, the other falls the exact amount), and +1 meaning a perfect 1:1 relationship (as one set of numbers rises, the other rises the exact amount).

A stat like offensive rating — which is a measure of how many points a team would score per 100 possessions — is obviously tied closely to success, and we see that in the correlation coefficient between ORtg and win percentage, which is 0.77. 

Pace comes in at 0.06. It’s almost impressive how insignificant that is. 

Only two statistics we looked at had less of a relationship to success: Turnover percentage (0.05) and 3-point attempt rate (0.02).

There’s a pretty reasonable explanation for this.

Before we get to it, let’s break down every team by its average pace for some context. It’s not a perfect estimate, as we aren’t calculating a team’s total pace over the past 18 years but rather averaging its pace each season. Still, it gives us a fairly accurate look. The full stats are only available since the 2010 season.

The slowest team in basketball shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Virginia, at 61.03 — an average of 6.47 fewer possessions per game than the typical Division I team. Right behind, at 61.32 is Wisconsin.

Now let’s look at defensive performance over the same time period with the points per game allowed by each team. 

1. Virginia: 56.95
2. Wisconsin: 59.88

The 20 slowest teams since 2010 have allowed an average of 63.9 points per game, as opposed to the Division I average of 69.7, and it makes sense. Fewer possessions equals fewer points.

But where Virginia and Wisconsin stray from the norm is on the opposite end of the court. While neither team is an offensive powerhouse, they both average more than 8.7 points per game more than their opponents. The margin for the rest of the 20 slowest teams is just 3.3, with four teams actually averaging fewer points per game than their opponents.

This disparity is apparent on the other end of the spectrum as well. Eight of the 20 fastest teams score fewer points than their opponents, and then you have BYU and North Carolina.

BYU (the eighth-fastest team in Division I) averages 10 points per game more than its opponents, while UNC (10th fastest) has a margin of 9.4.

The lesson is clear. Slowing a game down is only effective if you can hold your opponents and make the most of your limited opportunities. Speeding it up only helps if you can sustain firepower over long periods.

So no, Virginia’s pace isn’t what makes them such a dangerous team. It’s that they know how to use it.

Here’s a ranking of all Division I teams’ pace this decade: