As the saying goes, numbers don’t lie. In a disappointing season where the Wildcats won only five Big Ten games, the stats told the losing story. Read the piece by @sutro_sports.

Northwestern went 15-19 (5-15 in Big Ten) this season, totaling the most losses since its lowly 8-23 season in 2020. Here are three statistics that defined the ’Cats’ season:

No individual defensive talent

EvanMiya.com — one of the best college basketball statistical platforms — has a statistic called Bayesian player rating (BPR), an advanced metric that estimates how much a player impacts their team’s performance. Though Evan Miyakawa does not publish the exact formula for how he calculates BPR, he has explained the general Bayesian methodology: every player starts with a box-score-based estimate of ability, with play-by-play-adjusted plus-minus data, using a Bayesian regression framework. As more data is collected, the model places greater weight on observed on-court impact, evaluating a player’s performance in the context of the nine other players on the floor during each possession.

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A sub-section of EvanMiya.com’s BPR is DBPR, a player’s defensive Bayesian player rating. Per the site, “DBPR is interpreted as the number of defensive points per 100 possessions better than (below) D1 average expected to be allowed by the player’s team if the player were on the court with 9 other average players.”

In simple terms, it estimates how many fewer (or more) points the other team would score per 100 possessions because of that player.

This year, EvanMiya.com’s DBPR statistic really illuminated how outclassed Northwestern was on the defensive end this season. Northwestern’s best defensive player, per EvanMiya.com’s DBPR, was Arrinten Page, who had a rating of 2.02. Page’s DBPR was the lowest of all Northwestern DBPR single-season leaders since the 2019-20 season — the last time Northwestern lost more than 15 games in Big Ten play. Furthermore, Page’s 2.02 DBPR ranked 292nd in all of college basketball and 44th in the Big Ten. Michigan, the country’s best team, rostered SIX players with higher DBPRs than Northwestern’s best defender.