The Importance of Sample Size: A Christian Braun Story

After a dominant victory over a highly-rated opponent, it's easy to get carried away. Strong performances are treated as the new expectation. There is a tendency to declare every flaw fixed (or at least well on the way to no longer being an issue) and every prior loss becomes a little more excusable.

I normally only half pay attention to these takes, partially to keep myself from getting my own hopes up too high. But when I started hearing about how Christian Braun and his offense was "fixed", I remembered that I had heard the exact same things after the Oklahoma game. So I did some digging.

The following graphs are all courtesy of Bart Torvik's player stats, and show game-by-game stats, moving averages (solid-blue lines) and 5-game averages (dashed line). I pulled all of them prior to Monday night's games to examine the idea that the Baylor game showed he was "fixed".

The main thing that jumps out to me is that despite the Baylor game being his best game in nearly every offensive category in the last 5, his averages pretty much all went down. This is directly due to the weighting on the Oklahoma game that is lost. It highlights the fact that the Oklahoma game really was a blip in the overall season trend of Braun's decreasing performance.

And that's why what happened in last night's Texas game was so important. Yes, he scored 13 points, some of which were super important, but it's hard to imagine that he improved on any of his averages in the above graphs. He didn't have a SINGLE rebound on then night, had 2 turnovers, and his defense didn't jump out in any way.

If Baylor really is the start of a change in his game, it needs to be a more sustained thing than just a good blip every 5 games. He needs to bounce back again, and soon. Maybe the rematch with Oklahoma will be the perfect time for it....

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