By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
There’s an old Magic Johnson quote about the value of passing the ball: “Passing makes two people happy. Scoring only makes one person happy”.
However, happiness is debatable when you don’t win or don’t have a great offense.
That ended up being the case in the FIBA World Cup, according to the advanced statistics released by FIBA.
According to those numbers, Spain averaged a tournament-high 212.4 passes (including only front-court, non-out-of-bounds passes) per game, but that translated just to the 11th-best offense (85.8) on a tie with New Zeland and an early exit from the tournament.
The eventual World Cup winners, Germany, with 134.3 passes per game were near the bottom of this list, and on the very bottom, the USA averaged only 114.1 passes per game, the lowest among all teams.
It’s a shocking number because Steve Kerr himself called his unit just before the start of the tournament “more of a passing team”, compared to the team of 2019 that “had many great individual scorers”.
And what’s even more shocking is that due to the scoring ability of players like Anthony Edwards and Austin Reaves the USA had the highest-scoring team at the World Cup, averaging 104.5 points. Those numbers, however, were not enough for a medal…
| Average passes per game | |
| Spain | 212.4 |
| Italy | 202 |
| Iran | 186.8 |
| Finland | 172.6 |
| Venezuela | 167.4 |
| Mexico | 162 |
| Dominican Republic | 162 |
| Latvia | 161.3 |
| Lebanon | 155.8 |
| Ivory Coast | 155.6 |
| Serbia | 155 |
| China | 154 |
| France | 150.4 |
| Angola | 150.4 |
| Greece | 150 |
| Lithuania | 143.5 |
| Brazil | 143.4 |
| Puerto Rico | 141.4 |
| Montenegro | 141.2 |
| Australia | 140.2 |
| New Zealand | 136 |
| Jordan | 135 |
| Slovenia | 134.6 |
| Georgia | 134.6 |
| Germany | 134.3 |
| Canada | 128.5 |
| Japan | 125 |
| Cape Verde | 124.4 |
| South Sudan | 123.4 |
| Egypt | 121.8 |
| Philippines | 118.4 |
| United States | 114.1 |
AutoStats data collected by Stats Perform