UNC's Top 3 Scorers in Close Games vs Blow Outs

Carolina's top 3 most important offensive players are Justin Jackson, Joel Berry III, and Kennedy Meeks, as supported by KenPom's offensive rating, which measures "the number of points produced by a player per hundred total individual possessions" (originally created by Dean Oliver):

Player	ORtg
J Jackson	125
J Berry III	123
K Meeks	116

One perceived characteristic of these scorers is they seem to pad their stats in blowouts, but don't come through as often in close games. There has been some work done on quantifying "clutch", but this isn't what I'm trying to do here. I just want to determine if these three truly do shoot better or worse depending upon how close the game is.

Of course, this evokes a "chicken or the egg" problem: do we shoot more poorly in games that are close, or does our poor shooting lead to closer games? I first looked at two metrics split between wins and losses: offensive rating (as mentioned previously) and eFG, which gives more weight to 3-pointers:

	ORtg			eFG
Player	W	L	Diff	W	L	Diff
J Jackson	126	119	7	54.90%	57.84%	-2.94%
J Berry III	132	76	56	59.41%	31.92%	27.48%
K Meeks	119	111	7	52.79%	48.41%	4.38%

The biggest conclusion that jumps off the page here is something I wasn't even looking for: how important Berry is to whether we win or lose. He has been markedly worse in every loss except for Kentucky (which was 50/50 down to the end and could have gone either way). As Berry goes offensively, so does the win/loss column (we also struggled mightily in two games he missed, narrowly beating Davidson and Tennessee at home).

We only have 4 losses though, so how do things look on a more macro view over all of our games, based on the margin of victory (or defeat)? I bucked the average offensive ratings for each player based on the margin of victory:

This illustrates two things:

1. As shown before, Berry is significantly worse in our losses (bucket [-15 to -1])
2. Jackson's efficiency drops by a lot in close wins (bucket [0, 5])

Meeks is remarkably consistent across all games, and Berry is still above average (which is 104.1 this season) in all wins, even though there's some variability in his performance. This isolates Jackson, who has a large drop off in performance in close wins (a margin of victory between 0 and 5). 

This could be variance in the short run, but this picture suggests that Berry and Jackson's poor offensive performances are correlated with losses and close wins, respectively.