I recently learned of a conspiracy that claims Acie Law's home court assist numbers are padded. According the theorist, he was given assists when he was "no where near the play." I had never heard this before, so I decide to do a bit of investigating.

Before getting into a more formal analysis, a brief glance at the raw stats make it obvious both total assists, and average assists per game would be skewed by two home games, vs Grambling and vs Texas. In those two games, Acie racked up 14 and 15 assists, respectively. Each of those games are 5 to 6 over his next best performance, and almost 5 times his season average. Both of these games were high-scoring blowouts (Grambling 101-27, Texas 100-82) where Acie played at least 30 min. There is no reason to believe that Acie could not have had this many assists. Total assists would also be skewed by the fact that we played 10 more home games.

The formal analysis strategy I decided on was a comparison of assists credited against those opponents whom we played both as hosts and as visitors (other Big-12 south teams). Here is a graph of the results:

Again, the home Texas game is anomalous, so I will throw it out. In the remaining games, the gap between home assists and away assists is never more than 3, and is cumulatively 4 (+3 Baylor, 0 OU, -2 OSU, +3 TT). I find it hard to believe that 4 assists is the result of a coordinated effort to boost Acie's NBA-draft prospects.

I consider that myth busted.