Number Crunching

In an article on scout.com, Greg Barnes has done more research than I'm willing to do, so I'll cannibalize his article. He breaks down 2 main correlations to Carolina's success over the past couple of seasons. To start with, an apparently obvious one: field goal percentage. Greg notes that Carolina is 61-1 over the past two seasons when shooting better than 40% from the field; an extremely modest number. Remember, of course, that correlation is not causation, but the logical conclusions from this include a.) Carolina's less than stellar defensive play isn't as much of a concern as we thought, and b.) Carolina really controls its own destiny. Benson has made the argument to me that Carolina's success is dependent on their own play, not the play of the opposing squad (more or less), and this certainly lends some creedence to that argument.
A second factor Greg notes, and even more correlationally significant than the first, is that Carolina is 47-0 when Wayne Ellington shoots 50%+ from the floor. Obviously, that doesn't mean that Wayne is beating teams on his own, but that his success opens up the offense. Roy Williams shrugged the statistic off. "“I would bet that we’re 117-0 when we score more points than the other team, too."
Frankly, I don't read too much into these type of statistics. They're interesting, but they don't really account for much; like your high school stats teacher said a thousand times, correlation is not causation. I think other metrics like Hollinger's PER are more interesting anyway. If you like these sorts of stats though, read Freakonomics.