While the folks on the NCAA Committee on Infractions fiddle away, it behooves the University of Hawaii basketball team to make sure it finishes strong.

And not just in going to the basket, either.

Against the backdrop of the final three games of the regular season, beginning with tonight’s home finale, we are reminded that there is also the matter of the Rainbow Warriors putting some distance between themselves and recent deficiencies in the classroom.

In an academic update to the school’s Board of Regents on Thursday, there was re-stated concern about the shaky state of the men’s basketball team’s Academic Progress Rate, sometimes also referred to as the Academic Performance Rate.

“Generally our APRs are at, or slightly above or below, the average — except (men’s) basketball,” Jeff Portnoy, chairman of the Regents’ intercollegiate athletics committee, told the full board.

The most recent numbers, contained in an athletic department report this month, showed a single-year APR of 886 for 2015-16 and a 937 multi-year rate, both figures ranking at the bottom among 18 teams on campus and well below both conference and national Division I averages for men’s basketball.

Rainbow Wahine basketball, meanwhile, had a 981 single-year mark and 986 multi-year score. Five UH sports — women’s golf, men’s golf, men’s swimming, women’s tennis and water polo — registered perfect scores of 1,000 for 2015-16.

The APR is a key NCAA metric of progress toward a degree, student retention and eligibility and carries with it the possibility of postseason, scholarship and practice time sanctions for teams that are deemed underperformers. “The APR is viewed very critically by the NCAA in terms of whether teams can participate in postseason,” Portnoy said.

The NCAA calculates the APR by awarding each player who receives athletics-related financial aid one point for staying in school and one point for maintaining academic eligibility. A team’s total points are then divided by points possible and then multiplied by 1,000 to equal the team’s APR.

Players who go 0-for-2, meaning that they leave while ineligible, can do particular damage to a team’s APR, which is a major factor in UH’s struggles.

“Because of what’s been happening in the last year with transfers etc., (men’s basketball) is in a particularly, uh, interesting position,” Portnoy said.

Basically, they are in a position where they can afford little roster turnover, especially by players who haven’t measured up in the classroom.

The current minimum is 930 for a four-year rolling average — which the NCAA says equates to a 50 percent graduation rate — below which teams may face sanctions.

For the 2011-15 period, UH men’s basketball was last in the nine-member Big West Conference as well as 20 points below the national Division I average, according to a UH study.

In the case of men’s basketball it wasn’t just the turnover in players in the wake of the looming NCAA penalties that hit UH hard. It was that some who departed didn’t bother to finish up in the classroom after missing what a UH study said were 25 missed class days. More than one player reportedly didn’t set foot back in Manoa classrooms after the season ended. Taken together the combination resulted in the 886.

UH had some of its highest numbers, including a 1,000, in Bob Nash’s tenure as head coach. But by 2012 a UH internal report cited men’s basketball scores as “much lower than normal scores because of retention issues.”

That’s something the program needs to reverse.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.