Yearly Archives: 2016
Normally, when one team blocks a lot of shots and its opponent doesn’t block any, it leads to a large victory. The blocks themselves may only be a small contribution to the final margin. But the block dominance suggests that one team has a significant advantage in size and athleticism, and that advantage normally manifests itself in a […]
In anticipation of opening day, many people have offered up lists of the best players in college hoops. These are the lists I have found as of press time: CBSSports.com NBCSports.com SBNation The Big Lead (top 50) Well, I am offering my own list, but it is just a top five: the top five players that […]
There will be a lot of fun games before conference play begins. You know the ones: top ten teams playing top ten teams on national television. The best amateur players in the world testing themselves against each other thanks to a pile of TV cash. This piece is not about those games. It is about […]
Preseason ratings are up and the method to produce these is largely the same as used in previous seasons. However, this season I have added transfers and injured players with prior D-I experience to the mix. The construction here is surely more clumsy than Dan Hanner’s lineup-based approach, but at least it will better handle the […]
(For some words on the previous iteration of the ratings and what the columns on the ratings page mean, go here.) You may have noticed that the ratings pages look a little bit different than they used to. The Pyth column has been changed to AdjEM (adjusted efficiency margin) and likewise, strength of schedule and conference […]
I’ve produced a few graphs in my day and it’s always comforting when the lines are smooth, like the plot of playing time vs. minutes left in the game:
We’ve looked at how coaches define foul trouble and got an idea of how each active coach deviates from the norm. Now it’s time to find out how players define trouble. I’m going forward under the assumption that a player’s effectiveness is more impacted on the defensive end when he has foul trouble. With that as […]
Let’s take inventory on how every coach in college hoops handles foul trouble. To make this as simple as possible, for each head coach I’m going to determine how often a starter with two fouls is on the floor in the first half. As shown in the previous post in this series, there’s a lot […]
In order to have a mature discussion about foul trouble, we need to know what foul trouble is. I could define it myself, but there are really only two groups of people who should be making this determination: coaches and players. These two entities are not completely independent. If a coach treats a player like […]
This is the part of year where I have the time to laboriously explore a single topic at my own pace and you have the time to read about it. Welcome to the 2016 Summer Series. This off-season I will be digging into the issue of foul trouble. Many smart people (mostly non-coaches) believe that benching a […]