Last night, Barry Hinson gained worldwide fame with his postgame comments after a 73-65 loss at Murray State. In doing so, Hinson joined the ranks of Pat Knight and Mike Montgomery as recent users of an over-the-top negative motivational technique. Knight and Montgomery came off looking like heroes in many corners of the media for […]

A lot of times, people who aren’t numerically-inclined will ask me how advanced stats can help them. It’s tough to come up with a useful response because statistical analysis is as much of an art as it is a science. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some basic things that analytics can do. Separating 2-point percentage […]

With 23 seconds left in Tuesday’s Memphis-Xavier game, the Tigers’ Chris Crawford took an open three-pointer that would have given his team a two-point lead. He missed and Memphis went on to lose. The shot ended up being a referendum on the quality of Memphis’ 17-game winning streak. Had they won, this would have been […]

Sometime in the last week or two, and I seriously don’t remember when, I was watching a broadcast and it was mentioned that one of the participating teams tracks how well it shoots free throws in the last five minutes. I don’t think I heard an explanation of why they were doing it. It could […]

As people who have followed my twitter feed have figured out, I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the use of plus/minus data in college basketball analysis. I once produced something called an HD Box score which contained +/- data. It was a thrill to make the breakthrough to compute such data because after all, […]

You might be surprised to hear this, but I’m a big fan of the pre-season AP poll. There is no doubt poll participants have their biases in the pre-season. They may tend to over-estimate the importance of the previous postseason, especially when a team needed more than its fair share of luck to advance. But […]

Somewhere in the past week, this innocent blog post went viral. At least viral in the sphere of basketball blogs that still publish regularly in the offseason. The upshot is that coaches who bench players with foul trouble are only hurting themselves. It’s more geared towards the NBA, but the same principles discussed in the […]