A tribute to Quincy Roberts
01.13.12
The player of the year race is not about which player is most valuable to his team. At least, not exactly. The evaluation includes a subjective component related to the quality of the player’s team. That’s why Grambling’s Quincy Roberts has no shot at getting any fame from his performance this season. I’ll try to do my small part to change that in the next few paragraphs, because there’s a strong case that there’s no player in the nation more valuable to his team.
First the backstory: Roberts was recruited to St. John’s by then-head coach Norm Roberts (no relation) and spent his freshman season (way back in 2009) being the sixth man on a team that limped into the CBI with a 16-17 record. Roberts’ stats screamed out transfer – the 6-5 wing posted an offensive rating of just 85 while using a mere 18% of the Red Storm’s possessions when he was on the floor. He wasn’t a great shooter, he couldn’t draw fouls and he committed too many turnovers while not denting the rebound or assist columns either. In short, Roberts was overmatched by the Big East level of play.
However, Roberts didn’t run from the situation. He redshirted the 2010 season after suffering an off-season concussion and then he stuck around through the coaching change the following spring, remaining on the Johnnies’ roster at the beginning of Steve Lavin’s first season. Under Lavin, Roberts was relegated to less playing time than the season before, prompting him to leave the program after taking all of eight field goal attempts.
His move was interesting to say the least, heading to Grambling, a team that is habitually inept during its annual pre-conference barnstorming tour to power conference schools. The story on his decision to leave is told here by James Phillips of the Harrisburg Patriot News. But basically, Roberts wanted to play at an HBCU and be in a smaller town. Even though there are better programs that fit that description, he chose Grambling to finish his eligibility.
This season for Grambling has been disappointing even by the Tigers’ standards and the team is chasing a new low for offensive futility at the D-I level. In non-conference play, Grambling made 30.3% of its two-point attempts. Consider that the average D-I team makes about 34% of its three-point attempts. Grambling’s 0-10 record during that stretch was accompanied by a luck rating of .000, meaning that 0-10 was absolutely and completely deserved. Their closest non-conference loss was a 28-point decision to Texas Tech. In eight of their ten losses, they scored 45 points or fewer.
Because Roberts transferred mid-season from St. John’s, he was not eligible to play in Grambling’s first eight games. Since he avoided the tougher defenses on the Tigers’ schedule, Grambling’s player stats summary looks comical. Roberts has an offensive rating of 98 to go with a usage of 36 (and a shot percentage of 41!), while none of his lesser-involved teammates has an offensive rating higher than 82. However, limiting the data to the six games in which Roberts has played indicates that he truly is substantially better than his fellow Tigers on the offensive end. That data is shown below.
2PM-A 3PM-A FTM-A Roberts 51-114 .447 11-31 .355 43-52 .827 Others 64-199 .322 10-49 .204 49-72 .681
Considering the easier slate of opponents over this time and that Roberts is attracting more of the defense’s attention, Grambling’s “others” are still a woeful offensive bunch. Since he became eligible, Roberts has taken 39% of the team’s threes, 42% of its free throws, and has still found the time to take 114 twos in his six games on the court and make a respectable 45% of them. Nobody could blame him if he became more selfish. Feel free to blow away Jimmer-type levels of shooting frequency, Mr. Roberts. I have your back.
Grambling has won two of its first four SWAC games, which is noteworthy because the team without Roberts had a reasonable chance of skating through the entire season without a W. Even with his presence, the Tigers are still last nationally in two-point percentage and second-to-last in three-point percentage.
The money quote from Roberts in the Patriot-News piece was “coming from the Big East, I’m going to kill this league.” He has made good on that promise and he’s doing it without any help. While Grambling is much better with his presence, it’s probably not good enough for the Tigers to finish in the top half of the SWAC.
So you aren’t going to see Grambling on TV, and in fact, I can’t even find a photo of Roberts in a Grambling uniform. He is an anonymous dude whom you will have to work hard to keep dibs on, but it’s worth doing so. When you’re the team’s most frequent shooter (by far) and you are much more accurate than your teammates in every shooting category, you are special. Or at least in a special situation.
A note on recent site updates
01.12.12
There have been some features added to the site over the past 2-3 weeks and I haven’t gone out of my way to publicize them. I think most subscribers have discovered them, but for those that haven’t, I’m providing a description of the improvements here.
InstaGamePrep – Now you can click on upcoming prediction on a team’s schedule (or the game time on future FanMatch pages) and you’ll get a page with the vital stats for each team. This will allow you to more easily identify unique matchups in any game. Surprised that Northwestern went almost 25 minutes before getting its first offensive rebound against Michigan last night? Well you shouldn’t have. And while you could have determined that from clicking on each team’s page, now you can see the data side-by-side. Use it before the game, or use it at a commercial break to get up to speed on a game you’ve just tuned in to.
Ranking progression – On each team’s schedule you can now see that team’s rank before each game it played this season. So the fact that Wisconsin was ranked first in early January will forever be recorded. You can also see Pitt’s amazing slide as well. Yes, they miss Travon Woodall, but it’s hard to see him being the difference between a top 25 team and whatever the Panthers are now.
Conference SOS – This was introduced last season, but it’s been put back on the conference pages with conference play heating up. It can be a useful mid-season tool in evaluating conference records/stats. Colorado is leading the Pac-12 at this moment, but they’ve played by far the easiest schedule in the conference to this point. Which means the rest of their schedule is going to be tougher than everyone else’s. And since they’re an average Pac-12 team to begin with, that probably means a correction is on the way.
Play-by-play theater: Revisiting consecutive fouls
01.10.12
Play-by-play theater is a feature (that I just started) where I use the comprehensive play-by-play archive from the past three seasons to hunt for extreme, and possibly silly, events that have occurred in a college basketball game. And who doesn’t like extreme, and possibly silly, events? I do! I mean, I don’t! I don’t not like extreme, and possibly silly, events!
On Saturday, “BigH1313” of twitter fame, wondered which game listed in Friday’s consecutive foul table featured ten consecutive fouls by the same team to start the game. The answer: Whoops! There actually wasn’t such a game.
Thanks to BigH1313, though, I was forced to recheck my work which determined that the logic used to produce Friday’s table was a bit off. It turns out the forces working against consecutive fouls being called on the same team are even stronger than shown last week. Here’s the corrected table which includes the 200+ additional play-by-plays from games over the weekend.
Probability of (x+1)th foul being called on Team A when first x fouls of game have been called on Team A
x n n(a) Chc(a) 1 13326 6158 46.2 2 6158 2683 43.6 3 2683 1057 39.4 4 1057 386 36.5 5 386 129 33.4 6 129 37 28.7 7 37 8 21.6 8 8 1 12.5 9 1 0 0.0
x: number of consecutive fouls called against Team A since beginning of game
n: total number of cases
n(a): number of cases where Team A was called for the next foul
Chc(a): percentage of cases where Team A was called for the next foul
Instead of there being a single game with the first ten fouls called against one team, there’s actually only one nine-foul game since the beginning of the 2009-10 season. That one-in-13,326 event took place on December 3, 2010 when UMBC committed the first nine fouls of a game at UConn before Donnell Beverley was whistled with 5:55 remaining in the half. The final foul count in the game was UMBC 17, UConn 12.
For reference, if you assumed a sequence of fouls was completely random, with either team having a 50% chance of getting the next call, you would have expected 52 cases of a nine-foul game in a sample of this size. You even would have expected one game with 15 consecutive fouls against the same team to start the game. Imagine the riot that would ensue in that case!
As I alluded to Friday, there are other forces at work here besides officials trying to avoid a full-blown riot. It figures that teams that have committed a string of fouls might try harder to avoid them on the following possessions and teams that aren’t committing fouls might get a little more frisky. It seems like that’s not enough to completely explain this effect, but I’m not sure how one would isolate the influence of pure officiating on the data. Anyone?