Wednesday, October 10, 2007
BP is on line!
Basketball Prospectus is officially up. We should have daily Monday-through-Friday content right through the championship game on April 7th, so be sure to make it a daily stop. (And if you couldn’t figure it out, there will be no further posting here.)
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Moving On
As many of you noticed, I’m going to be writing somewhere else fairly soon. The good folks at Baseball Prospectus are diving into the college hoops game and generally looking to make all other college basketball coverage irrelevant, so how could I pass that up? It’s going to be a good fit for me and I’m really looking forward to it. Gradually over the next two months, the parts here will be moved over to BP. Other than the new domain, not much is going to change on my end. If anything, my work will be a little more organized and regular.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
What the heck is not going on here?
In an effort to keep my Ripken-eqsue streak of posting at least once a month intact, I thought I would stop by the old blog for an update. Despite the dust collecting around these parts, there is plenty of stuff going on behind the scenes.
John Gasaway and I will be rolling out a season preview sometime in October in a place on the internets that has yet to be determined. The details are still being worked out, but work is being done to provide some unique preparation for the upcoming season. There will be the team-by-team examinations like you are accustomed to from Gasaway with respect to the Big Ten and myself with respect to the Big XII, except we’ll be expanding them to more conferences and teams. Of course, there will be some other interesting content as well.
For instance, with the help of Jacob Wheatley-Schaller, I’ve collected about 2500 play-by-plays from last season. And with this, we can do all sorts of crazy things. Here’s the probability of the home team winning a college hoops game while facing a deficit of 8 points at various times during the game…
Time Left Win%
1st Half 15:00 46.5
10:00 42.0
5:00 33.5
Halftime 26.6
2nd Half 15:00 27.7
10:00 21.3
5:00 11.6
2:00 2.4
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I can’t give away the good stuff just yet. (Actually, I am still working on it.) Anyway, we’re closer to the start of next season than the end of last season. John and I plan to make that time pass a little faster in a few weeks.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
NST’s
If you read last season’s Big 12 preview, you know that there isn’t much relationship between steals and “non-steal turnovers”, or NST’s. Here’s how that relationship looked on the offensive end for the D-I universe during the 2007 season. At one extreme, Mercer had the ball stolen a lot last season (3rd most in the country), but otherwise didn’t give the ball away very often (6th best NST rate), while Binghamton provides the other extreme.
Monday, May 21, 2007
The Orange Effect
As part of the next generation of the Pomeroy Ratings, I’ll be removing the effect of opponents free throw shooting. In the grand scheme of things, this is a low-grade improvement and there are bigger fish to fry in improving the system. For most teams, opponents collectively shoot about what they should over the course of the season. But there are some teams that saw large deviations last season.
Here are the teams that saw opponents underachieve the most at the line last season:
Syracuse -37.9 Tennesse Martin -35.0 Boston U -28.9 Auburn -28.2 Canisius -24.3
What this means is that Syracuse’s opponents made 38 fewer free throws than we would have expected from their season-long percentages. That’s 38 points that Syracuse basically got through no effort of their own (unless they had a strategic plan to foul the opposing team’s worst shooters on a regular basis). Plugging and chugging into the Pythagorean Formula, we’d expect the Orange to benefit from this anomaly by about one win over their 35-game schedule. So again, ignoring those 38 points wouldn’t provide a huge adjustment to my ratings, but for accuracy’s sake, it’s something worth doing.
For completeness, here are the teams that were hurt the most by their opponents’ unusually good free throw shooting:
La Salle 33.8 Marshall 32.0 Montana St. 30.6 Pepperdine 28.9 Temple 26.8
Only a handful of teams were affected by opponents’ hot or cold free throw shooting in a meaningful way, but this is another tweak that should make the ratings marginally better in indicating a team’s true strength.
