A trip to Scobey, Montana
12.22.11
There are places in America where you can’t just go to a college basketball game on a whim. A trip must be planned, time off must be taken from work, and you need to get someone to watch the dog for a few days. No town has Scobey, Montana beaten in this regard. According to Google Maps, it’s a seven hour and 49 minute drive from Scobey to Max Worthington Arena in Bozeman. It takes seven hours and 58 minutes to make the trip to the Betty Englestad Sioux Center in Grand Forks.
Basically, it involves a lot of work to see Division I college basketball in person. Scobey is the farthest from D-I basketball of any town in the lower 48.
Few, if any, college hoops fans know what this degree of isolation is like. And I’m guessing that few, if any, residents of Scobey care about college hoops. That’s not to say that basketball isn’t important here. The Scobey Spartans won Montana’s Class C boys basketball title last title. (Technically, it was the Scobey/Opheim Spartans that won it, because like many rural Montana towns, nearby schools merge their sports programs in order have enough kids to form a team.) After going 22-1 last season, the Spartans are off to a 5-0 start in 2011 in their bid to advance to the state finals at Rimrock Auto Arena in Billings on the first weekend in March.
Unfortunately, the championship feat isn’t noted on the entrance in to town, or even at the school itself. Nor is Scobey’s unique geographical distinction relative to college basketball documented anywhere. Perhaps that is because Scobey is 13 miles south of the Canadian border and is not the type of place that anyone is going to encounter by accident. There is no tourist trade here. Everyone here knows what is happening with the Spartans and there is no need for a reminder.
If it’s like other rural towns in the state, then Class C ball is like college basketball to you and me. There are only seven players from Montana on a Division-I roster. Just one of these, Montana State reserve Blake Brumwell, who played for the Big Sandy Pioneers, is a product of a Class C school. Just as most starters at the D-I level know that these will be their hoops-playing glory days (going pro in something other sports, you know), so too do hoopsters and fans at Class C schools. You basically have a 1-in-500 chance of earning a Division-I scholarship if you’re a high school starter, and even less of a chance of seeing the floor regularly. (Brumwell has played 42 minutes so far this season.)
Seeing as how I happened to be in the area on unrelated business, I had to say I’d been to the place that few people could even imagine. And now I can. I did not have much time to spend there, but a 30-minute drive around town probably captured the essence of the place. It is dark and cold most of the winter and the snow covering the streets now isn’t going away until March. They also have a street name consisting of a combination of vowels that is not duplicated by any other street in the country.
So that’s it. Scobey, Montana. A simple place. A place where no college coach has ever been on a recruiting trip, but where the local media is nonetheless concerned about the boys basketball team’s “marksmanship on the uncontested 15-footer”.
The untrained eye: Baylor v. BYU
12.19.11
Baylor beat BYU 86-83 on Saturday in the game of the weekend as determined by FanMatch. I was there. Here is what I saw.
Perry Jones is good at playing basketball
The best thing about the game-watching experience was witnessing Perry Jones. Some games, he is more potential than production. In this game, he was productive as well, to the tune of a career-high 28 points. He made two three-pointers, his first long-range makes of the season, and he showed off some post moves in the second half. Jones still struggles in the rebounding department, and this was a factor in this game as well. In fact, it’s a pretty big issue for Baylor as a whole right now. Even playing a weak schedule, they haven’t rebounded well on either end of the floor.
The first 14 rebounds went to BYU
You watch enough games and you see some crazy things. When Baylor assistant A.D. for communications Heath Nielsen showed me the game stats after the second media timeout and pointed out that the Bears had zero rebounds, I chuckled. I mean, I’ve seen some spectacular gaffes by the scorer’s table, but that this one topped them all. Every single Baylor player had zeroes in the rebounding columns. However, I was assured it was real. Which left me wondering just how unusual this was.
Most consecutive rebounds to start a game since November 2009
15 12/20/10 UConn vs. Coppin State 14 12/17/12 BYU vs. Baylor 14 2/12/11 Marshall vs. East Carolina 12 2/10/11 Oral Roberts vs. UMKC 12 3/18/11 Duke vs. Hampton 12 12/04/12 Michigan State vs. Nebraska Omaha
We’re approaching 13,000 games in the play-by-play database, so this was a truly amazing occurrence, especially in a game that figured to be competitive. Statistical oddities aside, this highlights the rebounding issues that Baylor faces. For a team chasing an at-large bid, BYU is a below-average offensive rebounding team and yet they would grab 19 of their 40 reboundable misses in this game.
Like most shot-blocking teams, the Bears will give up more offensive boards than the typical team with their size. And since Baylor doesn’t have a lot of girth, they can get pushed around even when they aren’t attempting blocks anyway. Baylor does enough things well – even after BYU’s 21-37 performance on two-point shots, the Bears are still second nationally in two-point percentage allowed - that on most nights this won’t matter, and on other nights they’ll luck into good rebounding numbers. But when you’re breaking down where things can go wrong for the Bears this season, rebounding on both ends of the court is at the top of the list.
Pierre Jackson leads Baylor in usage
I was a little stunned when preparing for the game to learn that Baylor’s point guard tops the team in usage. True, Perry Jones has a comfortable lead in the percentage of shots taken while on the floor, and the difference between the two in terms of usage can be chalked up to turnovers. Still, for the first time I can remember, Jones was the obvious focal point of the offense in a competitive game. I don’t know if this will be the beginning of a trend, but it should be. If someone is going to make questionable decisions, you’d rather it be Perry Jones than Pierre Jackson. And because Jones is so good with the ball, he’d have to be a lot more involved to even get to the threshold of making questionable decisions.
Matt Carlino is no Jimmer, but he’s worth watching
The game featured the debut of point guard, and UCLA transfer, Matt Carlino. Unlike with Mike Moser, Ben Howland seemed slightly distressed when Carlino decided to leave Westwood last fall, which was odd because Carlino hadn’t cracked Howland’s rotation to that point. Carlino has been practicing against Jimmer Fredette for the better part of a year, and he’s inherited some of Fredette’s mannerisms. He already has the unconventional jump shot and the tendency to complain to the officials when the whistle goes against him.
Based on his first appearance in a BYU game, he’s an upgrade on a team that needs a playmaker. For those still thinking BYU is a clear 3rd in the WCC regular season race, that didn’t appear to be the case on Saturday. Once Carlino settles into the role, there’s enough here (especially when Stephen Rogers returns from knee surgery in a month) to match what Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s bring to the table.
A graph of substitution patterns
12.14.11
I have 828 play-by-plays from last season where the final margin was single-digits and for which the play-by-play has clean substitution data. “Clean” meaning that according to the play-by-play there were five players on the floor at all times. (This does not necessarily mean it’s accurate. There are probably some glitches as the curiously low figures immediately after halftime indicate.) Below is a graph of the average starters per team that were on the floor in those games, and the percentage of time that the entire starting five was on the floor.
There’s been a lot of research on lineup construction in baseball, but to my knowledge there isn’t much going on in terms of how to best deploy one’s players in basketball. It’s a given that your best players will start the game, and it makes sense to distribute a player’s time on the floor across the entire 40 minutes of the game. However, it seems like the enterprising underdog could use a predictable substitution pattern to its advantage. (I’m just saying it seems like it. I’m not exactly sure how.)
Almost every coach is giving their starters a rest sometime between the 8 and 13 minute mark of the first half, especially if that starter is a big man. And the starting lineup really doesn’t play much together. At any given time after the second media timeout of the first half, the starting lineup was on the floor in less than 10% of the cases examined, bottoming out at 4% at the 11 minute mark of the first half. You have Thad Matta to thank for those cases. (I kid.) Other than the first 5 minutes of the first half and the first four minute of the second half, the average team’s starting five is usually not on the floor.