Play-by-Play Theater: Longest foul-free streak
02.16.12
In this edition of Play-by-Play Theater, we investigate how long a team can possibly go without committing a foul. Let’s face it, committing fouls can be fun. Just ask Texas Tech! As with eating candy, it’s quite difficult to go long periods without just hammering an opposing player trying to advance the basketball towards the basket.
Last Thursday, New Mexico State did not commit a foul between the 2:25 mark of the first half to the 6:24 mark of the second half, a span of 16:01. Tweeter @wothism thought that might be some sort of record.
Well, our tweeter mistakenly thought the foul-free stretch was longer than it was, but even had it been 18:48 it still would not have cracked the top ten in my play-by-play database.
There have been 16 cases of a team going at least 20 minutes without committing a foul in the 15,066 games for which I have data over the past three seasons. The record-setting occurrence took place on March 7, 2011. The site of this incredible feat of restraint was Webster Bank Arena in the title game of the Spark Energy MAAC Championship.
The combatants were the fourth-seeded Saint Peter’s Peacocks and the second-seeded Iona Gaels. Only, the Gaels spent a long time not engaging in combat. At 11:44 of the first half, Kyle Smith committed Iona’s third, and last, team foul of the first half. The Gaels kept it rolling after the break, not picking up their first foul of the second half until Rashon Dwight’s infraction with 8:02 left. In total, there was a whopping 23:42 of game time between whistles against Iona. Take a bow, Gaels. The bad part is that Iona was outscored 28-23 over that time and saw a four-point deficit grow to nine. They would ultimately get upset and fall 62-57. (PBP)
Coincidentally, Prairie View made a run at the record on Monday against Grambling, going from 9:04 in the first half to 6:16 in the second half between fouls. The Panthers committed just eight fouls in the entire contest enroute to the easy win over the nation’s worst offense. Definitely no need to send Grambling to the line.
Here are the five longest foul-free streaks over the past three seasons…
03/07/11 23:42 Iona vs. Saint Peter's 02/13/12 22:48 Prairie View vs. Grambling 12/17/10 22:09 Ohio State vs. Tennessee Martin 03/10/11 21:49 Penn State vs. Indiana 02/05/11 21:47 San Diego State vs. TCU
Murray State and variance
02.13.12
One thing that bugs me about sports coverage is the stories. Not all stories, mind you. If you’re not interested in 1000 words criticizing the coverage of Murray State’s loss to Tennessee State last Thursday, skip what remains here and spend a few moments reading one of the following stories about Butler. There’s this David Woods’ piece about the Bulldogs’ Crishawn Hopkins, and also Pete Thamel’s look at the day-to-day operations of the program. Both are excellent stories worth your time.
It’s the manufactured stories that attempt to explain the often-unexplainable variability in a team’s performance that I take issue with. Some team salvages its season by going on a late winning-streak and the origins of the streak are explained by a players-only meeting or the team captain stepping up and being a leader, or a renewed emphasis on defense, etc. When in reality, the causes of the change may have been more complicated that anyone could truly understand. (Naturally, this xkcd comic comes to mind.)
Murray State’s loss last week provided one of the clearest such examples of this method of analysis. The general assumption after the loss was that the Racers cracked under the pressure [(1), (2), (3)] of their unbeaten record. Even the coach said so! The thing is, Murray never reached a point during the season where they were better than a 50% proposition to go unbeaten in conference. You play enough games in which you are heavily favored, and you are going to lose eventually. Put more precisely, a team that plays ten games as a 90% favorite is expected to lose once during that span, and the Racers have played a lot of such games this season, including the game against Tennessee State.
The question I have is this: How do you know the difference between Murray losing because it had a bad day (or its opponent had a good day) and Murray cracking under some sort of pressure? It seems impossible to me. Regardless of whether the Racers were negatively impacted by the pressure, they were still expected to lose at some point, through some natural intersection of playing a game worse than normal and their opponent playing abnormally well.
I suppose we could make a list of the things that would manifest themselves in a team that was burdened by pressure. Perhaps there would be more missed or rushed shots than usual, poorer decision-making, poorer defense, and a lot of turnovers. How would a bad game, uninfluenced by the pressure of an undefeated run, look? It seems like the same factors are in play. I guess you could throw in bad breaks or questionable calls, too. (Which arguably happened.) In one case the team is playing worse than usual because the pressure is getting to them and in the other case the team is playing worse than usual because of some other factors, yet the indicators are identical. I think you are fooling yourself if you think you can distinguish between the two.
There’s lots of unexplained variance in a college basketball game. The Vegas line has long been proven to be the best predictor of outcomes, and while it has the reputation among some of being scarily accurate, the average error in the Vegas line is 8.4 points. And, with all due respect to other prognosticators out there, that’s the best we can do.
Keep in mind that 8.4 points of unpredictable variability is the combination of the variability of the two teams involved in a game. When Duke unexpectedly won at North Carolina last week, was it because Duke played better than usual and UNC played worse than usual, or was it because UNC played better than usual and Duke played much, much better than normal? Or was it because both teams played worse than usual, but UNC just really played badly? I think it’s nearly impossible to disentangle the two. If one team shoots poorer than expected, is it because their form was off or because the defense was better than usual? It is difficult to determine the answers to questions like this without some serious video breakdown.
Duke beating UNC by a point actually wasn’t too unlikely of an event, but where results deviate more significantly from expectation as the Murray/TSU game did, it’s more reasonable to assume that it’s due to a combination of the underdog playing better than normal and the favorite playing worse than normal. We could speculate on what caused the Racers to play poorly. Certainly pressure is on the table of possible causes, but given that they were expected to lose a game in the absence of this unique factor, it’s hardly obvious that it was the main contributor to the outcome.
One might say that Murray committed 18 turnovers, and that’s a sure sign of cracking under the pressure. Perhaps, but Murray also made 10 of its 23 three-point attempts – not exactly a giveaway of sweaty palms. I expect if the Racers had committed 3 turnovers but gone 2 for 23 the same conclusion would have been reached. In fact, I don’t think there was any way the Racers could have lost an OVC game without pressure being attributed as the main reason, despite the fact that teams routinely get upset due to reasons other than pressure.
This leads into another pet peeve associated with coverage of this game: the difference in the coverage of power conference schools and everyone else. Murray State has strengths and weaknesses and one of their biggest weaknesses is committing turnovers. The biggest disservice in attributing the loss solely to a psychological burden is that it ignores a serious flaw the Racers have.
If we were talking about Syracuse’s first loss in mid-February, undoubtedly there would be a deeper examination of what we could take from that loss from a basketball standpoint. With Murray State, we got a lot of feel-good talk about how the Racers are still capable of a March run. Maybe they are, but if they do win multiple games in the tournament, it will be because they overcame their persistent problem of not taking care of the basketball, which was a culprit in their downfall last week.
Maybe the strongest argument that pressure was the cause of Murray State’s first loss was the Andy Katz piece linked above in which head coach Steve Prohm admits as much. However, it’s always a leap of faith to take a coach at his word when talking on the record for a piece that will get national visibility. If you were running a team, would you rather have your players believe that it lost a game on account of its ability or that there was some external factor involved? I think the latter, especially considering the factor in question is now removed. Assuming pressure actually impacted the outcome, it’s gone now, and therefore the team will believe that it can play better. Thus, I will take Prohm’s quotes with a grain of salt. Believe everything a coach says, and you end up in a place believing Levon Kendall was headed to the NBA or that Tony Bennett prefers an uptempo style. Coaches have a strong incentive to tell journalists what they want their team (or future opponents) to hear.
Certainly pressure could have been a factor in Murray State’s first loss, but given that a loss was expected at some point this season, it’s nearly impossible to say how much of an impact it made, if any. What’s more certain is that like any team trying to get an at-large bid, Murray State has flaws, and those flaws were evident in their loss against Tennessee State.
Anthony Davis and his not foul-prone ways
02.10.12
A frustrating thing about relying on counting stats to assess a player’s value is that it’s impossible to count things that don’t happen. Yes, perhaps you can watch enough of a player to tell if he is good at not doing bad things, but realistically it is tough. How many people watch a player score a basket and say, “that was a really good job at not committing a turnover.” It doesn’t happen.
For this reason, John Wall was considered a viable player of the year candidate two years ago despite a prodigious turnover rate. Likewise, Kendall Marshall was anointed the best point guard in a America before the season despite a turnover problem. And of course both Wall and Marshall are great players, but it does seem like their tendency to commit turnovers went unnoticed.
In case you’ve been locked inside the Biodome lately, Kentucky’s Anthony Davis is very good at something – blocking shots. We all know this. What makes Davis truly unique is his ability to not do something - commit fouls. (BTW, Searching for Billy Edelin is already on the case.)
But Davis’s 2.6 fouls committed per 40 minutes played is just a number that by itself doesn’t mean much to me. It turns out that this number, when combined with his block rate, is rather spectacular. To give it some context, I went back at looked at past shot-blocking greats that went on to play in the NBA (or at least tried to) in order to see how Davis’s combination of block and foul rate stacks up.
Blk PF Min PF/40 Blk/40 Blk/PF Adonal Foyle - Jr. 180 60 1055 2.3 6.8 3.0 Anthony Davis - Fr. 120 50 772 2.6 6.2 2.4 Hasheem Thabeet - Jr. 152 90 1145 3.1 5.3 1.7 Jarvis Varnado - Sr. 170 88 1141 3.1 6.0 1.9 Dikembe Mutombo - Sr. 151 91 1090 3.3 5.5 1.7 Marcus Camby - Jr. 128 87 1011 3.4 5.1 1.5 David Robinson - Jr. 207 100 1187 3.4 7.0 2.1 Shaquille O'Neal - Jr. 157 86 959 3.6 6.5 1.8 Emeka Okafor - So. 155 98 1087 3.6 5.7 1.6 Hassan Whiteside - Fr. 182 82 889 3.7 8.2 2.2 Justin Williams - Sr. 163 93 900 4.1 7.2 1.8 Alonzo Mourning - Sr. 169 102 962 4.2 7.0 1.7 Theo Ratliff - Sr. 144 95 912 4.2 6.3 1.5 Shawn Bradley - Fr. 177 109 984 4.4 7.2 1.6
There’s only one mega-shot blocker with an NBA resume that has not committed at least three fouls per 40 minutes and that was Colgate’s Adonal Foyle, who was picking on non-scholarship Patriot League opponents in the late ‘90’s. Davis isn’t immune to foul trouble, obviously, but among shot-blockers he’s as foul-proof as one gets. The only games where his minutes were seriously limited due to fouls were against Old Dominion and Indiana. Those were two of the five games where he’s played fewer than 28 minutes. The other three were non-competitive contests. It also helps that Davis has committed just three charges this season, so he’s not going to pick up fouls on offense very often.
While I’m not sold on the idea of Kentucky’s defense being the best in the land, or even that the Wildcats are clearly the best team in the country, one thing is clear: A strategy to challenge Davis in the hope of getting him in foul trouble is likely going to end in rejection.