Mark Your Calendar
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, July 15, 2004
Wake Forest meets New Mexico on December 22nd. This game won't make any of the pre-season must-see lists but it should.
For one thing, most of the marquee games end up on neutral courts. This game will be at The Pit and almost surely will be a sell-out.
Wake will get first place votes in the preseason polls, while the Lobos probably won't get any votes. But the gap between the two is not as much as it seems. Last year, Wake - at home - failed to put away UNM in winning 70-61. This was a year in which New Mexico didn't win a single game away from Albuquerque.
New Mexico should improve a lot on their 14-14 record from last season. The teams that finished ahead of them in the Mountain West have either changed coaches or lost a top 10 NBA draft pick. The Lobos return…
The Miserable Life of a Basketball Stathead
by Ken Pomeroy on Wednesday, July 7, 2004
(This post is the continuation of previous posts, here and here.)
It's tough doing statistical analysis of hoops.
In baseball, the sum of the parts equals the whole.
In football, offense and defense are easily separated.
In basketball neither is true, which makes life for a stathead difficult. Especially with respect to my recent rant about how college basketball has seen an offensive decline in offense that is comparable to the mid 1950s. Because while I've claimed that defense is dominating the offense like never before, it's really due to the fact that the wrong kind of defense is prevailing, the passive kind.
The zone defense has come back in college hoops, just like it did in the early 80s - the last time that scoring nosedived. I don't really know this for a fact. But think about it, increased use of a zone is consistent with recent…