The Lucky Ones
08.11.04
Just like with my post on the unlucky teams, I'm going to start this post on the lucky teams with a look at what happened two years ago. The following are the ten luckiest teams - as measured by wins over expected - from 2003 with their actual 2003 conference record in parenthesis.
1 Niagara +2.5 (12- 6) 2 Mercer +2.5 (14- 2) 3 Prairie View A&M +2.4 (14- 4) 4 Southern Illinois +2.4 (16- 2) 5 Wake Forest +2.3 (13- 3) 6 Wyoming +2.3 ( 8- 6) 7 Weber St. +2.2 (14- 0) 8 Massachusetts +2.1 ( 5-10) 9 William & Mary +2.1 ( 7-11) 10 Wichita St. +2.1 (12- 6)
In 2004 the teams above lost an average of 3.5 more conference games than in 2003. This shows much more of a decline than the unlucky teams showed improvement.
Here's the top 10, plus some other notables from 2004:
1 Toledo +3.2 (12- 6) 2 Stetson +3.1 (10-10) 3 Southern Illinois +3.0 (17- 1) 4 Prairie View A&M +2.8 ( 7-11) 5 Wisconsin Green Bay +2.7 (11- 5) 6 East Tennessee St. +2.7 (16- 1) 7 Virginia Tech +2.5 ( 7- 9) 8 Chicago St. +2.5 ( 9- 7) 9 Austin Peay +2.4 (16- 0) 10 Alcorn St. +2.3 ( 9- 9) 13 Pacific +2.2 (17- 1) 14 Stanford +2.1 (17- 1) 15 Syracuse +2.1 (11- 5) 16 Princeton +2.0 (13- 1) 22 Tennessee +1.9 ( 7- 9) 25 Virginia +1.8 ( 6-10)
Stanford and Virginia were beneficiaries of the most high-profile last-second heroics last year, so it's comforting to see them show up fairly high on the list.
Syracuse is the team I want to focus on. They'll likely be a preseason top 10 team and it's hard not to buy into the hype with Hakim Warrick and Gerry McNamara among the best in the nation at their positions. Then there's the expected return of point guard Billy Edelin who missed a good chunk of last year with personal problems.
So yeah, there's reason for optimism in Orangeland. But there's also reason to believe that the opinions of last year's Syracuse team are inflated. Even their sweet 16 run was built on a couple of games that were decided in the final minute, including a win over an overseeded Maryland in the second round.
Sure, the 'Cuse will be better this year. But if they prove to be a top 5 team, it would be a better coaching job by Jim Boeheim that the national championship run of two years ago.
The Unlucky Ones
08.06.04
Before I get to the teams that were the most unlucky last year, I should show if this method is effective or not. Below are the top 10 teams from 2003 who ended up with a worse conference record than they deserved as measured by wins below expected, using the Pythagorean formula mentioned in my previous post. For each team, wins below expected and 2003 conference record are given.
1 Pacific -3.1 ( 7-11) 2 Howard -2.9 ( 9- 9) 3 Canisius -2.6 ( 6-12) 4 NC Greensboro -2.6 ( 3-13) 5 Arizona St. -2.5 (11- 7) 6 Toledo -2.4 ( 7-11) 7 Kansas St. -2.3 ( 4-12) 8 Detroit -2.3 ( 9- 7) 9 Alabama A&M -2.3 ( 4-14) 10 American -2.2 ( 9- 5)
In 2004, these teams improved their conference record by an average of 1.5 wins. So a little less than this method would predict. Seven of the ten teams improved, while three got worse. Pacific and Toledo showed the greatest improvement with a 10 and 5 win increase respectively. They are also the only teams on the list that returned as many as 4 starters.
So one should put the numbers in context. If the team is being gutted the following season, the data for them is not very useful.
Without further ado, here are the top 10 teams (and a few other notables) from 2004.
1 Florida Atlantic -4.5 ( 6-14) 2 Holy Cross -4.0 ( 7- 7) 3 Louisville -3.8 ( 9- 7) 4 Texas A&M -3.0 ( 0-16) 5 Appalachian St. -2.9 ( 4-12) 6 Cleveland St. -2.8 ( 0-16) 7 Arizona -2.6 (11- 7) 8 Southeast Missouri St. -2.6 ( 4-12) 9 Quinnipiac -2.6 ( 5-13) 10 MD Baltimore County -2.5 ( 4-14) 12 Nebraska -2.5 ( 6-10) 15 Kansas St. -2.0 ( 6-10) 16 St. Mary's -1.9 ( 9- 5) 19 Cal Santa Barbara -1.9 (10- 8) 21 Pennsylvania -1.9 (10- 4) 23 Florida St. -1.8 ( 6-10)
Florida Atlantic actually outscored its opponents in conference but finished with a 6-14 record. All of their wins were by double digits, but they had a whopping 8 losses by 5 points or less including 3 overtime affairs, 2 of which were double overtime. But don't feel too sorry for the Owls, their campus is on a beach.
The next team of interest on the list is Louisville. Their bad luck was more in the form of injuries. When healthy they were beating up on CUSA foes. When injuries set in, they were losing close games. All but one of their nine conference wins were by double digits. All but one of their seven losses were by seven points or fewer. Their 9-7 record should have been more like 13-3. They're the kind of team that could be overlooked this year, except that they're Louisville, and they have Rick Pitino on the bench, so they are going to be the consensus favorite to win CUSA.
Arizona is another team that's not going to be overlooked with their recent tradition. And Katz has them at #7 and it's a good call. They have a ton of talent coming back, and while they were widely viewed as underachievers last year, they may have played a little better than most thought. The thing is, the Pac-10 was so bad, this doesn't tell us much.
Finally, Florida State was viewed as somewhat of a disappointment last year after having a great recruiting year. But even while losing Tim Pickett I would be shocked if they don't make it to the dance in '05.
Next up: the lucky teams from last year.
Meet My Friend Pythagoras
08.02.04
Andy Katz recently published his preseason top 50 for the upcoming season. He did a very thorough job and I think captured something close to what the preseason polls will have. Although I am a little puzzled as to why Gonzaga is ranked as low as 22. At any rate, it's time to start speculating on the upcoming season.
Part of doing that is accurately assessing how good a team was last year. Some opinions will be inflated and some deflated based on the distribution of luck. Can we quantify which teams were lucky and which teams were unlucky last year? We can take a shot at it. (Why do I keep saying we? I am sounding like Beano Cook here.)
Bill James can help us. He's a genius who unfortunately has applied his genius to Major League Baseball. He was the one who invented the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball, which looks like so:
Expected Winning Percentage = RunsScored^2 / (RunsScored^2+RunsAllowed^2)
This is similar to the more famous Pythagorean Theorem which is used to determine the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle. What one has to do with the other is anyone's guess. But there was also a time when chocolate and peanut butter were not thought to be a good match either.
I'm not going to get into why it works, because I am not exactly sure myself, but it works very well. The basic idea is that the more you outscore your opponents over the course of the season, the more games you should win.
This is one way to determine how lucky a team is. To buy into this, you have to believe that the outcome of close games is more due to luck than the outcome of blowouts is. It seems to be an obvious point, but there are those who still believe the Earth is flat also.
If a team wins a lot of close games and loses a few blowouts, their actual record would exceed their "Pythagorean record." They would be the beneficiary of luck, because you would not expect them to be dominant in close games especially given that they had a few lopsided losses. The opposite case would indicate a team is unlucky.
The formula's ability to predict a major league team's record is uncanny. It probably works well because baseball teams play a similar schedule. This isn't true in college hoops, but that problem can be minimized if we limit the formula to conference games. Then we can determine how lucky a team was relative to its conference.
The formula has to be modified to apply to basketball - instead of squaring points scored and points allowed, they need to be raised to the 10th power. In doing that, the formula also has an uncanny ability to predict the conference record of a given college hoops team.
Though for a few teams it does poorly. These are the teams that presumably were affected by an unusual amount of luck. Later this week, I will post the teams that benefited or were hurt the most by luck last season.