Combined Efficiency
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, December 30, 2004
received some good e-mails in response to the stats page. Most of the votes for an additional statistic were in favor of something I'll call "combined efficiency." It's simple:
Combined Efficiency = Offensive Efficiency - Defensive Efficiency
It's just the amount of points a team would gain or lose in 100 possessions with an average opponent. Honestly, I am not all that comfortable with this stat. The idea of calculating OE and DE was to assess the effectiveness of parts of the team. With CE, you have one number that applies to an entire team. It's really just a glorified average margin of victory. A couple of printable e-mails from the past week...
Ken,
Great work. I'm still reading through your explanation, but that's my slow comprehension, not necessarily your explanation.
I have a couple of suggestions that could be considered for…
Making a Beilein to Morgantown
West Virginia knocked off George Washington last night in an Atlantic-10 throwback game to remain in the unbeaten club, whose numbers dropped to ten with Hawaii's heartbreaking loss at Fresno State. The 9-0 start is the best for the Mountaineers since the Jerry West era. While the game at WVU Coliseum was sold out, one can conclude basketball has not quite arrived in Morgantown because no couches were burned in celebration.
WVU graduated to the Big East in the 1995 but they've never had much success there, with their only tourney bid coming in 1998 as a 10 seed. Things are changing under third-year head coach John Beilein though, and the Big East is more wide open than people expected this season. UConn has struggled with, or in one case been beaten by, some questionable competition. Syracuse and Pitt figure to finish 1-2 in some order, but then you…
Game Diary: Gonzaga/Oklahoma State
by Ken Pomeroy on Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Gonzaga and Oklahoma State square off in the second game of the "All College Classic."
1st half
14:41 - Gonzaga 17, OSU 10. Gonzaga has scored on every possession so far and is on pace to score about 130 points. So much for my theory that they couldn't win the game by scoring at will as they did against Washington. The Cowboys have been settling for threes having already attempted four. Their game is predicated on slashing to hole, getting layups and supplementing that with some John Lucas and Daniel Bobik jumpers.
10:35 - Gonzaga 26, OSU 15. Ronny Turiaf heads to the bench at the 14 minute mark bothered by an ankle sprain. His replacement, JP Batista scores on the Zags next two possessions. It's not until the 12:40 mark that OSU makes its first stop on Gonzaga. The Cowboys are still settling for the outside shot too often.…
Flex-ibility
I'd like to start today by giving credit to the Longwood Lancers. Coach Mike Gillian (friend of this blog) certainly got some mileage out of the game against the nation's #1 with a pregame feature on espn.com and an appearance on Cold Pizza. Then the 1-12 Lancers did something that neither Wake Forest nor Gonzaga could do - play a reasonably competitive game against Illinois for 30 minutes, eventually losing 105-79. Priceless trivia tidbit: Longwood and Delaware State are the only teams to shoot better than 50% against Illinois so far. That's the same Delaware State squad that missed its first 16 shots against Northwestern last night, in a 50-43 loss.
I promised some comments on the national efficiency stats I posted yesterday. One thing that jumped out at me involves the participants in the big game tonight, the aforementioned Gonzaga at Oklahoma State (correction: game is…
National Efficiency
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, December 27, 2004
[Be advised, I wrote this a long time ago. -kp]
Here's a page where I have computed efficiency stats for the 330 D1 teams.
http://www.kenpom.com/stats.phphttp://kenpom.com/summary.phpIt's kind of bulky and awkward, but I think it does give some unique insight into a few teams out there. The columns are sortable nationally. You can sort the adjusted numbers by conference using the T/O/D selector next to the 'Conf' heading. Unlike the ratings page, this won't be updated daily in the foreseeable future. It will probably be a weekly update until I streamline the process. I'm also thinking of displaying a different "bonus stat" every week.
Any feedback you have would be great, so .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
