Monday, December 06, 2004

Patsos No Patsy

Items of note from the weekend...

Loyola of Maryland beat Niagara 97-89 on Sunday. It was kind of an ugly game. Loyola had more free throws (53) than field goal attempts (51), the first time that's happened in any D1 game this year. Niagara had three players foul out and five more that finished with four fouls each. Larry Shyatt would be proud.

The Greyhounds don't really care how they get their wins. Coming into the game they had won once in their last 46. Rookie head coach Jimmy Patsos gets a win over a team that went to last year's NIT on the same day his former boss, Maryland coach Gary Williams, took a loss to an NIT team (George Washington).

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I love a good streak, and New Mexico had a doozy going until Saturday's win at New Mexico State. The past two seasons, the Lobos had lost every time they played away from their home arena, The Pit, a total of 29 games. After a close call at the other Pit, Oregon's MacArthur Court, earlier this season, the Lobos finally have shaken off the road demons, and are quietly establishing themselves as the favorites in the Mountain West.

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Dave pointed out the ACC's dominance over the SEC on Saturday. If you count Friday and Sunday, the ACC went 6-0 against the SEC. But it can't go without saying that in the less anticipated SEC/Southern Conference challenge on Sunday, the Southern Conference won 2-0, with Wofford taking down Auburn and Chattanooga upsetting Tennessee.

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Those who read my previous post regarding Connecticut's inability - or more like ignorance - at forcing turnovers should not have been surprised to see Indiana turn it over a season-low six times against UConn on Saturday. That number matched the lowest single-game output for the Hoosiers all of last year. But the Huskies managed to play effective defense the way they always do, holding IU to 32% shooting and blocking eight shots.

Friday, December 03, 2004

Oh-fense Wins

Last night (correction: game was Tuesday), Florida International coughed up the ball 26 times against UConn. This was more than any single UConn opponent turned the ball over last season.

In 15 of their 39 games last season, Huskies opponents committed fewer than 10 turnovers, and only twice did their opponents cough the ball up more than 20 times. Notre Dame turned it over a grand total of 13 times in three games against UConn! Plain and simply, UConn was inept at forcing turnovers. They ranked 322nd nationally in opponents turnover percentage (the percentage of possessions that an opponent commits a turnover). And yet it didn't matter.

Earlier this week, I presented some data that showed that offensive field goal percentage was more important to the formula of winning basketball games that defensive field goal percentage (read it here). When you look at turnover rate, this pattern continues - a team's own turnover rate is more important that its opponent's. Teams that excelled in taking care of the basketball regularly in 2004 also won regularly, and teams that gave it away lost. However the same can't be said for teams that forced their opponent to give it up a lot. The best teams in this category represented a seemingly random cross section of the college game. There was almost no difference in the winning percentage of teams that forced a lot of turnovers compared to teams that forced few turnovers...

Offensive TO%
Top 30 teams in this category had a cumulative .650 winning percentage
Bottom 30 teams in this category had a cumulative .293 winning percentage
The difference between the top 30 and bottom 30 was .357

Defensive TO%
Top 30 teams = .563, Bottom 30 teams = .483 (difference = .080)

This is not to say the forcing turnovers is irrelevant to winning. There are common threads to playing winning basketball. For instance, winning teams must shoot the ball better than their opponents. But when it comes to turnovers, it's not a necessary ingredient to force a lot of them. Some good or even great teams don't force many and make up the difference in other ways, either by blocking shots or winning the rebounding battle to name a couple.

Last season, there was no better example of this than UConn. They were the fifth worst team in the nation at forcing turnovers. However, they compensated for this by being one the ten best teams in field goal defense, probably because they didn't give up many shots close to the hoop. On the other hand, Duke was one of the best teams in the nation at forcing turnovers. Sure enough, in the 2004 national semifinal between the two teams, UConn was -9 in the turnover department, yet shot 50% from the field to Duke's 41%. And the result was a Husky victory.

I'm not really sure what all this means (maybe nothing?) and I'm certainly open to suggestions. I feel fairly confident that offensive ability is more important than defense to playing winning basketball. But it should go without saying that being an elite team requires greatness on both ends. Connecticut was a great defensive team, but the way they achieved this was unusual.

Another idea that falls out of this is that a turnover is caused more by the offense than the defense. So defenses that rely on forcing turnovers will have a difficult time against offenses that refuse to give it up. Maybe I can develop this idea a little more in the future. (An interesting aside here: Florida International was the had the highest turnover percentage in the nation last year. So Huskies fans shouldn't get too excited that their team is going to force more turnovers this season.)

In other news, Islander Fever has apparently caught on in the blogging world, where Hoops Junkie has an interview with Texas A&M Corpus Christi head coach Ronnie Arrow. (Personally, I think he's just hoping to score an all-expenses paid trip to South Padre for spring break.) Then there's midmajority.com, who took my idea regarding Texas A&M - College Station a step further.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Rush Hour Blues

The Columbia at Hofstra game tonight was cancelled due to the Columbia bus being stuck in what is termed "heavy traffic" in the AP story. This wasn't your run-of-the-mill Columbia-Hofstra game either. It was 4-0 Hofstra against 3-1 Columbia. Hofstra is two wins away from becoming bowl eliglible, and a representative from the Las Vegas Bowl was going to be in attendance. And is heavy traffic all that unexpected in metropolitan New York?

In conference news, the Missouri Valley Conference went 4-0 last night, led by Northern Iowa's 99-82 victory over Iowa State in the UNI-Dome. This pushes the MVC's record against D1 competition to 26-11. The MVC is staking a very early claim as the best conference in America that doesn't have a bunch of games on ESPN or FSN. This is a distinction that has been traded between the Atlantic-10 and Mountain West in this millenium, but with both of those conferences down, keep your eye on the Valley. Along with UNI, Creighton and Southern Illinois have at-large aspirations also.

The rumors of Gonzaga's demise were greatly exaggerated after their loss to Illinois last Saturday. The Zags beat Washington 99-87 even though Erroll Knight didn't play again. I'm no talent scout, but the people that are say Ronny Turiaf and Adam Morrison have NBA futures. That means Gonzaga has two more future pros than most of their opponents. I can throw stats at you day and night, but the bottom line is that talent wins, and Gonzaga has some left this year. And oh by the way, we're finding out the Illini are pretty good, and they're going to squash a lot of quality teams like bugs.

Finally it's time for a time-honored tradition in this space. I try to guess which team will be the last unbeaten, but without any explanation. Here's what I went with last season. With ten teams suffering their first loss last night, the ranks of the unbeatens are thinning a lot faster this year. As of this morning, there are only 42 remaining. The last one standing will be Kansas or Connecticut.