Move the Line Back
01.19.05
Wake Forest missed but one free throw in 53 attempts over the past two games against North Carolina and Florida State. Yet that miss cost them a win. Taron Downey clanked one with 4 seconds left in regulation that would have broken a 76-76 tie against FSU. The miss ended an NCAA record streak of 50 consecutive free throws made by Wake Forest. It adds further evidence that we're in an era where free throws are like layups. Really, they need to move back that line.
(By the way, there's been a discernible negative effect of playing UNC. Call it The Carolina Hangover. Each of UNC's four ACC opponents have lost their next game. Overall, UNC opponents are 4-12 in their next contest.)
Back to the free throws. This incarnation of my blog essentially started with a post analyzing Kansas' poor free throw shooting in the 2003 national championship game. So in that tradition, let's look at the astronomical odds against Wake Forest making 50 in a row. It's easy to do. Say a player shoots 75% from the line. The chance of him making two in a row is .75 x .75 or .5625 (56.25%). The chance of that player making four in a row is .75 x .75 x .75 x .75 (31.64%) and so on.
A rough approximation of Wake's streak could be arrived at by using the Deacs' team free throw percentage and muliplying it by itself 50 times (math-type people like to call this taking it to the 50th power). However, the team doesn't shoot free throws, players do. So with that in mind, let's look at the chances of each of the individual streaks involved in making up the new team record, using each player's FT% after the FSU game. Here's a breakdown of who made what free throws during the streak:
Chance of
Season personal
FTM FT% streak(%)
Chris Paul......19 86.1 5.84
Taron Downey.... 7 84.2 30.03
Justin Gray..... 6 73.8 16.22
Vytas Daneluis.. 6 70.8 12.63
Jamaal Levy..... 4 45.8 4.41
Chris Ellis..... 4 73.7 29.48
Eric Williams... 4 60.0 12.96
There's a couple of interesting things you can take away from this analysis. (1) Levy's four consecutive free throws were less likely than Paul's 19 in a row. (2) Overall the bad free throw shooters (Levy and Williams) didn't participate much in this streak. Trent Strickland at 56% didn't participate at all, despite playing 23 minutes during the streak.
The individual streaks were improbable, but what was the chance of the stars aligning - having all of the streaks happen simultaneously? We can multiply together the percentages in the right-most column to get the true odds of the overall event. The result is .000605%*. In other words it would happen once in every 1,651,987 sequences of 50 free throws. (In this case, each free throw starts a new sequence of 50.)
Q: So what does this number mean?
A: This kind of thing doesn't happen very often. Assuming Wake Forest shoots 25 free throws a game, you would expect this event to happen to the Deacons once in every 66,000 games...2,200 seasons...110 generations.
If I had bet you before every free throw ever shot in the history of college basketball that the team of the shooter wouldn't make their next 50, I would have been right every time - until this week. I don't know how many free throws have been shot in the history of college hoops, but I'm guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of five million. So maybe this kind of streak was overdue, or maybe there's some other factor that limits the probability of a streak like this more than the true odds would indicate, or maybe my estimate of five million is too high, or maybe this record has only been tracked over the last 30 years. All of these explanations are possible.
Regardless, there's probably a grumpy old Wake fan out there who is saying that if they had just been better from the line, they'd wouldn't have lost. And sometime around the year 4205 another grumpy old Wake fan will be saying the same thing.
*By comparison, if you use Wake's team FT% of 69.6, you get the chances of .000013% or about once in 76,000,000! So clearly the distribution of free throws in this streak being skewed more than usual towards the good shooters made the record possible. (The weighted average FT% of shooters during the streak was 76.2)
Channel 56
01.18.05
Back in the day, when ESPN was still showing Australian Rules Football on a regular basis and college basketball was not available every night, there was an over-the-air channel that was basically what the Full Court package is now. You could see quite a few games from all the big conferences. You know, the Southwest Conference, The Big Eight, the Metro. Remember them? Plus the SEC and WAC, among others. This thing was channel 56, and if you lived in northern Virginia in the mid '80s, you know what I'm talking about.
The thing is, while 56 was basically today's Full Court - it mostly relied on the syndicated packages for each conference - it was only one channel unlike the multi-plexed Full Court system. This meant that a lot of games were broadcast by tape-delay. The concept wasn't all bad though. When Bob Knight threw the chair across the court, I got wind of it before 56 broadcast the game later in the afternoon. So I was able to watch all the events unfold, knowing what was to come. For some reason my best memories of this station involve Indiana University. I saw the Soviet exhibition where Knight pulled the players off the floor. There was a game in there where Indiana and Purdue were #1 and #2 in the nation, and it was on 56.
When March rolled around, the fun continued. Before CBS snapped up the rights to all 63 games of the tournament, the NCAA produced the first round games and allowed local stations to air them as they wished. ESPN was famous for showing a few games live on Thursday and Friday and the rest were shown on tape delay through the night and morning, providing 48 consecutive hours of basketball. 56 did the same thing, giving you two options to find your favorite game.
In addition, the week before, 56 would deal with the preliminary rounds of conference tournaments in a similar manner. They would promote how they were broadcasting 72 hours of continuous hoops. I distinctly remember watching a Big Sky quarterfinal at 8 AM on a Saturday morning on 56. The game was meaningless in the big picture, an elimination game on the road to a 16 seed. I guess it was the voyeur in me that felt privileged that no one without a thousand miles of me could see this game, so I watched it in its entirety. I was also cognizant that I was probably the only person in northern Virginia watching this game. 56 was like the station that read my mind. If I could have programmed a TV station at the time, I would have loaded up on obscure college basketball also.
The reason I am writing this? There is no trace of channel 56 anymore. ESPN, FSN, and regional sports networks, combined with the increasing rights costs for syndicated games put 56 out of the college hoops business a few years back. Now all they offer is foreign programming. There appears to be no record on the internet of just how groundbreaking these guys were. Which is a shame, because there should be an exhibit in the Basketball Hall of Fame devoted to 56. I owe my college basketball addiction to them.
Game Diary: Boston College/West Virginia
01.17.05
13-0 Boston College tried to maintain its unbeaten record and 11-2 West Virginia was hoping to make people forget that they had just lost to Marshall. Through the miracle of streaming video, I was able to file this report as if I were attending the game, or even merely watching it on TV. Here are my uncensored musings...
1st half
15:50 BC 7, WVU 5 - West Virginia has a Princetonesque offense. There are a lot of back-cuts, it's very deliberate, they take the open three, and they get few offensive rebounds. The 1-3-1 zone they employ is forcing BC to take a lot of time to get a shot themselves.
11:49 WVU 11, BC 9 - The first player to get in any kind of foul trouble is BC point guard Louis Hinnant, when he picks up his second foul. While WVU's offense is based on the perimeter, their defense is solid inside with the shot-blocking platoon of D'Or Fischer and Kevin Pittsnogle. Given that BC doesn't have much outside firepower, it's a good matchup for the Mountaineers.
7:22 WVU 18, BC 17 - BC shows a press after a made free throw which forces a turnover. On the ensuing transition, Hinnant's replacement, Steve Hailey, commits a charge and twists his ankle. This forces Hinnant back into the game, who subsequently commits his third foul. Jermaine Watson is pressed into some rare action at the point.
3:04 WVU 25, BC 22 - BC's offense sputters without a ball-handler on the floor. On top of that, point guard de facto Watson picks up his third foul. Al Skinner leaves him in the game. BC has already taken seven threes (they only average 11 a game), but replays indicate the successful bomb before the last media timeout should have been a two.
Halftime, WVU 29, BC 29 - Center Nate Doornekamp joins the three-foul club for BC. BC has 11 fouls, but nine of them are spread among three players. Even with the makeshift lineup, the Eagles close the gap before intermission due to some impressive play from Jared Dudley who hits a couple of tough shots in the lane.
2nd Half
16:15 BC 40, WVU 31 - After WVU opens with a backdoor lay-up, BC reels off 11 consecutive points to open up the game and force a WVU timeout. Dudley and Craig Smith have combined for 26 points for BC.
14:04 BC 45, WVU 31 - Sean Marshall hits a three for BC, while WVU continues to throw up bricks. Three point field goals: WVU 3-13, BC 3-9. Overall FG%: WVU 31%, BC 52%.
11:18 BC 51, WVU 34 - The WVU offense has fallen apart, now resorting to forcing long threes and making none of them. BC continues to pound it inside where they get enough opportunities on each possession to eventually convert. The only remaining suspense is whether Smith and Dudley will outscore BC by themselves. Currently, Smith has 18 and Dudley 14. Smith is outscoring WVU 11-5 in the second half.
7:17 BC 59, WVU 42 - The only thing I learned from the last segment is that analyst Bob Wenzel does not know the difference between right and left. Louis Hinnant steps on a WVU players foot with his right foot, and goes down in a bit of pain. Wenzel declares that it's Hinnant's left foot that was injured. Not a big deal I guess, but you know Majerus wouldn't make that mistake.
3:39 BC 63, WVU 50 - WVU has matched their putrid numbers in the loss to Marshall by going 3 for 19 from three. Their best shooter, Patrick Beilien is 0 for 6.
Final BC 73, WVU 53 - Yet another lopsided affair in the game diary section. After I jumped on the bandwagon after WVU's 10-0 start, the Mountaineers have gone 1-3 with a loss to 2-10 Marshall and lopsided defeats against Villanova and BC. The lone win was a 4 point home tussle against potential Big East cellar dweller St. John's. In their first ten wins, WVU shot 35% from three, and they had some impressive W's - double-digit wins at LSU and at NC State (though without Julius Hodge) and a home win against George Washington. Over the last four games WVU has shot 20% from three.