Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Basketball ShrinkTM

Perhaps no team in major college basketball has changed its personality from last season as much as the Arizona Wildcats. Last season they were an up-tempo offensive machine, but prone to giving up too many easy baskets. This season, with Ivan Radenovic eating up a lot of the minutes vacated by NBA early-entry Andre Iguodala, the Wildcats are more controlled and efficient defensively, but prone to stretches where they have difficulty scoring.

We can get an idea of a team's personality by comparing their major stats (in adjusted form) - tempo, offensive efficiency, and defensive efficiency - to every other team in college basketball. Sum the percentage difference in each category and the resulting number is the similarity between two teams. The lower the number, the more similar two teams are. It's a device I'll call the Basketball Shrink^TM.

For instance, the Shrink says the following five teams turn out to be most similar to Arizona in 2004 and 2005:

      2004                   2005
   Washington                Iowa 
   Wake Forest         Mississippi State 
Wisconsin Milwaukee       Cincinnati 
  North Carolina          Texas Tech 
      UNLV               Arizona State 

Last season, Arizona was similar to Washington and Wake Forest, and this season they resemble Iowa and Mississippi State. The results from the two seasons have been fairly similar, with Arizona mainly beating teams you would expect them to beat, but not able to pull off that big win that propels them into the national spotlight.

Let's get the Basketball Shrink^TM to give us a diagnosis on a few other interesting hoops characters. The biggest headcase in the game may be Maryland. Get smoked by NC State at home, then win at Cameron Indoor. Take care of Georgia Tech at home, then get trashed at Clemson. Who is Maryland most similar to?

Connecticut
Iowa
Texas Tech
Mississippi State
George Washington

Maryland keeps some of the same company as Arizona. The Terps and UConn share not only a penchant for up-tempo basketball, but they've both failed badly to meet pre-season expectations.

Now let's look at a team that is a mystery to everyone - Vermont. The Catamounts sport a lofty #19 ranking in the RPI thanks to a new formula that treats a road victory like a win over a top ten team. Shrink, what do you say?

Boston College
Boston University
Pittsburgh
Notre Dame
South Carolina

UVM is a small conference team that has a big conference personality. You like BC? Then you should like Vermont. Vermont is a team with only two top 100 RPI wins so far, so their margin for error in the at-large chase is slim. The Bracket Buster game with Nevada will have a lot riding on it. If they get blown out, then their at-large chances are probably shot. They will be considered a heavy favorite to win the America East Tournament. But with conference-mate Boston U. ranking #2 in similarity to Vermont, a win over BU in the AE championship shouldn't be taken for granted, even in Burlington.

On Friday, I plan to make Basketball Shrink^TM available on the stats page. Then you can schedule an appointment for your favorite team to get a check-up from the neck up.

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Random Junk

Back from a weekend of getting out of the house and watching some hoops in-person, I return with the following tidbits...

ESPN announced the February 19th Bracket Buster schedule on Monday. Surely one of the cadre of personalities at The Mid-Majority will have an in-depth breakdown of the key matchups with the proper aplomb that can't be provided here. The headline game is Vermont/Nevada in a rematch of a first round preseason NIT game last season which the Wolf Pack won convincingly, 69-49.

Once again, the ESPN matchmakers ignored geography. It's one thing to send Vermont to Reno or the U. of Buffalo to Fresno in the name of good TV, but another to send 10-9 Cal State Northridge to Bridgeport, Connecticut to play 10-9 Fairfield.

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Florida International and Arkansas Little Rock participated in a Sun Belt classic for the ages on Sunday in Pharmed Arena in Miami. FIU prevailed 118-114 in quintuple overtime. UALR guard Zach Graber played all 65 minutes.

Unfortunately, it appears that no one knows when the last five overtime game was played, with all accounts of the game referencing the D1-record seven overtime affair between Bradley and Cincinnati in pre-shot clock 1981. But using some info on overtime games over the past two and a half seasons, one can make an educated guess on how rare five overtimes are.

In 2003 and 2004, 4.32% of all games required bonus basketball. Once in overtime, a game has about an 18% chance of being extended another period. So the chance of any game going 5 OTs is .0432 x .18 x .18 x .18 x .18. Which is 0.0453% or about once in every 22,000 games. With about 5,000 games played each season, this works out to once in every four to five seasons.

(As a footnote, in looking for the last five overtime game I found that there was a high school game in 1996 in Michigan that went five OTs with the final score of 7-6. That's 52 minutes of action and 13 points. Talk about taking the fun out of the game. At least the 5-2 game from Vermont in early January ended in regulation.)

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ESPN has rolled out wall to wall coverage of the miserable 0-24 season Savannah State is having. Over the last 50 years, winless seasons (one) are much rarer than undefeated seasons (eight). Shannon Sharpe's alma mater appears to have a great (maybe the wrong choice of words) chance of losing their last four games and finishing 0-28. But it was only two years ago that North Carolina A&T was expected to take on the same fate before pulling off a March shocker at Norfolk State. There won't be any March Madness for SSU - their season ends on Valentine's Day, before any other D1 team.

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The upset of the weekend was Washington State winning 70-63 at Arizona, ending a 38 game span where Arizona won every game between the two teams. Four players on the Wazzu roster weren't born the last time the Cougars beat the Wildcats on January 30, 1986. The longest in-conference winning streak now belongs to Kansas over Kansas State. The Jayhawks have won 28 in a row since falling to K State in a January 17, 1994 loss.

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Speaking of one team's domination over another, Princeton won every home game against Brown between 1929 and 2002 - a total of 52 games, the longest streak of its kind in NCAA history. With Brown's 57-52 win at Princeton on Friday, the Bears have taken two of the last three at Princeton.