Thursday, March 24, 2005

Viewer’s Guide: Louisville/Washington

The best game of the sweet 16 is Louisville vs. Washington. This is going to be real basketball - presses, fast breaks, dunks, long range snipers. There are other games that will be great over the next two days, but they won't have all of those elements.

Louisville and Washington will score points, and that's not say there won't be defense. Francisco Garcia's influence on the defensive end might end up being the difference.

For those of you unfamiliar with one or both of the participants, here's a breakdown in various categories with national rank:

              Louisville   Washington
           OE  117.4(7)     119.6(4)
           DE   88.3(12)     94.9(64)
        Tempo   68.7(122)    73.2(17)
         3FG%   40.0(7)      38.9(23)
     3FGA/FGA   41.9(16)     29.3(246)
     Opp 3FG%   31.3(19)     33.3(92)
          OR%   38.4(39)     42.0(3)
          DR%   68.1(64)     64.6(243)
B-ball Shrink  Villanova   Wake Forest

Louisville and UW are two of the most skilled offenses in the nation. Part of this is because they have multiple shooters that are accurate from long range. But Louisville is much more dependent on the long-ball than Huskies. A chunk of UW's effectiveness is also due to crashing the offensive boards.

UW is also one of the weakest defensive teams still playing. Their style puts them in similar company with Gonzaga. Due to the aggressive offensive rebounding, the Huskies give up their share of fast breaks which contributes to the weak defensive numbers. But UW's defense isn't as bad as the 'Zags, so their comp in the Basketball Shrink turns out to be Wake Forest (while Gonzaga is 6th in the list). Louisville on the other hand is great at preventing offensive boards and three-point accuracy, so UW's strengths will get a serious test.

Now the key players...

First, the four Cardinals most involved in the offense...

Player       Off Rtg. %Poss  PPG  3P%  TO% FTA/FGA  OR%
Garcia, F..... 120    24.5  15.9 .361 20.3  .422    4.7
O'Bannon, L... 130    20.3  14.9 .435 16.5  .404    2.8
Dean, T....... 126    22.1  14.1 .456 17.6  .209    3.3
Myles, E...... 106    22.7  10.3 .000 26.3 1.018   13.4

The guard trio of Garcia/O'Bannon/Dean is the engine that makes this offense go. Ellis Myles in the middle is an interesting character. He's shot more free throws than field goals. He nearly leads the team in assists, but he's also a turnover machine. Louisville is one of these teams that gets a lot of assists per field goal (about 60%), but that's mainly due to the bizarre fact that threes are more likely to be assisted than twos and this is likely what inflates Myles rating. Make no mistake, the three guards have to be effective shooting from long-range for Louisville to be effective.

It's a tough formula to work for the six consecutive games needed for a national championship, as Pitino's seemingly loaded Kentucky teams proved all but once. And indeed while Louisville just pummeled Georgia Tech, let's not forget their first round game was a six-point win over Louisiana Lafayette when the GOD trio combined for a less-than-heavenly 6 of 21 (29%) from three.

Washington's offense is more diverse...

Player         Off Rtg. %Poss  PPG  3P%  TO% FTA/FGA  OR%
Robinson, N..G.  129    22.6  16.6 .397 15.6  .414    5.5
Simmons, T...G.  119    24.9  16.2 .415 17.5  .221    7.7
Roy, B.......G.  126    21.9  12.7 .368 16.2  .377    9.7
Jones, B.....F.  126    19.0  11.3 .508 15.6  .463   10.7
Williams, J..F.  111    24.5   9.6 .000 18.2  .272   10.0
Conroy, W....G.  113    18.4   9.2 .290 27.8  .379    2.9
Jensen, M....F.  105    16.4   6.4 .321 22.8  .238   10.1

Conroy is usually the point guard, and plays it in a more traditional way than Garcia, who is mainly responsible for the Cards' ball-handling. While Roy, Simmons, Robinson, and Jones can all shoot it, only Simmons and Robinson do so in bulk - Roy has only taken 19 3s all year. This is where the 6-7 Garcia comes in to play. He would seem to be best suited for the assignment of shutting down the 6-5 Simmons, which opens the door for Robinson to put the team on his back as he did in Alaska.

This game won't be the score-a-thon that a now impossible Washington/Wake Forest game would have been, but it should be the one most worth watching Thursday.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Ranking the Eight

Eight more games are coming at us Thursday and Friday. Only two are mismatches, with the other six being close to toss-ups, so there are bound to be a couple of classics that fall out of these.

Here's the list of games, in order of appeal, with rankings of tempo/offensive efficiency/defensive efficiency among the 16 remaining teams.

1. Louisville (8/6/6) vs. Washington (2/3/15), Thursday 7:10 pm: This is the first sweet 16 game to tip and I'll have more on this one Thursday morning. Appallingly, this game will be seen a minority of the country, giving way to game #8 below.

2. Arizona (5/7/10) vs. Oklahoma State (11/2/12), Thursday 10:00 pm: A very close second. It's the last college game for either the nation's best floor general (John Lucas) or best shooter (Salim Stoudamire). Nobody runs the fast break better than Lucas. Ivan McFarlin's composite line for the first two rounds: 49 points, 18-23 FGs, 13-14 FTs, 3 turnovers. He's going to need some help from the foul-prone Joey Graham (40 total minutes in two games) in this one.

3. Michigan State (10/5/11) vs. Duke (6/9/1), Friday 7:10 pm: I am not a Duke-hater, but if a Blue Devil loss means the end of seeing Coach K's American Express commercials, then I'm all for the Spartans here. If MSU wins, their advantage in depth is going to be the reason why.

4. West Virginia (13/11/16) vs. Texas Tech (4/15/9), Thursday 9:40 pm: Nice tactical battle between Knight and Beilein. My worst nightmare is having Knight in the Final Four with a whole week to manipulate the media. That's another reason to pull for WVU in this one. However, it's hard to root against Ronald Ross and Jarrius Jackson.

5. NC State (14/8/14) vs. Wisconsin (15/14/7), Friday 7:30 pm: The second- and third-slowest teams left. This one figures to be competitive, but the winner is the first team to 60, so the entertainment value is minimal. Interesting subplot: Duke and NC State competing for local TV time with their games being played simultaneuosly.

6. Utah (16/12/8) vs. Kentucky (9/13/3), Friday 9:40 pm: See above, a low-scoring slugfest played in the 50s or if you're lucky, the 60s. Anyone think Bogut hasn't attended his last class at Utah?

7. Villanova (7/10/5) vs. North Carolina (1/1/2), Friday 10:00 pm: This one lost some luster when it was confirmed that Curtis Sumpter wouldn't play. It still could be interesting if Jason Fraser can get Sean May into foul trouble early.

8. Wisconsin Milwaukee (3/16/13) vs. Illinois (12/4/4), Thursday 7:30 pm: If the sweet 16 were re-seeded, this would be the 1/16 game. Illinois continues on its quest to reverse the curse of Norm Sloan, who was the coach of NC State, the last one-loss team to win it all (in 1974). Apparently, there is some animosity between Illinois fans and UWM's coach. If I hear more on this, I'll let you know.

Monday, March 21, 2005

Revenge of the Low Seeds

Cleaning up some first-round issues...collectively, this year's 1 vs. 16 and 2 vs. 15 games were the closest ever with an average margin of victory of 13.1 points. And by "ever," I mean since the tournament went to the 64 team format in 1985. The previous low (14.3) occurred during the magical 1989 tourney when two 16 seeds fell one point short in the opening round.

This has relevance for the one seeds in this way: Since 1985, only 7 of 30 (23%) one-seeds that failed to win the first round game by at least 20 points made the Final Four. Teams winning by 20 or more fared much better, with over half (27 of 50) advancing to the Final Four. The only one-seed with such a victory this year was North Carolina.

Now to the second round. The most shocking development was everybody's Final Four pick (including mine), Wake Forest, losing to my adopted team, West Virginia.

(I do enjoy how this opens the door for Washington to get to St. Louis, perhaps the most disrespected one-seed ever, even more so than Saint Joe's last year and the '94 Missouri team. Not just because UW was a victim of the perpetual east-coast bias, but also because there is already a university by the name of Washington that has been in St. Louis for quite some time.)

Much was made of Wake Forest's defensive weakness this season, and it reared its head against the Mountaineers. WVU scored 111 points on roughly 90 possessions, for an offensive efficiency of 124. Even if you remove WVU's free throws - 30 of 39 - and their associated possessions, their OE still works out to an impressive 111.

The Mountaineers offense was underrated before the dance, it ranked 22nd nationally in adjusted offensive efficiency before the dance. They had torched some high profile teams with less than air-tight defenses before (LSU - 129 OE, NC State - 122 OE, and most recently Villanova - 130 OE). However, in all of those cases they had nice three point shooting games. At the end of regulation against Wake, they had only made four threes.

A team that gets an average of 38% of its offense from beyond the arc, the most of any team in the dance, took Wake to overtime by only getting 16% of its offense on threes. This was the Mountaineers' second-lowest regulation total of the year.

Their worst three-point output was in a December win against 2-26 St. Bonaventure. Their third- and fourth-worst games were the crushing 73-53 home loss to BC in January and the loss to 6-22 Marshall the game before that.

So is it Skip Prosser's system or the players? For the second year in a row Wake makes an early exit, and for the second year in a row their defense is the culprit.