A Correction
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, January 26, 2006
Ryan K. had a beef with my leniency on Marco Killingsworth yesterday. So I decided to do a little investigating. How does Killingsworth’s TORate compare with other high usage players around the country? There are 27 players that have used over 30% of their team’s possessions (minimum 40% minutes played).
Here are the most turnover prone of those 27.
Player TORate Robinson, Rhode Island 26.3 Gordon, Stetson 26.1 Owens, UT San Antonio 25.9 Farmar, UCLA 25.8 Killingsworth, Indiana 25.3 Smith, E. Tenn St. 24.5 Smith, Colorado St. 23.1 Singletary, UVa 22.8 Mensah, Siena 22.5 Guions, NC A&T 22.4
This makes me wonder why Jordan Farmar is occasionally celebrated. Sure he piles up assists, but he commits a lot of turnovers and is an ordinary shooter (47% eFG).
For your curiosity, here are the ultra-high usage players that commit the fewest turnovers.
Player TORate Tucker, Wisconsin 11.3 Morrison, Gonzaga 11.6…
Mmmmmm….Turnovers
by Ken Pomeroy on Wednesday, January 25, 2006
A couple of housekeeping notes. I forgot that I put together some notes on what various individual stats mean before the season. Here’s the link. It doesn’t cover everything, but I’ll add the rest shortly.
Hi Ken, I love that you have added tempo-free stats for every team. Just a quick question about that. How do you calculate individual possessions used? And as a tie-in, how do you calculate the TO Rate? I was just curious because at Big Ten Wonk, Marco Killingsworth has by far the highest TO Rate in the conference, while on your page he isn’t even the highest on IU. I assume it has something to do with the calculation of individual possessions - Wonk’s are just based on minutes played/team minutes played. Thanks a ton, keep up the good work, Matt
Counting individual possessions used (as opposed to the number of possessions…
Strange Indeed
by Ken Pomeroy on Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Long-time reader Louis from Vermont provides us with a nomination for the wacky box score of the year:
Ken: Yesterday’s game between Vermont and BU was very strange. BU won 43-41. Vermont outshot BU 55% to 25%! The killer stat was BU’s 25 offensive rebounds to 2 for Vermont. Vermont was able to take only 9 shots in the second half. See the box score.
All of the o-rebs helped give this game an extremely low count of 49 possessions. I counted 22 in the second half. BU had a possession that lasted 2:04 in there.
Line o’ the Night
FG 3pt FT Reb Min M-A M-A M-A O-T A F S TO BLK Pts Adam Morrison 37 14-23 5-7 8-8 1-9 1 2 0 2 0 41 Result: Win. Gonzaga 84, San Francisco 75.
Practice Makes Perfect…ly Bad
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, January 23, 2006
Some random notes from the weekend that was…
- Baylor is close to owning the triple crown of bad shooting. They currently rank dead last in the nation in free throw shooting and three-point shooting. There are only 17 teams worse than Baylor in the two point shooting department. This is a combination of Baylor being not very good and having to play the nation’s most difficult schedule. All of Baylor’s raw stats are going to look worse than they should this season. Well, except for the free throws.
- The mystique of Saint Louis’s bipolar record continued with a stunning upset against emotionally deflated Xavier last night. This is good news for Saint Joe’s. The Hawks are on the verge of A-10 irrelevance and badly need a win. Fortunately they have to go Saint Louis on Wednesday.
- If you want another interesting progression of a team…
Break Time
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, January 19, 2006
I know I promised some more explanation on individual stats, but I haven’t had the time to get to it. I’ll give it a shot next week when I should have some individual leaderboards for your examination. I’m not expecting to be able to do any updates to the site (ratings/RPI/stats) until Sunday.
Line o’ the NightFG 3pt FT Reb Min M-A M-A M-A O-T A F S TO BLK Pts Greg Brunner 50 6-17 0-4 5-9 7-23 2 2 1 5 1 17 Result: Win. Iowa 76, Minnesota 72 (3OT).
Not a scintillating offensive performance, but according to Kyle’s database, it’s the second best rebounding total of the season. Even if it did take him 50 minutes to get it.
A Better Passer Than His Pops
by Ken Pomeroy on Wednesday, January 18, 2006
FG 3pt FT Reb Min M-A M-A M-A O-T A F S TO BLK Pts Ledell Eackles 31 4-13 0-5 3-5 1-1 11 1 3 1 0 11 Result: Loss. Florida Atlantic 97, Campbell 88.Not the most sensational line, but this guy brought back memories of when his dad played on some woeful Bullets teams in the early ‘90s with such notables as Haywoode Workman and John ‘Hot Plate’ Williams.
Offensive Rating/Possession Usage
by Ken Pomeroy on Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Offensive rating is a measure of an individual player’s efficiency. In its simplest form, it’s points produced divided by possessions used. If you want to know more than that, you must read Dean Oliver’s Basketball on Paper. Otherwise you’ll have to take my word that the formula is about as good as it gets for assessing personal efficiency based on the stats that are recorded.
Values of ORtg fall in the same range as team efficiencies - 100 is about average, higher values are better. Considering that individual stats are often dependent on team interactions, to say that Player A is better than Player B because he has a better offensive rating is a serious misuse of this metric.
A very important aspect of offensive rating is that it must be used in conjunction with the possession usage (%Poss) column to have any value. The average player will use…
Individual Stats: An Introduction
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, January 16, 2006
A couple of odds and ends to start off the week.
If you haven’t seen the new blog from Ryan, of Hawkeye Hoops fame, you should check it out. For those of you that have lamented the lack of material over here this season, maybe Ryan can fill the void for you. He already has two excellent posts up. The latest one deals with the legacy of Dick Bennett.
Each season, I end up gravitating towards two or three teams this time of year - usually the ones that seem to be on the verge of getting showered with attention. Washington State is one of those teams this season. Sure, they could have made life easier on themselves by winning one game on their LA road trip last week. But with Arizona getting swept by the third and fourth best teams in Oregon, and UCLA with some serious injury…
Scouting Report
by Ken Pomeroy on Friday, January 13, 2006
When you click on a team link from the efficiency/tempo page, you’ll now be taken to a “scouting report” for that team, with individual tempo-free data on all players that have played at least 10% of the team’s minutes. I’m still working on some of the functionality of it, but I figure you all can play around with it and discover the bugs better than I can. I’ve already noticed that Assist Rate does not display national ranks properly. Anyway, have at it.
Line o’ the Night
FG 3pt FT Reb Min M-A M-A M-A O-T A F S TO BLK Pts Shane James 37 6-12 1-2 4-4 3-8 8 1 4 2 0 17 Result: Win. Loyola (Maryland) 95, Canisius 80.
For Fans of the Genius That Was MTV’s Remote Control
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, January 12, 2006
FG 3pt FT Reb Min M-A M-A M-A O-T A F S TO BLK Pts Colin Quinn 79 11-21 8-16 0-0 2-7 19 1 2 4 0 30 Result: Loss. Syracuse 88, Notre Dame 82.Yeah, I know some guy had a triple-double last night, but I’ve talked about him enough already. And really, I just couldn’t pass up being a little clever this morning. This is the combined line of Colin Falls (18 points, 10 assists) and Chris Quinn (12 points, 9 assists). Seriously, having two teammates finish with at least 9 assists in a regular-paced game is probably about as rare as a triple-double. So I feel justified.