Monday, April 03, 2006

Championship Breakdown

The Final Four games were totally lacking in anything resembling excitement. But there’s good news on the way. For tonight’s game, the efficiency model predicts 62.9 points for Florida and it predicts 62.9 points for UCLA. So maybe we’ll cap this wacky event with some late-game drama, because the matchup couldn’t be any more even. UCLA’s slight advantage on D is offset by Florida’s advantage on O.

Let’s get to the particulars (national rank listed)...

        UCLA O  Fla D
AdjEff    24      8 
eFG%      24     17 
TO%      229     87
OR%       49    101 
FTRate    96     43

When you get this far, it’s hard to find weaknesses. UCLA has balance, with every player except the point guards sporting offensive ratings better than 100.

Jordan Farmar’s shot selection has been maligned in this space before, and a prime example was given against LSU. He took a couple of ill-advised 3s, but they went in. When that’s happening and the Bruins manage to get over 40% of possible offensive rebounds (they got 44.1% against LSU), the opposing defense is in trouble.

Farmar’s not a horrible shooter (48.9% eFG), and to be fair, his accuracy has risen slightly as his health has improved. But he gets the least bang for his buck on shot attempts among UCLA regulars, except for his back-up Darren Collison, and Farmar takes a whopping 30% of the team’s shots when he plays. His three biggest FGA output games have been UCLA losses. He had only nine shot attempts against LSU, but eight were with at least 13 seconds on the shot clock, so it’s not like we’re talking desperation heaves here. He’s not afraid to launch with a little encouragement, and while he is good enough to burn you on occasion, he is less efficient that his teammates.

It shouldn’t go unnoticed that a healthy Lorenzo Mata, statistically the team’s best offensive rebounder, makes UCLA a better offensive rebounding team. Mata got 17 minutes against LSU, his most in eight games since returning from a knee injury, and rewarded Ben Howland with eight boards, three offensive.

        Fla O  UCLA D
AdjEff     6      3 
eFG%       3     34 
TO%      148     88
OR%       81     50 
FTRate    20     73

We’re all well aware of UCLA’s defense. Florida’s offense is very effective as well. I’d like to focus on Corey Brewer, who started the season 16 of 67 (23.9%) on 3s and has gone 24 of 50 (48.0%) since. Along with Lee Humphrey (45.8%) and Taurean Green (39.6%), Florida has three solid, nearly spectacular, long-ball threats to go with the two future-NBA big men. So double-team at your own peril, Ben Howland. We know Howland isn’t going to double with a guard, and he may still double Joakim Noah at selective times in the low post, leaving the somewhat more offensively challenged Al Horford.

George Mason got a nice gift in the beginning of the semifinal game with Florida when Noah decided to jack up a few 15-18 foot jump shots. Eventually, he cut that out and Florida’s offense rolled. UCLA is 11th best at preventing 3-pointers, so Horford and Noah will have to be more involved down low than they were against GMU (18 points, .88 PPWS, only 5 FTAs, and 7 TOs), because the Gators won’t make 12 3s, and probably won’t get close to that total. The max has been 10 against the Bruins this season, and seven since Pac-10 play began. 23 is the most attempts they have allowed, and just 19 since conference play started.

Final Analysis

What we have here is a game among equals that don’t have many obvious weaknesses, especially defensively. So it’s a game that should be close. Most have it pegged for a low-scoring contest, but keep in mind, it’s just as likely to be played in the low 70s as the low 50s.

It looks like Noah must have a nice game for Florida to be efficient offensively since we can expect the Gators to take - and make - fewer 3s that they are used to. Brewer is the wild card, because he is the Gators only true inside/outside threat. Howland has the resources to make Noah work, especially with the emergence of Mata.

For UCLA, another big game from Mbah a Moute would be nice. Afflalo vs. Brewer, assuming the matchup works out that way, will probably cancel each other out in ugly fashion when both are on the floor. Farmar will take his share of shots, and in this game he may need to. Florida is 4th in the nation in 2-point FG% defense. So what Farmar does with his 12 to 15 FGAs is crucial.

It deserves to be mentioned that these two teams are now tops in expected winning percentage. I suppose any two teams from the top ten that ended up in the final game would have risen to the top, but it goes to show you that there’s a decent case that these are the two best teams in the country right now. The winner will be one of the weaker champions in recent years, but nonetheless deserving of the title this season.

Predictions are stupid, but I’ll call it 63 possessions, UCLA 61-57.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Charting the Final Four

Florida 73, George Mason 58 [60 possessions] - Wonk’s lecture on eFG% from yesterday applies here. There’s a sense that Florida didn’t shoot that well by virtue of their 43.4 FG%. But going 12-25 from 3 makes their eFG% a gaudy 54.7, while Mason shot only 42.9% by that measure. And that was the difference.

Mason won the turnover battle as expected (11 to 15), and lost the rebounding battle as expected, but not embarrassingly so (50.0 to 31.4 in OR%, with four of Florida’s offensive boards coming in their final two possessions). The game was decided in the first three possessions of the 2nd half, which resulted in three Lee Humphrey 3-pointers against two Jai Lewis free throws for GMU and turned a five-point Florida lead into 12.

UCLA 59, LSU 45 [62] - An interesting possession split by half in this one: 37/25. UCLA was willing to run in the first half, then took the air out of the ball with big lead after halftime. Again, the early part of the second half was a turning point. In the first four possessions, UCLA got three dunks, and LSU got a single free throw to turn a 15 point game into 20 and remove any suspense.

Ben Howland stuck Afflalo (can Billy Packer learn his name by Monday?) on Darrel Mitchell, who had a rough night, and doubled Glen Davis with another big man. Davis missed his share of chippies, also, and LSU shot horribly from the line (13-of-28) to aid in producing another anemic point total against the Bruins. Eight of LSU’s points came in the heart of garbage time, their final four possessions. Fittingly, LSU didn’t make a 3 in the loss. It’s only the second time a team hasn’t made a 3 in a Final Four game since ‘87.

Championship game breakdown coming Monday…

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Four Final Points

1) The AP revealed yesterday that their Coach of the Year award went to Roy Williams. Here’s how the voting went:

Roy Williams 29
Jay Wright   15
Bruce Pearl  11
Bill Self     7
Thad Matta    5
John Calipari 2
Karl Hobbs    1
Ben Howland   1
Al Skinner    1

My first reaction to this list was, why in the heck would you vote for Al Skinner? BC was picked to finish second in the ACC, and they finished third. Without any injuries or mitigating factors. Way to go, Al. You clearly did the best coaching job in the country.

If you want to be different, which I can relate to, you should have voted for Billy Donovan. Look, I realize that the vote for Skinner was most likely from a Boston writer trying to curry favor with Skinner and that voting took place before the tournament, but couldn’t someone have seen the job Donovan did?

One of the projects I’ll be working on in the off-season is to see how much players improve from year to the next. For instance, there were 186 freshmen that played at least 20 mpg in 2005 that saw action in 2006. The average change in this group’s points per 40 minutes was +11.4%. Al Horford ranked fifth in this group with an 81% improvement. Corey Brewer is in 13th at 49.8%. Joakim Noah and Taurean Green didn’t play as many minutes last season, but they also showed better than average improvement in their scoring per 40 minutes.

In fact, every returning player improved their production significantly. And this is scaled for playing time, so it wasn’t the increased minutes that did it. Florida barely got votes in the preseason poll, but was in the top 10 most of the season. Even without the tournament, there was a pretty good case that Donovan did as fine of a coaching job as Williams, Wright, and Pearl.

2) By now, you know that LSU is last in the nation in three-point production. But the 17.0% of scoring they get from 3s is better than four teams from last season. Yes, 3-point usage increased nationwide again this season.

3) The perception is that this is an all-Cinderella Final Four. And no doubt that talk is justified based on George Mason alone. But the other three teams have been realistic Final Four material for a while. I’ve already talked about Florida’s run near the top of the polls. UCLA snuck under the radar, but their six losses were by a total of 29 points. And over two months ago, a couple of people saw through LSU’s bad luck and predicted big things for them.

It will always sound silly to some people, but whether a team wins or loses is often less significant than how the outcome occurred when trying to assess the future.

4) In non-Final Four news, Jim Boeheim is spearheading an effort to add a few more teams to the tournament. Boeheim seems to infer that he has a lot of other support for this, but I can’t believe any coach in the bottom half of Division I would be in favor of it.

Since all the new teams will be at-larges, and get seeds in the 11-13 range, the low-majors get screwed. Take Winthrop. As a 15-seed this season, they almost knocked off Tennessee. But under the new plan, they would have played on Tuesday in a fun-filled 16/17 game for the right to play a one-seed.

Boeheim defends his plan this way:

This year has proven that teams that just got in, or maybe didn’t get in, can win games.

Yeah, and so did 1986. Come on, it’s common knowledge that the 12/5 game is ripe for upsets. It’s always been that way. The fact is, no matter how many teams you include - 70, 100, or 200 - Boeheim’s statement will always be true. The teams that just miss could win a game or two in the tourney. And the more teams you include, the harder it is to tell what differentiates the last 3 or 4 teams on the board.

This couldn’t have anything to do with him wanting a 7-9 Big East team to have a better shot at a bid, could it?