Monthly Archives: February 2012

The second installment of log5-style conference tournament predictions features little in the way of surprises. To this this point, we’ve yet to see anything worse than a two-seed favored to win. The following seven conferences start their postseason festivities between tonight and Friday. Patriot League “It’s all about the home court” Feb. 29, Mar. 3, […]

For record-keeping purposes, here’s a list of the predictions for regular-season conference champions based on the simulator’s work at the end of December. Whoever gets the top seed in their conference tournament is considered the conference champ. So far, Valpo is the biggest longshot to accomplish this at 4%, but Michigan State is likely going […]

Tonight, the Big South tournament tips off with 2012 tournament play officially beginning at 7 pm ET at cozy Cameron Hall in Lexington, Virginia. That means it’s time for the annual tradition of log5-style conference tournament predictions to begin. For the uninitiated, I’ll be using Bill James’ log5 equation (it makes theoretical sense!) on the […]

I’ve been concerned about the sample size of this week’s work regarding 3P%. We’re only looking at 8-10 games in each half of the conference season. As Kevin Pelton gently reminded me, there are fewer three-point shots than two-point shots and thus there will be more noise in the 3P%. Still, if there is so […]

Continuing the discussion from yesterday, let’s look at more scatterplots! We’ve looked exclusively at defense so far and in order to get a better understanding of how defense works, we need to look at both sides of the ball. Because clearly the offense has some control over what happens on each possession as well. To […]

[Note: the graphs originally posted Friday were slightly in error. The corrected data has been posted and does not change the conclusions drawn. My apologies for the mistake.] The data from last Friday’s post has got me wondering about a lot of things and I hope it did the same for you. Mainly, how does […]

I took last season’s conference-only data for every team and split it into two halves. Then I compared each team’s opponents’ 3P% between the first half and second half of the conference season. I did the same for opponents’ three-point attempt percentage (their percentage of field-goal attempts that are from three-point range). The following plots […]

In this edition of Play-by-Play Theater, we investigate how long a team can possibly go without committing a foul. Let’s face it, committing fouls can be fun. Just ask Texas Tech! As with eating candy, it’s quite difficult to go long periods without just hammering an opposing player trying to advance the basketball towards the […]

One thing that bugs me about sports coverage is the stories. Not all stories, mind you. If you’re not interested in 1000 words criticizing the coverage of Murray State’s loss to Tennessee State last Thursday, skip what remains here and spend a few moments reading one of the following stories about Butler. There’s this David […]

A frustrating thing about relying on counting stats to assess a player’s value is that it’s impossible to count things that don’t happen. Yes, perhaps you can watch enough of a player to tell if he is good at not doing bad things, but realistically it is tough. How many people watch a player score […]