Category Archives: counting things

On rebounding

reb

(Mike Carter, USA Today Sports)

We live at a time of televised analytic plenty, yet, somehow, you still see rebound margin numbers flung up on the screen during this or that telecast in 2019. That makes me grit my teeth at the blatant luddite behaviors on display, of course, and, well, I’m right to do so. Rebound margin really is meaningless, an ersatz and mislabeled tribute paid to teams that alter shots yet refuse to go for steals and/or charges (with all of the above, preferably, transpiring at a fast pace).

In partial defense of my well-intentioned graphic-making brethren and sistren, however, I will additionally confess to the following. I’ve been mulling just how peculiar rebounds really are for a while now, and (this may say more about me than about rebounding) I’m still not sure I’ve found solid ground on this particular subject.

Here’s what I think I think….

I’m not a fan of whole-season rebound percentages in college basketball
Leave it to the sport’s endearing and enduring idiosyncrasies to overturn perfectly sound axioms regarding sample size. Continue reading →

Tuesday Truths: Salute to concision edition

Welcome to this season’s first installment of Tuesday Truths, where I look at how well 75 teams in six conferences are doing against their league opponents on a per-possession basis.

Editor’s note: Tuesday Truths 2019 refuses to play along with your bourgeois time-slavery plastic fantastic Madison Avenue thing by being updated weekly like its name would, um, logically imply. It will instead will appear here and there, now and then, to this one and that one. Also, with today’s post, Tuesday Truths has now made an appearance for 11 consecutive seasons under two different names and across three different sites. Huzzah, The Streak! Take that, KU!

Duke and Louisville are functionally the same ACC team

mcmahon

(gocards.com)

Through February 4, conference games only
Pace: possessions per 40 minutes
PPP: points per possession   Opp. PPP: opponent PPP
EM: efficiency margin (PPP – Opp. PPP)

ACC                       W-L   Pace    PPP   Opp. PPP    EM
1.  Virginia              8-1   60.8    1.14    0.89    +0.25
2.  Louisville            8-2   69.8    1.12    0.95    +0.17
3.  Duke                  7-1   71.1    1.12    0.96    +0.16
4.  North Carolina        7-1   74.3    1.10    0.97    +0.13
5.  Virginia Tech         7-3   64.1    1.11    1.03    +0.08
6.  Syracuse              7-2   66.9    1.04    0.98    +0.06
7.  Florida State         4-4   67.9    1.02    1.02     0.00
8.  Clemson               3-5   66.3    0.98    0.99    -0.01
9.  NC State              4-5   69.4    1.00    1.04    -0.04
10. Georgia Tech          3-6   68.6    0.88    0.98    -0.10
11. Boston College        2-6   66.8    1.04    1.14    -0.10
12. Pitt                  2-7   69.6    0.96    1.08    -0.12
13. Notre Dame            2-7   65.7    1.01    1.14    -0.13
14. Miami                 1-8   67.0    1.00    1.13    -0.13
15. Wake Forest           1-8   67.5    0.90    1.13    -0.23

AVG.                            67.8     1.03

Duke is a rather well publicized team, and one of Mike Krzyzewski’s players in particular is possibly the best bridge we’ve ever seen between shoe sales and analytic swoons. But we here at Tuesday Truths are all about equal time, so let’s give it up for Louisville. Continue reading →

Meet the best teams at taking shots

uva

Jack Salt says this taking more shots than your opponent stuff really works. (Matt Riley/UVA Media Relations)

There are exciting developments afoot in the fast-paced, glamorous, and paparazzi-laden world of shot-volume studies.

Ever since the appearance of the shot volume index (SVI) a couple years back, the metric’s been dominated by one team: North Carolina. This hegemony has led casual fans and, yes, even texting coaches to infer something like the following:

Great. Want to put up a lot of shots? Be a storied program with six national titles and incredible athletes who form possibly the best offensive rebounding collective in the history of the sport. Hey, thanks, John! I’ll be sure to put that on my whiteboard tomorrow!

O, how the mighty have fallen….

Shot volume index (SVI)
Turnover percentage, offensive rebound percentage, and shot volume
Major-conference games only, through January 27

                         TO%     OR%     SVI
1.  Virginia            13.0    30.0    101.6
2.  Purdue              16.0    35.3    100.6
3.  Tennessee           15.5    31.9     99.6
4.  Arizona             15.3    31.1     99.5
5.  Alabama             17.2    34.7     98.9
6.  Duke                17.3    34.2     98.6
7.  Baylor              19.4    39.9     98.6

The UNC legacy notwithstanding, getting more shots is about way more than just second chances. Actually, it’s mostly about first chances. You can’t get an offensive board if you’ve already committed a turnover. Continue reading →

The analytic perils of dual-efficiency fetishism

winston

(msuspartans.com)

We’ve reached the time of year when good teams are being praised on the basis of showing up “in the top-[highest applicable number divisible by five] for both offensive and defensive efficiency at KenPom.” Specifically, Michigan State’s getting a lot of this variety of love at present.

(Virginia qualifies for this treatment too, surely, but the Cavaliers in 2019 are destined to be a special case. There’s a lingering UMBC effect 10 months after the fact that seems to be inhibiting a more full-throated chorus of bedazzlement.)

The Spartans are indeed destroying opponents, of course. Tom Izzo’s guys could well win the national title. (Heck, I’ve sung their praises too.) Not to mention it’s a clear basketball benefit to be one of the best teams in the country at offense at the same time that you’re also one of the best teams in the country at defense.

There’s no searing indictment to be filed against such common-sense notions, goodness knows, but a warning label may still be in order. “Top-X in both offensive and defensive efficiency at KenPom” isn’t as predictive of tournament success as you probably think it is, and, in particular, dual-efficiency essentialism can’t shed much light on whether a team so blessed — even if it’s a top seed — will reach the Final Four. Continue reading →

Welcome to the record book, Hawkeyes

iowa

(Brian Ray/hawkeyesports.com)

In its 95-71 trouncing of Illinois in Iowa City this weekend, Iowa shot 34-of-50 from the floor and 15-of-21 from beyond the arc.

That nets out to an 83.0 effective FG percentage, which ranks No. 2 for accuracy from the field out of over 8,400 major-conference games played since 2006.

Best shooting
Effective FG percentages: 80 and above
Major-conference games only, 2006-19

                            opponent       H/A  eFG%
Clemson         12-Jan-11   Georgia Tech    H   83.3
Iowa            20-Jan-19   Illinois        H   83.0
Ohio State      6-Mar-11    Wisconsin       H   83.0
Oregon          4-Feb-17    Arizona         H   82.6
Providence      23-Feb-14   Butler          A   82.1
Pitt            9-Mar-13    DePaul          A   81.5
Illinois        6-Jan-11    Northwestern    H   80.7
Virginia Tech   25-Feb-17   Boston College  A   80.4
West Virginia   31-Jan-07   Rutgers         A   80.4
Illinois        9-Dec-10    Iowa            A   80.2
Arizona         7-Mar-09    Stanford        H   80.0

Yes, you’re reading that correctly. Two of the best shooting performances of the entire decade have occurred when Iowa has played the Illini at Carver Hawkeye Arena. Go figure. Continue reading →

A very brief history of the Big East’s 1990s-era experiment with six fouls

mourning

Those were the days. Sort of.

Every time my colleague Dick Vitale sees Zion Williamson take a seat on the bench after picking up two first-half fouls, he launches into an impassioned and loquacious plea (it’s true!) for increasing the number of personal fouls allowed per player to six.

And every time that happens, Twitter reacts to Dickie V with arch and snarky dismissiveness (it’s true!) and says it would never work.

Young turks on social media say, hey, great, just what we need, more fouls. Old geezers say, hey, I remember the old six-foul Big East from the 1990s, and it was awful.

Well, score one for the old geezers. Six fouls is not the answer, at least not now, and the Big East proved it between 1990 and 1992. (For the record, the Trans America Athletic Conference, the forerunner of today’s Atlantic Sun, joined the Big East in taking the six-foul rule out for a spin at that same time.) Continue reading →

All coaches are interim

iu

(AP)

The last push notification of 2018 told me Steve Alford had been let go by UCLA, and it got me to thinking about just how unique his career has been. The ex-Bruin head coach has been nothing if not innovative in his comings and goings.

If you’re looking at college basketball fixtures that have been as famous for as long as Alford, you’re working from a really short list. Jim Boeheim, of course. Plus Mike Krzyzewski, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, and Danny Manning, certainly, but not too many others. Relative newcomers like Roy Williams and Bill Self, for example, were still anonymous assistants at North Carolina and Oklahoma State, respectively, when Alford won a national title as a player at Indiana.

What’s interesting about Alford in stark contrast to other hoary holdovers from the ’80s is that, to an extent that’s unusual and that far outstrips mere maturation, he seemed to change before our eyes. Continue reading →