Category Archives: hoops

Sudden death and narratives

(Greg Fiume/Getty)

We tell ourselves NCAA tournament stories in order to love. March Madness is a treasure, surprises always occur, and each turn of events demands immediate explanation. We all have our narratives.

Here are some of my stories. I carry these with me serene in the knowledge they must be dashed by events someday….

Absolutely any team can lose one game, but only teams above a certain threshold can win six.

Not so much the mere presence of threes starting in the 1980s as their increasing prevalence since the teens has introduced new suspense in tournament outcomes.

Some seed lines are winning more games than previously and as a result old values for “expected” wins require an update (see below).

The champion’s always a team from the top 12 of the Week 6 AP poll and from the top six at KenPom on Selection Monday morning, etc., etc.

Continue reading →

The best games of tournament offense “ever”

Historically great tournament offense has a rich tradition stretching from 2003 to last Sunday. (AP/Mary Altaffer)

This past weekend in the round of 32, teams kept putting up ridiculously good numbers for offense. I would say as much in real time, and after two or three instances of this I was asked: Well, just how good are these performances, historically speaking?

Good question.

Here’s what I have for the top 25 games of NCAA tournament offense ever. As usual, “ever” is understood to encompass just the most recent 29 percent of tournaments as archived faithfully by my friend Ken.

Tough luck, old times! You should have tracked offensive boards and turnovers sooner and more frequently.

But before anyone asks: Villanova’s “Perfect Game” against Georgetown in 1985 comes in at 1.16 points per possession. Perfect shooting, yes, but turnovers were committed.

This is a very unofficial curation. Corrections and additions are welcome.

Still, it is likely that four of the best six tournament games on offense ever came from just two individual tournament runs. And one of those teams didn’t even reach the national title game. March Madness is beautiful, truly.

Continue reading →

Why “selection”?

The first selection committee: Ned Irish, pictured in 1943. (Associated Press)

I said this:

Naturally, this begs the question of what we should do instead.

The problem’s in the very term “selection,” isn’t it? True, the NCAA’s decision making body doesn’t really carry that name. It’s not the selection committee, it’s the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee. But we say Selection Sunday and “the selection show,” and we’ve done so for years.

No one bats an eye when we say “selection” because we’re using the term accurately with regard to the NCAA tournament. Selection’s precisely what is happening. Selection is exactly what should not occur, however, in anything rightly understood as sports. Selection renders that which is being selected a passive vessel.

In other sports, teams make the playoffs or qualify for the Champions League. We even talk like this in college basketball when we see teams win their conference tournaments. What we call an “automatic bid” is a euphemism for mere sports normalcy.

Instead of selecting teams in March we should choose criteria in May.

Continue reading →

Bid thieves and March vocabulary

In 2021 Georgetown was a bid thief’s bid thief. (Georgetown Athletics)

Every March we’re awash in college basketball terms where bottom-up usage has filled a vacuum or triumphed over official top-down naming. “NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship” is a mouthful. “March Madness” is perfect.

The NCAA trademark March Madness has a byzantine origin story. Even the lightest 2020s search shows this catchy bit of alliteration to be older than basketball itself. The term begins to produce more search hits in the 1920s and 1930s, when March madness could refer to gardening, the weather, or anything else happening that month. Actually, for a heartbeat it looked like March Madness might become the exclusive possession of English football.

Then Indiana newspapers covering high school hoops in the 1930s got busy. A poem celebrating the state high school tournament next door in Illinois limned “the March madness” and was published in 1939 by the Illinois High School Association.

Four decades later the IHSA commissioned March Madness, a history of the Illinois state tournament. From his chair at CBS Chicago in the 1970s, a young Brent Musburger picked up the term. Musburger took it with him to the mother ship when CBS began carrying the tournament in 1982. March Madness stuck. NCAA lawyers have been shooing away unauthorized users and uses ever since.

Continue reading →

This is the golden age of shot volume

Scoring efficiency is up significantly in Division I men’s hoops in 2024 even as shooting accuracy remains more or less the same as it was last year. Teams are simply attempting more shots.

Giving credit for trends on the largest scale is challenging, but one version of events could venture to say the praise for our current high-scoring game might go to Kelvin Sampson and the NCAA, in that order.

Sampson is the guru of shot volume. This season the guru has landed in what is still, even with the presence of his Houston team, the lowest shot volume league of the six major conferences.

Broadly speaking, the Big 12 hasn’t traditionally done shot volume. More precisely, the league has perhaps hosted two schools of thought represented tidily by recent national champions. The Baylor school does say yes, please, to shot volume. The more influential paradigm, however, has been the Kansas school which has shown vividly you can win national titles, plural, without this volume stuff. This season the Jayhawks are pushing this to an extreme even by their own standards, cruising toward a No. 2 seed while ranking No. 67 out of 80 major-conference teams for shot volume.

Then there’s Sampson. When you watch a Houston game in 2024 the analyst will still say the Cougars’ best play call on offense is a missed shot. This remains a fair description as far as it goes, but tonight, for example, UH will host Cincinnati and based on Big 12 play the Cougars won’t even be the best offensive rebounding team in the building. Houston in 2024 carries the lowest whole-season rank for offensive rebound percentage of any post-pandemic UH team.

Continue reading →

Reduce the number of timeouts

Anyone with the effrontery to suggest improvements for Division I men’s college basketball in 2024 should begin with the welcome elephant in the room. The game is flourishing. Arguably it’s never been better.

Scoring is up because efficiency has increased markedly. Back in the aughts when “points per possession” first started to be bandied about online, it was a notable occurrence to run across an offense clocking in at 1.07. Now the major conferences collectively score points at that rate in league play.

The change to the block/charge rule this season has been a spectacular success. Offensive fouls per game have declined from 3.7 in 2021-22 to 2.2 this year. Turnovers are down significantly across D-I. Scarcity in giveaways means abundance in points. Ours is truly a golden age of shot volume.

Many fans of the game clamored for reform on this front, often in anguished posts on social media. Then the NCAA stepped in, made the change, and suddenly the issue has subsided drastically. Now everyone can promptly set about finding other things to complain about, like for instance there being too many timeouts. Be that as it may, the new block/charge rule has been a triumph. Take a bow, NCAA.

Continue reading →

Preserving madness

Mark Norris/Houston Public Media

One of the many joys of the NCAA tournament is that it can be savored as two distinct events. There is of course the desire to see the strongest teams with the best records settle this question head-to-head. This dynamic emerges over the second weekend and can on occasion shine forth to brilliant effect at the Final Four.

The first weekend’s radically different. The last five brackets in particular have shown how fully the round of 64 embraces the term March Madness.

Over that time we’ve seen two No. 1 seeds fall in the round of 64. We’re on a three-year streak of a No. 2 seed losing to a No. 15 each March. These are upheavals that “should” occur just one and seven percent of the time, respectively. We’ve been awash in rarity since 2018.

The round of 64 holds two qualities that are scarce if not wholly absent anywhere else in team sports as media properties. First there’s the sheer volume of the knockout round: 32 games in 36 hours, give or take. Often there are four games happening at once and every one constitutes the most important 40 minutes of the season to the teams and their entire fan bases.

Continue reading →

Major conferences as evaluative labor-savers

We hardly knew ye. (Photo: Shelly Hanks)

Recently at ESPN.com I offered some forecasting on what shape college basketball may take next year when the term “power five” is, at last, accurate in basketball. In summary, the Big 12 might continue to swagger smugly around the top of the KenPom leader board, the ACC may again bring up the rear, and in between these poles the already fast-improving SEC could be strengthened further still by virtue of expansion alone.

Whenever pieces concerning the major conferences are posted, it is customary to field responses saying this or that additional league should also be regarded as meriting the label in question. Fair enough. Here is one working definition:

Over a five-year period the mean of a major conference’s performance will be equivalent to outscoring an average Division I opponent by at least 10 points over 100 possessions.

Scoring margin over 100 possessions is of course a nod to what’s shown as AdjEM (adjusted efficiency margin) at KenPom. Tracking this over five-year windows prevents one-season outliers from wagging the dog, and for that the ACC is thankful. Otherwise the unsightly +8.58 the league coughed up last year would have resulted in the ACC’s major-conference membership card being revoked.

Continue reading →

The already and perhaps fleetingly historic UNC perimeter defense

They appear saddened by their 15 percent shooting beyond the arc. (Photo: Seth Seebaugh)

Last night Wake Forest shot 3-of-20 on its threes in a 21-point loss at North Carolina. Both the final score and the opponent’s three-point haplessness are rapidly becoming par for the course with the Tar Heels.

UNC’s conference opponents have connected on just 22.5 percent of their threes. We haven’t even reached February, of course, and these numbers will shift over North Carolina’s remaining 12 conference games. Nevertheless, 570 possessions of basketball constitutes a fair sample size in its own right. At a minimum one might note that over that stretch the Tar Heels’ opponents were historically bad at making threes.

Just how extreme have UNC’s opponents been in their three-point misery, where is this coming from, and what happens now?

One answer to the first question would be “very.” The conference season is equally young for the entire ACC, yet to this point North Carolina’s three-point defense is nearly three standard deviations better than the conference mean.

Bear in mind Division I as a whole’s making a business-as-usual 33.6 percent of its threes this season. Actually the Tar Heels themselves have allowed opponents to shoot a rather more normal 28.5 percent from beyond the arc in all games. Non-conference opponents like Lehigh (13-of-33 on threes) or Kentucky (8-of-23) didn’t faint dead away at the sight of this defense.

Continue reading →

Loving an always changing game

The NCAA tournament is shockingly close to perfect because fairness is sacrificed so ruthlessly and deliberately at the altar of drama. Every March without fail we learn again that literally any team can lose in a single-elimination bracket that requires six or seven wins for a championship. Possibly this isn’t the fairest method for determining a national title. Well, sports aren’t fair. The tournament’s a national treasure.

Incrementally and miraculously, the NCAA tournament evolved over the years into an iconic event worthy of Naismith’s game. The defining features of the tournament are access and single elimination. Limiting access to the top 68 teams in any given rating system would effectively kill the magic. You would still have a compelling win-or-go-home bracket populated by the top teams, it just wouldn’t be March Madness.

If hoops had been around in Talleyrand’s day he would have said smoothing out the randomness by eliminating single elimination would be worse than a crime, it would be a mistake. The randomness that governs which teams lose one time is the point. Then, in the compensatory fashion of any trustworthy dialectic, the teams that emerge without losing even once turn out to be not quite so random after all.

Access and single elimination are the unchanging sinews of a championship event for a changing game. This tournament is irreplaceable, no less so because the evolution of the sport itself has completely changed the content of its championship event.

Continue reading →