thanks added to our basketball list.
"Don't argue with an idiot, he'll drag you down to his level and beat you with experience."
ENTJ
Another good link is one that jgisland tweeted to me today. I highly recommend everyone checks it out:
http://www.thebasketballdistribution.com/
Also, if you're on twitter, TZI and JG had a good conversation today discussing the team (and TZI even got Ryan Thoburn involved in another one as well) that's worth your time. I would link to it, but my work recently blocked Twitter (despite the fact that I do in fact use it for work, so hopefully this will be fixed soon) so I can't find the link. Their handles on twitter:
jgisland
TZiskBuff
I ran across another site last night that the guy from basketball distribution seems to have some involvement in. It is geared toward the NBA but there is a post yesterday with a great glossary/explanation of nearly every advanced stat and method out there. If you are interested in this stuff, read this.
http://thecity2.com/2011/12/01/the-c...stical-primer/
Ken pomeroy is on the cbssports.com podcast today, i haven't listened to it yet, I will this afternoon, but it has to be good.
I will be the first to admit stats can be very misleading, you can backup completely insane arguments at times with some random stats taken out of context or analyzed in a vacuum. You always need to look at any stat and ask yourself, "does this pass the eye test?"
This article by Drew Cannon in Basketball Prospectus does a great job of analyzing stats taken out of context and passing the eye test. I highly recommend the read.
That was a great read.Originally Posted by jgisland
On a similar note, I've always thought the "pace" number was misleading. Or maybe not so much misleading as it is used incorrectly. It makes sense as a modifier to total stats (points, rebounds, assists, etc.) and allows us to compare Wisconsin to Kentucky on a more apples-to-apples basis.
But what it doesn't really do is tell you whether a team plays a certain style. To get there, we'd really need a "relative pace" stat that told us how much a team plays above or below the standard pace of the opponents it has played in those actual games. "Relative pace" could, for example, show us that a certain team from the BiG is actually pushing pace despite it being below the national pace average due to the opponents it plays. If a team that fit that profile and you were playing them in the NCAAt, the pace stat might tell you that they like to play slow. But relative pace would give you the more accurate assessment that if you try to speed things up you're actually playing right into their hands.
Not to continually pimp kenpom.com, but he mentioned massey ratings today in his blog. I had never personally heard of the ratings site, I don't pretend to understand this comparative college basketball ratings page on their site, but it certainly intrigues me.
Does anybody have experience with the Massey site? I am going to do some investigating into those ratings on the site, but it looks like there are about 20 different ratings on the site.
Anybody who follows kenpom.com will find his blog post interesting today, he has been taking a bit of heat for his ratings as he still has Wisconsin so high (2nd) after their past few bad losses.
if Wisconsin:
do something to fix Wisconsin
else:
do normal calculations
computer nerds will love this. I wonder if he will do some trending analysis, because I think we are much better in the past 5 games than we were in our first 5 games.
Trending is pretty overrated unless there is a significant change to the team like getting a player back from injury or losing a player to injury. The last game is more relevant than the first game, but I think you'd be surprised by how small the change in relevance actually is.
computer nerds will love this. I wonder if he will do some trending analysis, because I think we are much better in the past 5 games than we were in our first 5 games.
That is a great blog post. Especially the part about "deserving" to be #2. I wish we had someone/thing like Kenpom for football, too (Sagarin predictor is OK for football, but nowhere near the same level of in-depth analysis).
Anybody who follows this thread jump on twitter right now and follow @sloansportsconf and follow #ssachat. Sports analytic's chat. Dean Oliver, Daryl Morey, Rich Bucher and many others participating.
Done.
Found this interesting:
Q) @SloanSportsConf how large a role does analytics play in NCAA sports? HS statistics readily avail in today's world... #SSAChat
A) @ESPNStatsInfo Hard to use analytics for HS plyers but it has started, see krossover. But analytics for tactics - yes
FYI - @espnstatsinfo is being manned by Dean Oliver today
It was a big weekend in the world of sports stat geeks, the MIT Sloans Sports Conference took pace in Boston. ESPN's True Hoop Blog had nice coverage that is worth checking out. On Twitter #ssac was used as the hashtag to post about the conference, lost of good twitter conversations went on.
Wayne Winston, (former Dallas Mavs stat guy and University of Indiana Professor) has as much of a take down piece as you will get in the stats world. Going after ESPN's John Hollinger's PER.
TeamRankings.com is having a Stat Geek Idol. A "stats blog off" if you will. To a surprise of probably nobody I find this stuff fascinating.
But there was a article called Lehigh, Duke, And The Equalizing Power Of Free Throws.
This part I found really interesting.
Seeing as there are typically 34 fouls called per 132 possessions – or roughly 25.7 percent of possessions (as not every foul ends a possession)
According to this analysis, just over every three extra foul calls are connected to a one-point swing in favor of the underdog. As minimal as it may sound, a lone point is equivalent to approximately 3.5% of win probability according to Pythagorean expectations (such as those used on KenPom.com).
The underdog hasn’t seen such happy results in all the high-foul games this year. Ohio State, Kansas State and Louisville all covered the spread (albeit by less than two points) in games with more than 40 fouls. But 16-seed UNC-Asheville nearly beat Syracuse in a 37-foul game and 15-seed Norfolk State pulled off its own improbable upset in a 39-foul game. 11-seed Colorado won their second-round matchup in a 40-foul affair as well.
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