Contributing to SportsIllustrated.com: Charts for Luke Winn's Final Four preview.

Instead of writing a post this week for Luke Winn's Tourney Blog, I contributed some charts to his massive final Four preview. Click through to the Final Four Intel Report to find what categories the Final Four teams under-and over-performed in during the NCAA tournament, relative to their established rest-of-season levels:

For SportsIllustrated.com: Sweet 16 Matchup Issues

My latest is over at Luke Winn’s SI Tourney Blog. In it, I use adjusted efficiency data from Ken Pomeroy and adjusted box score data from TeamRankings.com’s possession-based college basketball game simulations to spotlight a few remaining teams that have matchup issues on defense. Summary: FSU should do great against VCU, Duke doesn’t want to see Kansas in the final, and Ohio State’s defense may be slightly overrated.

Catching up on links

I’ve been delinquent this week in posting links to my articles elsewhere, so here’s a catch up.

On Monday, I had a piece at SI on Luke Winn’s Tourney Blog that I’m rather proud of: a summary of all my defensive charting efforts this year. If you read only one thing I’ve written all year, I hope it’s that.

Tuesday on NBC Sports, I took a look at whether this year’s tournament was expected to be more or less crazy than usual. The verdict was that the first round probably wouldn’t feature any more upsets than usual, but the later rounds should be wide open.

Though I’m not mentioned by name, I wrote the blurbs for the Southeast region for this Tuesday picks post on Chad Millman’s Blog. The NCAA bracket picks themselves were straight from the TeamRankings.com mainframe.

And of course, I’ve had lots of posts over at TeamRankings.com. One nice one from this week examines how much a healthy Kyrie Irving was worth to Duke at the start of this year (which is a different question from how much he’ll be worth in his return, due to issues with his game condition, and amount of practice with the team).

Finally, my “official” bracket is up over at NBC Sports. Full disclosure: I didn’t actually enter this one in any of my pools, but it’s a fairly close copy of my ideal bracket. That said, I have zero confidence in my picks this year. I may or may not do better than these guys:

Please Donate To Japan Disaster Relief

Jonathan Foster of From The Barn prompted this post. I hope he doesn’t mind, but I’m going to just reprint his plea to support the Japan relief efforts below:

Hello fellow college basketball bloggers,

By now I am sure you are acutely aware of the disaster unfolding throughout Japan. After a massive earthquake, one of the five strongest in recorded history and a subsequent tsunami, there is indescribable devastation. An estimated 10,000 died, thousands more are injured, millions are homeless and a struggling with access to basic needs like food shelter and water, and hundreds of thousands of others have been evacuated from their homes due to the threat of nuclear meltdowns at several power plants throughout the northeast of the country. It is a horrific situation.

Meanwhile, on our side of the Pacific Ocean, we are gearing up for out favorite time of year, the NCAA tournament. Over the next few days and weeks, many of our websites will see the most traffic we see all season. Please consider using this increased traffic to help the people of Japan, and place either a new post asking your readers to donate, or consider adding a link your various open threads, live blogs, game previews, or we got snubbed rants that you'll be posting between now Thursday.

The people of Japan face a monumental effort in rebuilding their country and their lives, and the least we can all do is throw a few links and few dollars their way. Every little bit helps.

For those willing to encourage their readers to help the cause, I'd suggest links to the American Red Cross dedicated Japan Relief Fund, or donating directly to the Japanese Red Cross, made extra easy by the fine folks at google.

Thanks for reading this, and please considering making a donation and making it easy for your readers to donate too.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Foster

Writer and Owner of From The Barn, A Golden Gophers Basketball Blog

This was a classy idea on Jon’s part, and I hope many of you will contribute.

Defensive Score Sheet: Colorado vs. Kansas

For background on what’s going on here, see my first Project Defensive Score Sheet post.

Here’s the table; notes are after the break.

Defensive Score Sheet: Oklahoma State vs. Kansas

I’m back, baby!

OK, so I still have quite a backlog to get through, but I’ve already done the actual charting on a couple of them, and just need to do data entry and formatting. And Saturday looks to be a marathon charting day for the rest.

Here’s the chart for Thursday’s game:

For NBCSports.com: Do Conference Tourneys Matter?

Posted today over at the Peacock: my article that looks at NCAA tournament performance over the past 13 years to determine whether winning your conference tournament is a good thing (higher seed!), a bad thing (tired legs!), or a wash.

For NBCSports.com: BYU, SDSU, and balance

My latest for NBCSports tackles tomorrow’s BYU-SDSU game, and specifically which of the teams has the balance and interior contributions necessary for an NCAA title run. Hint: The Jimmer doesn’t post up.

Don’t Worry, defense, I haven’t forgotten about you.

I just wanted to post a quick note to let everyone know that I haven’t abandoned Project Defensive Score Sheet. I have DVR recordings of the last three Kansas games, and I’ll eventually get around to charting them. I’ve just fallen behind because my flesh and blood girlfriend managed to pry me away from the computer long enough to smuggle me into Canada over the long weekend. And I won’t be able to catch up until after this coming weekend, because family’s visiting me in sunny San Diego, and I’d feel like a poor host if I turned them loose on their own just so that I could spend six hours watching basketball games that I already know the outcomes of. So, I’ll probably fall a bit further behind, then catch up in a massive 4-game post sometime next week.

Until then, best of luck to your favorite team.

Defensive Score Sheet: Iowa State@Kansas

[If you’re unfamiliar with the series, please check out my first Project Defensive Score Sheet post, or else you’re probably going to be very confused.]

Kansas had little trouble with Iowa State, but if you look at the final numbers, you’ll see that the Cyclones managed 0.95 points per possession, which is fine, but not Texas-esque. However, the numbers if the first half were Texas-esque, and with the game basically in hand before halftime, it’s easy to hypothesize that, had the Jayhawks played poorly on offense and thus needed to keep playing good defense, they might have been able to do so. In that light, besides the usual full-game totals, I’m adding a few summary columns for each half, so you can see which players were worse (slacking off?) in the latter period.

Here’s the table. [Apologies to mobile users if this is unreadable, but this was just too large to fit into my usual template.] My comments are after the jump.

Five (And One) For Friday

No new analysis tonight, but I have a couple posts I want to pass on, so I figured I might as well supplement them with a few more that I’ve enjoyed throughout the week. Most of these are taken from the Daily Feast, which I’ve been writing putting together every morning for the TeamRankings.com blog, so if you followed me over there, a lot of them will seem familiar.

First, the ones directly involving yours truly.

1. Jesse Newell of the Lawrence Journal-World and KUSports.com has apparently been following Project Defensive Score Sheet, because he has compiled the Kansas defensive stats for all the Big 12 games from my charts. It’s something I’d been meaning to do, but kept putting off, usually in favor of, you know, actually watching some basketball. I try to do that now and then. I’m glad he took the initiative, because he did a much more thorough job on the individual player write ups than I would have.

2. This one is a day late and a dollar short. Here’s my third article for NBCSports.com, which previews the two-days-ago North Carolina at Duke game. In hindsight, I think I did a pretty good job. I mean, doesn’t this sound like a bit like a recap of the actual game:

“… the Tar Heels, especially Harrison Barnes, have been playing out of their minds since Kendall Marshall took over at point guard. But that new car smell has to fade away some time, and Cameron Indoor seems a pretty reasonable place for that to happen.”

The Tarheels went to Durham, played out of their minds for a half, and then faded in the second as the Cameron Crazies went, well, crazy. So, maybe a day late and a dollar short was a misnomer. Two days late and a dollar up might be more accurate. Because if you placed a bet on the latest college basketball odds after reading my article, with the way I hyped up UNC, I bet you took the Tarheels and the points (+10). Win for you.

Now, here are a few other stories from this week that I want to make sure you caught:

• Maybe the most exciting news of the week took place off the court, with the release of this year’s new and improved NCAA tournament schedule. I agree 100% with this headline.
• Like Oregon’s court? Liar. Either way, check out what a similar design aesthetic might have produced at some other schools.
• Nathan Walker of The Basketball Distribution created a fun little junk stat called Offensive Decision%. Basically, good actions divided by total actions. Go check out the details. He also came up with a new way of estimating individual defensive ratings from box score stats. To be honest, I haven’t really looked at the equations in depth to see if they check out, so for now I’m taking his word for it. But he’s always right, so that should be fine.
• One of my favorite quotes is from the Chaitanya Charitamrita: “Essential truth spoken concisely is true eloquence.” By that definition, this may be the most elegant website in the history of the internet: DidTheCavsWinLastNight.com

Have a good weekend, folks. Tomorrow should be a fun one.

Heady Company

I don’t usually do link posts, but there’s one making the rounds today that’s worth a mention, for three reasons:

• It’s a pretty good list of what somebody thought were the 30 best college basketball blogs, so anybody looking for more daily reading material should make sure they’re already hip to those listed.
• The guy who pulled the list together wrote me a polite email about it.
• Audacity Of Hoops made it as one of 5 blogs listed in the “Stats” section. Huzzah!

So, head on over to College Crunch, and enjoy.

Defensive Score Sheet: Missouri@Kansas

If you’re unfamiliar with this series, check out my first Project Defensive Score Sheet post. This one’s a day late, but these numbers are pretty ugly, so I doubt anybody was exactly giddy with anticipation.

Let’s start with the table:

Nerds of a Feather Work Together

I don’t know if anybody has noticed my recent more frequent (and during usual business hours) posting, but that was a bit of foreshadowing. I’m excited to announce that, starting today, my primary job for the rest of the college basketball season will be to work with TeamRankings.com. I’ll be doing a lot of behind-the-scenes analysis and marketing work, but you guys will mostly notice that I should shortly begin posting regularly on their blog. I’ll continue posting here in my free time, but in order to read everything I write, I encourage you to bookmark the TR blog, and follow TR on Twitter (@TeamRankingsCBB for college basketball, @TeamRankings for general sports). So, head on over and check TeamRankings out. Here’s a fun place to start.

Defensive Score Sheet: Kansas@Nebraska

[For a recap of what the numbers below mean, and what this series is all about, see my first Project Defensive Score Sheet post.]

Here’s the score sheet (note that Nebraska’s team line has 10 free throws, because those were clearly strategic end-of-game intentional fouls). My thoughts are after the break.

Free throws and “Luck”

In light of today’s great post on Free Throw Plus by John Ezekowitz, I thought I’d share something I noticed a couple days ago. I had heard some Twitter chatter about Illinois consistently ranking low in Ken Pomeroy’s Luck metric, which essentially tells you which teams have tended to be on the right/wrong side of close games. (They’ve fared no better than 158th in the past 7 years.) It made me wonder if they were doing something specific that would lead to their low ranking. So, I decided to see if any of the stats kept by Pomeroy correlate to “Luck.”

Using 2010 team stats, here’s what I found. I highlighted SOS-related stats in yellow, offensive free throw stats in green, defensive free throw stats in red, and bolded tempo. The bars at the right represent the magnitude of the correlation, but keep in mind that the sign also matters:

Defensive Score Sheet: Kansas@Texas Tech

[For explanation of what’s below, check out the original Project Defensive Score Sheet post.]

This one will be quick, as it wasn’t a very intriguing game, and I’ve got a busy day. Here’s the table, notes after the break.

Defensive Score Sheet: Kansas State@Kansas

[As always, check out my first Project Defensive Score Sheet post for information on what this all mean. Also, shout out to Ray Floriani for taking a cue from by good/bad shots tracking, and doing it for St. Bonaventure.]

Sorry this is so late. I promise tonight’s game against Texas Tech will be up tomorrow. Here’s the table. My thoughts are after the break.

Time of Possession & single-team pace

Ohio State’s narrow escape against Northwestern last night presents a great opportunity to talk about an idea that I floated on Twitter a few days ago: keeping track of time of possession (TOP) for basketball teams. That was inspired by an absolutely fantastic post by Rohan Cruyff, who used shot clock data to break down NBA teams’ pace into offensive and defensive “Speed Indexes.” His basic idea: a single number that represents the pace of a team and/or game doesn’t really describe what happens on the court. A fast-paced game can be cause by one team playing at a normal speed, but the other team shooting super early in the shot clock.

Or, as happened last night, a slow-paced game can be caused by one team running the clock down on every possession.

I went through the play-by-play for last night’s game and recorded how much time elapsed on the clock before the first action (shot, turnover, or foul that leads to free throws) of each team’s possession. Here’s what that distribution looked like for each team:

Defensive Score Sheet: Kansas@Colorado

For those of you new to this series, check out the original Project Defensive Score Sheet post. The rest of you know what I’m about to say…

“Here’s the chart (click to enlarge). Notes are after the break.”