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:

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: 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.

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:

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.

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.

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.”

Defensive Score Sheet: Texas@Kansas

Better late than never, right? Being a Kansas fan, this wasn’t a fun one to score. Here’s the chart, notes are after the break.

In Search of: The First Six Minutes Of Texas@Kansas

[EDIT: I’m no longer searching. Huge thanks to Luke Winn, who probably has access to some super secret SI footage vault, for sending me video of the first half. I should get this game scored tonight, just in time to watch Kansas@Colorado.]

Here on the west coast, CBS preempted the beginning of the Texas-Kansas game with 10 minutes of UCLA shooting free throws to close out their win over Stanford.  I don’t really want to post the defensive charting for a partial game, so the Project Defensive Score Sheet stats will be delayed until I can find a source for the opening 6 minutes.  Or until I give up.  If anybody has a link to an online replay stream, or if you want to take a video of the beginning off of a DVR recording, let me know in the comments (or drop me an email).  Thanks!

Project Defensive Score Sheet: Kansas@Baylor

[Check out the introduction to Project Defensive Score Sheet for info on what the numbers below mean.]

Let’s start with the chart (click to enlarge).  Notes after the break.

Project Defensive Score Sheet: Nebraska@Kansas

[For background info, see my original Project Defensive Score Sheet post.]

When I started this project, and saw that the Jayhawks’ first three opponents were Michigan, Iowa State and Nebraska, I figured the defensive charting would be what helped me stay interested in what I assumed would be fairly easy victories.  Not so much.

Nebraska’s first half defense was the most impressive I’ve seen from any unit in the few games that I’ve charted.  The help was coming at the exact right time, and recovery back to shooters was great.  To be honest, I’m not sure whether Kansas made adjustments at halftime, or if Nebraska just didn’t quite play as well, but my subjective “Wow, these guys are good” feeling wasn’t nearly as strong in half two.  I guess allowing 4 straight dunks will do that.

Here are the numbers (click to enlarge).  Notes after the break.

Project Defensive Score Sheet: Kansas@Iowa State

Here’s Game 2 of my stab at charting individual defensive stats.  Check Game 1 for an introduction and explanation, otherwise you’ll have no clue what the alphabet soup is trying to tell you.

Before I get to the numbers, I have to complain about the TV coverage last night.  There were multiple times where I missed a turnover or shot attempt because the producers decided to show close ups of bench players celebrating a dunk, or something along those lines.  And then the announcers failed to clue me in on what had just happened (“Great play there by Iowa State” isn’t very informative, guys).  So, my stats didn’t quite line up with the box score at the end of the game, and I lumped the ~5 plays I was missing into the “Team” lines.  Ugh.

More notes and comments are after the break, but first, the tables (click for larger view):

Project Defensive Score Sheet: Kansas@Michigan

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I just read (most of) Dean Oliver’s Basketball On Paper for the first time.  A few of the chapters focus on defense, and there’s one specifically about individual defensive stats.  Oliver laments the lack of useful defensive data, and talks about a WNBA pet project of his: Project Defensive Score Sheet.  This was (is?) an effort to keep track of individual defensive credit or blame for all of the shots and turnovers a team allows.  After reading the chapter, I rushed to the internet in hopes of finding the results of his efforts, but was disappointed to find very little information available, and very few people attempting to continue or expand on the project.  [See the end of this post for a list of what I did find.]

I thought it would be fun, and possibly illuminating, to keep track of Oliver’s individual defensive stats for some college basketball games.  In a happy little coincidence, the top defensive team in the country happens to also be my favorite team, so I decided to try to chart as many Kansas games as time and TV coverage would allow, starting with this past Sunday’s game against Michigan.

It’s amazing how different the game-watching experience was when I was forced to pay close attention to defensive players.  I would never have otherwise noticed how active – and cagey – Jordan Morgan is.  More on that later.  Anyway, at this point, I don’t have any brilliant ideas on what to do with the numbers, so I’ll simply start by posting the results of each game.

Here’s the table (click for larger view); the explanation is after the break.