For NBCSports.com: Purdue’s Life After Hummel

In what to me is an awesome piece of news, I’ve been invited by Mike Miller to write a few articles for NBCSports.com this season.  The first one went live yesterday, and takes a statistics-oriented look into the question of how Purdue has managed to play like an elite team this year without Robbie Hummel, after struggling mightily without him at the end of last year.

As a teaser, here’s one of the tables from the article, showing that E’Twaun Moore was forced to carry a ridiculous load after Hummel went down last season, and struggled to do it.  But he’s been able to dial his Shot% back down to normal-for-him this year, and has seen his offense numbers bounce most of the way back to their 2010 pre-Hummel-injury levels:

To read the rest of the piece, head over to NBCSports.com.

All I Want For Christmas Is An Offensive Rebounder

In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d dole out some gifts to 5 teams that have some glaring weaknesses.

PITTSBURGH

Pitt has the #1 offense in the nation (all ranks throughout the article are from the Pomeroy ratings), but ranks only 43rd in defense, which is a pretty big red flag, in terms of contending for a national title.  Their main problems are a lack of turnovers (234th) and steals (246th), 3pt defense (223rd), and few blocks (114th).

Santa’s Bringing Them – Ayron Hardy, Jacksonville.  The  6’5” senior was named A-Sun Defensive Player of the Year in 2008-09.  He averages a steal every 20 opponent possessions (13th), blocks 4.7% of opponent shots (242nd), and helps anchor a Jacksonville defense that holds opponents to only 29.1% from deep (41st).  The fact that he’s an extremely efficient role player on offense (130.2 ORtg, 16.7 %Poss) is a sweet bonus.

Similarity Predictions: 2nd Round (Sunday)

I'll start with the prediction chart for all of Sunday's games, then get to the previews for the Big 12 games, which are also cross posted over at Upon Further Review.  If you are unfamiliar with my similarity predictions, read about the methods here.  Also, sorry about the ugly tables - I tried a new method of posting them, and it didn't work so well.  You live, you learn.

SIMILARITY vs. POMEROY
GAME			POMEROY	SIMILARITY
Syracuse	-	Gonzaga	Syr +8.5 (78%)	Syr +11 (84%)
Ohio St	-	Georgia Tech	OSU +4.5 (68%)	OSU +7.5 (77%)
Maryland	-	Michigan St	MD +3.5 (64%)	MD +9 (81%)
West Virginia	-	Missouri	WVU +2.5 (60%)	MU +3 (62%)
Wisconsin	-	Cornell	Wisc +8.5 (82%)	Corn +2.5 (61%)
Pittsburgh	-	Xavier	Xav +1.5 (56%)	Xav +2 (57%)
Purdue	-	Texas A&M	Pur +0.5 (51%)	Pur +4.5 (69%)
Purdue w/o Hummel	-	Texas A&M	Pur +0.5 (51%)	A&M +3.5 (79%)
Duke	-	California	Duke +8 (78%)	Duke +9.5 (82%)

Similarity Scores: Title Contenders

This is part 3 (or 5, depending on if you count the posts at UFR) of the Similarity Scores series. The post on how the scores are calculated is here, in case you missed it.  Tonight I'll be taking a look at which teams from the past are most similar to the current AP Top 10, and how those teams fared in the NCAA tournament.

[Data is from games through March 1, 2008.]

The Big 12 post ended up checking in at a Posnanskian length, which is usually a bad thing for anyone other than Joe, so I'm going to keep the commentary to a minimum this time.  Also, there will be a couple changes to the lists themselves.  First, I'm only including teams that made the NCAA tournament.  If they weren't good enough to make it, they can't be THAT good of a comp.  And second, I'm adding two new columns to these graphs: NCAA seed, and PASE (Performance Against Seed Expectation).  This tells to what extent each team exceeded or fell short of expectations, relative to their seed in the big dance.

2010 Syracuse - Historical Comps

SCORE	YR	TEAM	SEED	W's	PASE
90	2009	Syracuse	3	2	0.1
88	2005	Syracuse	4	0	-1.5
88	2008	Kansas	1	6	2.6
88	2006	Kansas	4	0	-1.5
87	2005	North Carolina	1	6	2.6
87	2007	Kansas	1	3	-0.4
87	2006	Florida	3	6	4.1
86	2007	Georgetown	2	4	1.6
86	2004	Providence	5	0	-1.1
86	2008	Georgetown	2	1	-1.4
		Average	2.6	2.8	0.5

Pretty all-or-nothing here - 3 champs, and 3 first round upsets.  But notice that the upsets are all 4/5 seeds, meaning they may have had good numbers, but they apparently didn't take care of business as well as this year's Orangemen.  Limit it to seeds 1 through 3, and you're looking at an average of 4 wins, and a +1.3 PASE.  Or, looking at just 1 seeds, where 'Cuse expects to end up this year, we see 5 wins and a +1.6 PASE.