Prediction System Bracket Challenge: Final Standings

I’ll have another post later showing what the standings would be under some alternate scoring methods, but for now here’s how it looks with the default 1/2/4/8/16/32 system:

For info on each of the entries, check out my original post.

My Similarity Scores system is up in second place, basically because myself and Martin Manley were the only ones to pick West Virginia in the Final Four.  Pomeroy should probably really be in second, as his ratings had Duke on top every day except the one I used to fill out the bracket.  And both Yet Another Basketball Blog’s ratings and mine are derived by tweaking Pomeroy’s ratings, so Pomeroy is the true winner today.

Championship Game Preview

[NOTE: This will be cross posted over at UFR, hence the duplication of some info from previous AOH posts.]

Time for the last preview of the season (*sniff*). In the last two games, I told you that Butler was slightly favored to win a defensive struggle, because they’d take away Michigan State’s main offensive strength of rebounding and force a lot of Spartan turnovers; and that Duke was slightly favored against WVU, but whichever team could hit their jumpers and/or dominate the boards would win. Well, the Butler-MSU prediction was spot on, as the Bulldogs held Michigan State to their 2^nd lowest offensive rebounding % of the season, and got 19 points off turnovers (according to CBS). The Duke forecast was spot off, as Duke blew out the Mountaineers. But a look at the Four Factors box score shows that the teams were fairly even, except for eFG% - which the Blue Devils dominated largely due to an abnormally strong shooting night, making 13 of 25 from 3-pt range.

I won’t go into as much detail for the championship game, partly because I covered both teams pretty extensively in the semifinal previews. Check those out if you’re looking for the offensive/defensive key traits and similarity scores. By now we all know that Butler wins by playing a smothering man-to-man defense, controlling the defensive boards, forcing turnovers, and hoping they can scrape together enough points via transition opportunities, Matt Howard’s post play, Shelvin Mack’s drives and jumpers, and Gordon Heyward’s versatility – those three combine to take 75% of Butler’s shots while they’re in the game. Meanwhile, Duke wins by playing the best perimeter defense in the country, doing a bit better than average at limiting opponents’ offensive rebounds, and using what John Gasaway calls the “barrage factor” on offense – limiting turnovers and grabbing tons of offensive rebounds, so they get a lot of extra chances to make up for their usually non-elite shooting.

So what will happen when these two teams clash on Monday? Butler has been winning almost entirely due to their defensive rebounding and forced turnovers, but Duke is both the best offensive rebounding team and the least turnover-prone team that Butler has faced – not only so far in the tournament, but all season. However, Duke usually relies on those two factors to score – last night’s jump shot barrage notwithstanding. This is one of the clearest examples there is of a game where a couple of key areas will decide who wins. There’s always a chance that one team will get hot and make all the analysis moot, but it sure looks to me like Duke’s turnovers and offensive rebounds will be hugely important.

This weekend, I put together an Excel spreadsheet that adjusts Ken Pomeroy’s Game Plan data to account for opponent strength. If you want details, check out my last post here on Audacity Of Hoops. I used these adjusted numbers to predict the Four Factors numbers for the championship game, to give us an idea of what to expect:

You can see that Duke is expected to significantly outshoot Butler, and out-rebound them. Both teams should be able to limit their turnovers, and both may be able to get to the line more than average, with Butler having a slight advantage there. But the advantage in eFG% for Duke is huge, and Butler will need to do something to counteract that. Given the way they’ve been playing lately, they may be able to limit Duke’s offensive rebounding, and force more turnovers than predicted by the numbers. They must if they want to have any shot of winning, because it’s unlikely they’ll be able to outshoot the Blue Devils.

Now let’s take a look at the similar-opponent prediction:

The Vegas line is Duke by 7 as I write this, and both Pomeroy and the Similarity system have Duke as an even slightly larger favorite. All the signs point to a comfortable Duke victory. The only thing I can see that would make me second guess these numbers is the fact that Butler has done even better than predicted on the defensive glass, and in terms of forcing turnovers, during the NCAA tournament. They need to continue that in a big way to have any shot against Duke.

Butler-Duke Four Factors

I updated the Opponent-adjusted Four Factors spreadsheet to include last night’s games.  The actual team values didn’t change much, so no point in showing those again, but here are the predictions for Monday’s championship game:



I don’t think any of these should be a surprise to people who have been paying attention.  Duke’s offensive clinic against West Virginia was impressive, but a lot of that was due to them making a higher-then-expected percentage of their jumpers.  Obviously, if they’re on fire again Monday, it’ll be a blowout.  But a more likely scenario is a game that looks a lot like Butler-Michigan State, except with Duke turning the ball over less than Michigan State.  I expect Duke will win without the need for any last minute heroics, mostly by outshooting (and possible outrebounding) Butler.

[EDIT: I took a page from the basketball distribution, and used linear regression to map single game Four Factors values onto efficiency margin.  The numbers above work out to an 11.1 efficiency margin.  Adjusting for the 62-possession pace predicted by Pomeroy, that's a point margin of 6.9.  Obviously in Duke's favor.]

Opponent-Adjusted Four Factors

This is something I’ve been thinking about for some time, and I finally gave it a shot yesterday.  I should point out right up front that I haven’t done any kind of testing to see if the way I’ve implemented it makes sense, nor checked to see if the adjusted numbers are more predictive than raw Four Factors data.  But I wanted to get a rough draft of the system done before today’s games are underway – I’ll test and tweak in the off season.

My method was basically to reproduce the Pomeroy ratings, except using (for example) offensive and defensive OR% instead of offensive and defensive efficiency.  I tested the method first on efficiency, just to make sure I was able to reproduce Pomeroy’s numbers.  He actually weights the numbers based on how recent the games are, and I didn’t try to mimic that, but my numbers still essentially aligned with his:

That’s the easy part; I’ve done that before.  The trickier part was deciding what value to use for home field advantage for the various factors.  Pomeroy uses 1.4% per team for each number - he adds 1.4% to the home team’s offense and visitor’s defense, and subtracts 1.4% from the home defense and visiting offense.  I don’t know where he got that number, but I was able to roughly reproduce it (1.25%) by looking at only home-and-home games from this season, finding the average overall efficiency, and the average home efficiency, and then taking the square root of the ratio between the two:

( [Ave Home Eff] / [Ave Overall Eff] ) ^ 1/2 = (103.6/101.0)^0.5 = 1.0125

Since this makes sense, and seems to reproduce Pomeroy’s HFA number, I used this method to come up with the HFA adjustments for the Four Factors:

• eFG%: 1.007
• TO%: 0.980
• OR%: 1.007
• FTR: 1.031

Once I had these, all I had to do was re-do the opponent adjustments using the Four Factors and their HFA’s, instead of the efficiency values.  Then I looked to see if the outputs passed the smell test.  I’d say they look fine; here is a comparison of the raw and adjusted Four Factors rankings for the Final Four participants (click image for larger version):

I highlighted a few of the significant changes.  For the most part, all the teams look better in all the categories, but there are a few exceptions.  Here are a few notes:

• The only instances where the adjustment moved a team’s ranking down more than a couple spots were Butler’s eFG% and Michigan State’s FTR.
• Duke and West Virginia’s shooting numbers are not as bad as they seem – the adjustments pull them up to basically even with Butler and MSU.
• Michigan State’s turnover problem is as bad as it seems – especially with the adjustment improving Butler’s defensive TO%.
• The best three offensive rebounding teams in the nation are still alive.
• Butler doesn’t have as much of a defensive rebounding advantage as I thought.
• The FTR adjustment for MSU is interesting – I’m wondering if that is a result of Big Ten officials “letting them play.”

Of course, now that I have these numbers, the obvious temptation is to use them to predict the Four Factors numbers for tonight’s games.  I of course gave in, but right now I have no faith whatsoever in the accuracy of these.  Just for fun, though:

Eyeballing those, it looks like Butler wins by forcing Michigan State turnovers, and Duke wins by forcing West Virginia into a poor shooting night.  Sounds about right to me.

How They Won (Or Lost): Adjusted Efficiency by Region

The idea here is pretty simple.  I just took a team’s actual offensive and defensive efficiency for every game, and adjusted it to account for opponent ratings.  Then I averaged those adjusted efficiencies over all the games a team played.  This should not be thought of as who “deserved” to win each region, for a number of reasons (consistency, skewed numbers from blowouts, etc).  It’s merely showing you how well a team played while they were still alive.  Final Four teams are in bold.



The top three teams here have the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th best Margins in the whole bracket, behind only Duke.  It’s too bad only one of them was able to make the trip to Indy.  WVU won by playing the best defense in the whole tourney – yes, they’re even rated better than Butler. After their gimme against Morgan State, they then beat the teams that performed 4th, 5th, and best in the region. Marquette gets the “tough luck” award, as they turned in the best performance of any first-round loser.



This is either evidence of Tom Izzo’s genius, or of his insane luck, depending on which side of the fence you’re on.  I feel sorry for Tennessee, who beat Ohio State, then lost by a free throw to MSU - I can definitely see how they topped the chart.  And Michigan State wasn’t the best at anything (off/def/marg).  Georgetown and Kansas laid the biggest eggs here (obviously), both on the defensive end – congrats to Georgetown for being the only major conference team with a negative adjusted margin.  The highest rated team here would have only ranked 4th, 4th, and 5th in the other regions.



This is the only region with a team that clearly outperformed everybody else – not surprisingly, it’s also the only region where 1st-ranked team made the Final Four.  Duke’s offense has been the 3rd-best so far, behind only Cornell and Marquette.  Their defense has been 8th-best.  Villanova played worse than 5 of the 8 first-round losers in this region - including Robert Morris.  Surprisingly, though, it was their offense that didn't show up.



Syracuse and Butler were a cut above the rest statistically, and I don’t think you can really argue that Butler wasn't the best team.  It occurs to me now that perhaps Pythag would have been a better way to go than Margin – Butler would have topped this region at 0.982 to Syracuse’s 0.980.  Oh well.

Similarity Preview: Duke Vs. West Virginia

[NOTE: Cross posted at UFR. For more info on similarity scores and predictions, see here and here.]

Saturday’s headlining game features the offenses ranked 1^st (Duke) and 12^th (West Virginia) in adjusted offensive efficiency, compared with 25^th (Michigan State) and 46^th (Butler). So it obviously features the better shooting teams, right? Nope:

Duke and WVU made it this far not because they make the most of their opportunities, but because they get so many more opportunities than their opponents. They’re both great rebounding teams, and also come out on the plus side of the turnover balance sheet. In fact, when you add together their rebounding and scoring margins, they are the top two major conference teams in the country, in terms of creating extra chances for themselves, with both averaging over +6 in combined Reb+TO margin. Obviously they can’t both keep this up on Saturday, and whoever wins the “extra chances” battle will have a very good chance of extending their season.

Now let’s get more specific, and look at what to expect when Duke has the ball:

Duke’s not going to be able to get a lot going from inside the arc, as they’re below average in 2P% while WVU is on the plus side. And not shown here is the fact that the same is true for Block%, meaning the interior defense of Wellington Smith and John Flowers may end up playing a key role. Flowers had 3 blocks in 23 minutes against Kentucky, and I’d expect the two players to combine for at least that many against Duke.

But as indicated above, Duke’s emphasis is on using offensive rebounding and a low turnover rate to ensure they get a lot of looks at the basket – a good shooting night would just be icing on the cake. West Virginia is above average at defensive rebounding and forcing turnovers, but just barely. Here is how they fared this season against major conference teams in the top 30 in OReb%:

It’s going to be tough to beat Duke if they allow another 40% offensive rebounding night. They were able to overcome that against Kentucky by holding them to a low shooting percentage (37.3 eFG%) and forcing a lot of turnovers (22.6%). They might be able to hold Duke to similar shooting numbers, but likely won’t be able to force them into that many turnovers. Duke should be able to take care of the ball, and get a lot of first and second shot opportunities, but their best looks will be long jumpers. How efficiency they are will ultimately come down to whether they are hitting those jumpers.

You may have noticed above that West Virginia plays at a slow pace, and are wondering whether that will frustrate Duke. No, not at all – the Blue Devils have played 12 straight games at a sub-70-possession pace, and for the year they are 17-1 in games with 65 or less possessions. Shouldn’t be an issue.

Now how about when West Virginia has the ball:

This is going to read a lot like the section above, so I’ll keep it relatively short. West Virginia should also have trouble getting open first looks on offense, but Duke defends the perimeter (1^st in 3P% against, 10^th in fewest 3PA/FGA) better than the interior (39^th in 2P%), so the Mountaineers won’t have as many open long jumpers as Duke will (nor as many as they had in the first half against Kentucky). However, WVU is even less dependent on good shooting than Duke is, as they’re even better at offensive rebounding (and because they shoot more 3’s, there are a few more rebounds for them to grab). They also get to the line slightly more, but it’s a small advantage.

So if everything holds true to form, West Virginia’s offense will look largely the same as Duke’s. They’ll turn it over a bit more, and probably shoot a bit worse (especially from long range). But they’ll draw a few more fouls, and grab a few more rebounds. The core strategy will be the same, though – throw it towards the hoop, then go and get it in the likely event that it misses.

Let’s look at the Similarity Prediction:

Vegas has the Blue Devils favored by 2.5, and Pomeroy’s numbers have them even stronger. The similarity analysis disagrees, showing that both teams have performed nearly the same in games against similar opponents – which makes perfect sense, given that both teams use the same volume-over-efficiency strategy on offense, and both rely on good FG% defense (as opposed to turnovers or rebounding) at the other end. Duke and West Virginia usually miss a lot of shots, but make up for it with excellent offensive rebounding. If one of them starts hitting their first chance shots, or if one can dominate the boards, that team will probably win. Duke is better at shooting and defending the three point line, and that advantage is what separates the two teams statistically. But given West Virginia’s first half against Kentucky, it should be clear that anything can happen in a span of 30 possessions. Duke’s perimeter advantage will likely be less important than the advantage that one of these teams gains through luck – or clutchness, or heart, or whatever you want to call it. So I feel comfortable with the similarity prediction – Duke as a slight favorite, but really anybody’s game.

Similarity Preview: Michigan State Vs. Butler

[NOTE: Cross posted at UFR.  Also, for background on the similarity scores and predictions, check out here and here.]

The early Final Four game on Saturday pits Michigan State against Butler. To get there, the Spartans squeaked by a parade of low seeds, winning by a total of 13 points against teams seeded #12, #4, #9, and #6. Butler, on the other hand, beat #2 Kansas State in the regional final by 7 points – more than Michigan State’s combined margins for their games against New Mexico State (3), Maryland (2), and Tennessee (1) – and led #1 Syracuse by double digits before eventually winning by 4. This is all a long way of saying that in the games I watched, Butler won by outplaying their opponents, while MSU won by out-lucking them. But what’s done is done, and the way a team advanced to Indy isn’t going to affect this weekend’s final score. The only thing that matters is what goes down on the hardwood. Let’s take a look at what to expect when Michigan State has the ball.

Despite losing Goran Suton, and having no regulars taller than 6’8”, Michigan State’s 2010 offense is a near clone of the 2009 version. OK, not that weird, right? Well, how about this:

Despite never having Goran Suton in the first place, Butler’s 2010 defense is also a clone of 2009 Michigan State. If ever there were a game perfectly set up to let Tom Izzo demonstrate his supposed March coaching genius, this is it. He’s facing a Butler team that’s drawing (justified) raves for its tremendous tourney defense, having manhandled two offenses that are significantly more efficient than MSU. His team’s leader in minutes, points, and assists is out of commission, and other significant players are nursing injuries. His opponent will be playing a mere 6 miles from their home gym. But the basketball gods have handed him an advantage to exploit – this fabulous defense that he’s up against is a whole lot like the one he happened to coach last year, and you’re fooling yourself if you don’t think a great coach like Izzo wouldn’t know how to best attack his own defense. How much is that style-familiarity worth? Beats me.