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rye – We’d never in a million years have gotten Auriemma to come here. He’s the greatest women’s basketball coach of all time, gets essentially any prospect he wants, is a favorite for the title almost every year, and is a god at UConn. Why would he ever leave?
There are a lot of different factors that go into the way the college game is played now, and I believe I saw a recent article that scoring efficiency is actually on an upward trend in college basketball, it’s the speed of the game that is trending down (don’t have time to track it down at the moment though). I will say this though, if you want to make an argument about lack of fundamentals, Okafor’s a terrible example. Sure, he’s not a good free throw shooter. Outside of that though, he’s the most polished and skilled offensive big man in the college game in decades.
I’m extremely proud of this team and the way they fought and improved throughout the season. They didn’t play poorly in this game and we didn’t get blown out, Louisville just had a little more in the tank. I’m excited by the growth of the young guys and by the potential we’ve got to be something really special next season
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But man I wanted this one. It was there for the taking, and it slipped out of our fingers. I wanted so badly to shut up all the national media and make everybody sit up and take notice. It was all right there…and it just wasn’t to be.
As to the Louisville game, I said right afterwards that I think we have a better than even chance at beating them (though it’s close).
– We’re two teams trending in opposite directions. Pitino can talk all he wants about them becoming a smarter basketball team, but since the loss to State, UL lost to Syracuse, scraped by Miami, GaTech, and UVA by 1,1, and 2 points respectively, and lost by 10 to UNC in the tourney. Before the State game, KenPom ranked them 11th nationally. They’re now ranked 19th (that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it takes a big change to make a major late-season swing). That’s not just the stretch since the State game, it’s the stretch since they lost Chris Jones, a senior and one of their 3 best players. UL is a different team without Jones. We’re obviously on a great run essentially since the loss to WF. We had slip-up at BC, but other than that we’ve been a drastically differently team since the Cataissance/Freeman coming back into the starting lineup.
– We match up extremely well with them. They excel at creating turnovers and we are (and I know this is hard to believe about an NC State team) very good at not turning the ball over. Not only are we good at this over the course of the season, but we’ve been markedly better since Cat’s emergence. With the exception of the Clemson game, our turnover rates have been pretty tiny every game. Louisville is also a very poor shooting team, shooting only 30.8% from 3 on the season (and Jones, at 34%, was their best shooter). They score a large percentage of their points on 2PT shots. We are fairly mediocre defending the 3 (33.1% allowed, 109th nationally). We are excellent defending the paint. Opponents only shoot 43.2% against us from 2.
– Lennard Freeman is great matchup for Montrezl Harrell due to his combination of strength and quickness. He did an awesome job covering Harrell in the first game, and I find no reason to believe he won’t in this game. While Harrell most likely won’t struggle as much as he did in the first game, there’s a good reason why he struggled so much.
– We beat Louisville soundly on the road (which is a much bigger factor than most people think), and since then we’ve continued to play at a high level and they’ve lost ground. I don’t really have any reason to think they should be favored.
To the subject of talent on the roster:
1) Andy Katz (who I generally don’t mind) is 100% wrong with the “top 2 line talent” comment. There was nobody who thought that before the season, and it’s pretty clear that nobody actually thinks that now, since hardly anyone is picking us over Louisville. None of our players are NBA prospects this year. Our best recruit is a guy who Louisville turned down. Nobody actually thinks we have elite-caliber talent, and saying otherwise is just disingenuous.
2) According to VerbalCommits.com, which aggregates star rankings from several recruiting sites, the average star ranking of players on States’ roster is 3.5. That’s good, but it’s not elite. It’s 5th in the ACC. Some other notable teams’ average star ratings:
Conference
Duke 4.333
UNC 4.028
Syracuse 4.000
Louisville 3.736
NCSU 3.500
UVA 3.359
ND 3.278National
Kentucky 4.308
Florida 3.972
Kansas 3.909
Arizona 3.861
UCLA 3.833
OSU 3.778
Texas 3.758
Marquette 3.667
Georgetown 3.628
Villanova 3.567
Maryland 3.528
MSU 3.303
LSU 3.222
Wisconsin 3.083
Gonzaga 3.051
WVU 2.976
Oklahoma 2.736Obviously, star ratings aren’t everything, but they’re at least a decent gauge of true talent
3) The teams that are truly “top two line talent” basically have one of two things going for them, generally speaking.
I) They are absurdly talented, but usually young. These are teams like Duke, UK, Kansas and Arizona (by the way, why isn’t Carolina catching any heat for only managing a 4 seed with elite-caliber talent?)
II) They are a very experienced team. Average experience for teams like Wisconsin (2.07 yrs, 50th nationally, according to KenPom), Gonzaga (2.13, 41st) and Villanova (1.89, 114) make up for less than elite talent with more experience.State’s average experience is 1.31 yrs, 290th nationally. We’re on the young side for a major conference team, and we have very good talent, but not truly elite. What I would expect from that is, honestly, pretty much what we got. An erratic team that can pull out big wins and inexplicable losses, but improves significantly when they get more minutes under their belt. I actually give Gottfried a tremendous amount of credit for the development that we’ve seen with these young players. They look like a much more talented team now than they did at the beginning of the season, even when they were winning.
We’re better than Louisville. The way we’re playing, and with Chris Jones off their roster, I totally believe that. We won’t be favored going into the game, but we should be. Not saying we’re going to win, but I genuinely think we’ve got a better than 50% chance of making the Elite Eight.
Yeah, it’s definitely better for Anya to continue to lose the baby fat and play at a lighter weight. It’s not just being able to play longer, it’s being able to play more explosively on offense and being able to contain pick and rolls better on defense. It’s one thing if you’re adding pounds of muscle, but Beejay doesn’t exactly have a toned physique. The difference between Beejay being 270 and 300 isn’t that he’s more immovable, it’s that he’s more immobile.
It’s amazing that Freeman is still the youngest player on the team as a sophomore, and yet he’s probably the team’s smartest defender.
From the post I tried to make last night that wouldn’t go through:
Game ball to Lennard Freeman. It’s not just the rebounds (which there were 12 of), or the great finishing (he’s unrecognizable from the guy who was terrified to even shoot open layups early in the season), or being the only big to stay out of foul trouble. He was continually switching onto Nova’s guards, and almost without fail he stayed with them step for step. There was a sequence in the second half where he had to D up Arcidiacono (the Big East co-PoY), and the only thing he gave up was that ridiculous reverse layup Arcidiacono hit. He was awesome.
I had a long post about how awesome each and every one of our players was this game, but the comment system keeps eating it. Suffice it to say, everyone was amazing and I love, love, love watching this team.
I’ve been a pretty big critic of his all season, but you can’t say enough good things about how Kyle Washington has come in and given great minutes these two games. It would’ve been so easy for him to sulk when his minutes got cut, or be mad that he didn’t get more minutes after playing well on Thursday, but he just comes in and plays his butt off when we need him. Really impressed with his attitude.
I love Barber as much as anyone, and I think he’s an absolutely terrific defender, but Tokoto’s the best perimeter defender in the league. He’d be my choice as DPOY, and I’d probably take Perrantes 2nd. Cat’s great, and he’s in that class, but his lack of strength gets him in trouble some. He has a harder time than most fighting through picks.
I don’t think KW is a bad player, and I certainly don’t want to see him leave, but he’s got to do a lot of work on his decision-making (offensively and defensively) if he wants to be a productive rotation guy. He’s got the skills to do it. He’s probably the most skilled offensive big on the team. The problem is that he’s prone to taking 19 foot jumpers early in the shot clock, or trying to beat his man off the dribble in traffic, or tossing up fading jump hooks after his attempt to back a guy down was unsuccessful. His shot selection is really poor, and he’s not the offensive rebounding threat that the other 3 bigs are. On a bad or mediocre offensive team, a guy like KW might be valuable, because you just need to create buckets. On this team, we’ve got two guys who can create a pretty decent shot most any time. The fact is, if KW is going to shoot a bunch of long 2s, well, Trevor Lacey can get that shot basically any time he wants, and he’s better at shooting it. If you’re the 3rd or 4th offensive option on the floor, you’ve got to have better judgement than KW does. Defensively, he’s much worse than Anya and Freeman, and I think Abu has passed him by as well. He’s not only super jumpy, he’s also in the wrong place a ton. I was doing some close video analysis of some of our games earlier in the season (Ga Tech, ND, UVA) to see what was going wrong with our defense, and Washington really stood out. He’s a terrible P&R defender, and he’s not a particularly good 1 on 1 defender in the post either.
I love the guy, I love the energy and enthusiasm he brings to the court, but he’s got to play smarter and channel that energy in constructive ways. Anya and Freeman are less skilled on offense, but they know exactly who they are and what they’re there to do.
I’ve been one complaining very vocally about Gott’s defensive performance over the past 3 seasons, and I’ve been just as vocal about praising the defensive work this team has done over the last 6 games (Boston College notwithstanding). The defense right now sits at 87th in the nation over the course of the season (according to KenPom). It was substantially worse than that before the Virginia game. Even early in the season when Freeman was playing more, the defense was hugely problematic. Pre-Virginia, I believe we were ranked more in the 120 range (which would be in line with the last two seasons). Since that Virginia game, the improvement has been massive, not just in the numbers but in the eye test as well. There have been scheme changes (we’re defending on-ball screens much more aggressively now), personnel changes (Freeman over Washington) and an overall improvement in defensive energy. It’s been very impressive and hugely encouraging to see.
That said, the verdict is still out on whether this is sustainable. 5 excellent defensive games is nice, but it’s not proof that we can expect this level of play going forward. We have a much bigger sample that says defense is a problem with this team and with this coaching staff. It takes work to create a culture that prizes defense. These last couple weeks have been a great step, but I want to see a full season of this kind of defense.
Also, the offense is fine. We’ve played a stretch of very good defenses (Clemson, UNC, UVA and Louisville are all top 40 defenses, UVA and Louisville are top 10), so of course we look worse than we did earlier in the season. That’s what happens when you play good defenses. Cat Barber is playing much better basketball and making much better decisions, and I actually think our offense is better without Washington in the lineup. We’re still very good on that side of the ball.
An “ugly” win like this says far more about how far this team has come than a “pretty” win does. All three of these last road wins have been pretty “ugly”, but they’re games that we never would have had a chance in earlier in the season because our defense wasn’t close to this good. I’ll take a defense-fueled win from this team any day, cause there have been precious few of them over the last 3 years.
Also, it wasn’t a pretty offensive game, but in what universe is 72% FT shooting “dreadful”? It’s better than the national average, and well above our season average.
That’s a really good road win with our best player playing like crap.
After the debacle with BC, the defense is back to looking like it did against Louisville/UNC. There were a couple lapses in concentration off the ball, but all in all we looked much sharper. We played Anya more minutes (always good), and the bigs were more aggressive hedging and recovering on picks.
We need to all take a moment and recognize what a totally fantastic defender Lennard Freeman is, and how spectacular he is at all the non-flashy parts of defense. I love watching him. He’s always in the right place, he almost never bites on pump fakes, and he’s terrific at matching up with guards when he gets switched on them. His back line rotations are impeccable as well. Seriously, spend some possessions just watching Freeman regardless of where the ball goes. He’s awesome, and helps cover up a lot of our defensive weaknesses.
I just don’t get it with this team. We’ve reverted to all the bad things we were doing earlier, we’re being passive on screens, and for some unfathomable reason we’re playing Kyle Washington, who has been terrible this half. Just…ugh.
Just awesome, absolutely awesome. I never would have believed a few weeks ago that this team could win, on the road, by 9 and 12 over Louisville and Carolina. The defensive turnaround has been astounding.
– Our bigs have been much more aggressive against pick and rolls over the past 3 games. You started seeing it with Freeman in particular in the Louisville game, and all the bigs were doing it this game. It’s a much-needed change in defensive strategy, and it’s worked really well to contain ball handlers and put more pressure on opposing offenses.
– Game ball to Beejay Anya. He owned the paint tonight. 6 blocks, only 1 foul, and countless altered shots. The only time Carolina got easy buckets was on the break, or when Beejay was on the bench. Completely dominant against a really good offensive frontcourt.
– Cat Barber played with great pace and patience, and refused to force the issue and let the game get up tempo. He’s become really great at dancing in the free throw line area and probing the defense, but not committing unless he knows he has something.
– As far as I’m concerned, we can glue Kyle Washington to the bench for the rest of the season unless he improves his focus on defense and his decision-making on offense. He’s a distant 4th in the big man rotation for me.
– J.P. Tokoto is an awesome defender, just super, super good. He didn’t give Trevor Lacey an inch of daylight all game.
-This team, playing this defense, can play with any non-Kentucky team in the country. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a turnaround in competence from a team. Lets hope they keep it up.
If he’s sitting Kyle to teach a lesson, I’m totally okay with that. He’s the worst defender of our 4 big men (and after reviewing some video recently, it gave me a much greater appreciation of how good Freeman is on defense). Honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing Ralston sit some in a game like this. If you want to be a good defensive team, emphasize a culture of defense.
I haven’t seen VaTech at all this year, and man are they terrible. If we don’t win this game by double digits, we should be embarrassed.
Well, I got most of it to post by breaking it up, I can’t seem to get the last numbered point to post, but here’s the final thing:
Look, I know that this is a really long post, and I don’t expect most of you to read it all, but you asked for reasons, and I’m giving them as clearly as I can. I’m not trying to be a know-it-all, argumentative, or proving that I can win the silly internet debate. I love basketball, and as the many post-game analysis posts I’ve made will attest, I love diving into the nitty gritty, eye-test details of not numbers but what is actually going on on the floor. But I also got a statistics degree from this great university that we all love, and I love talking about and explaining sports statistics. So I hope this post doesn’t come off as condescending or aggressive, because that’s not the spirit with which it was intended.
3) One of the main issues with RPI is that it doesn’t use margin of victory (there are other issues, but that’s probably the biggest one). I’m not privy to the exact formulas behind BPI/Kenpom/Sagarin, but I know the general gist, and they all are based in some part on margin of victory (or, more exactly, offensive and defensive efficiency, which controls for pace). This is a better metric to use than just W/L, and simply by not using it RPI immediately is at a disadvantage. It’s not as good at figuring out how good teams actually are, so the way it calculates strength of schedule is inherently flawed. All of the other systems account not just for margin of victory, but also for strength of opponents, and they do it in much more effective ways than RPI does. Again, I don’t know exactly what the calculations are for opponent adjustment in each system, but I know that they’re done on a game-by-game basis (i.e. this game is weighted X because the opponent is ranked X is the system), rather than arbitrarily deciding that SOS is 75% of a team’s value. And that’s the thing, these systems are made by statisticians who know basketball and who know math, and they are models based on solid empirical evidence (does the model match what we see in real life?) and theoretical justification (does it make sense mathematically?). RPI is divided the way it is because it’s easy to divide by 4. RPI was built for simplicity, not for accuracy.
ESPN’s BPI, by the way, lessens the impact of blowouts and accounts for when key players miss games.
4) All these systems account for home/road results better than RPI does. For example, lets look at our upcoming game with UNC according to the KenPom ranking. The KenPom system sees that UNC is a better team than us, and estimates that, including the home court advantage (~4 points from a neutral floor on average), UNC should expect to beat us by 9. If we beat UNC, or even just lose to them by 1, the system will go “hey, they’re better than I thought they were”, and our ranking will go up. There’s a definite expectation for that game, a definite weight that it carries in our schedule. In RPI, it says “this game is worth 60% of a game if you lose and 140% of a game if you win”. So lets say we’re down by 1 at the end of the game, and Ralston gets a wide open look to win it at the buzzer. Lets be charitable and say that he’s a 50% shooter if you give him a good look at the basket. Essentially, we have flipped a coin to determine if the game is worth twice as much to our rating as it otherwise would be. Compare that to the KenPom method, which acknowledges that those two points are important, but also knows that whether or not that shot goes down is not indicative of a huge swing in the actual quality of the team. The RPI adjustment is better than nothing, but it’s still not good. It’s also inconsistent. If home/away matters for the quality of my wins, it should matter for the quality of my opponents’ wins too in calculating my strength of schedule, but the home/away adjustment is not used in calculating the strength of schedule portion of the RPI (presumably because they realized this would potentially set up situations where it is actually preferable for your RPI for you to lose to a good team at home than to beat them, which kind of shows why the whole thing is flawed in concept).
I haven’t gone into extreme detail on other rating systems mostly because this isn’t a controversial point I’m making. Every college basketball analyst that has any measure of statistical knowledge knows that RPI is a bad system. It has been almost universally derided as outdated and obsolete, with seemingly the only holdout being the NCAA itself.
So, here we go.
1) What are we actually trying to measure here? We’re trying to figure out which teams are the best teams, right? Or we can call it “which teams have played the best this season,” but that’s really the same question, because all we can actually see and measure is how well a team has actually played. I’ll quote again from the Nate Silver article I linked to earlier:
But there was a fundamental tension in the process: were we supposed to be picking the best teams or the most deserving ones? One example of the distinction is Xavier: did it deserve some consideration because a number of its players were suspended after a midseason brawl with Cincinnati? Xavier was probably more talented than its record at the time and might beat another potential 12th seed head to head. And yet, it was hard to call Xavier deserving; its problems were of the players’ making.
When I posed this question to David Worlock, the associate director for the men’s tournament, his answer was unambiguous: we were supposed to be picking the best teams. The committee members spoke frequently of the “shirts and skins test”: who would beat whom if they actually played a game?
According to the NCAA itself, we’re trying to find the best teams. That’s the idea. Now, if I give you no other information than “RPI tells me that team X is a better team than team Y” and then ask you who you would pick to win the game, in lieu of any other information, you would pick team X. That’s the whole idea of a rating system. Now, team X is not always going to beat team Y. There may be injuries, there may be matchup problems, one team may play out of their minds, one team may have an off night. However, if we check it over the course of hundreds of games or thousands of games, we expect that if RPI is any good at telling me which team is better, than in the aggregate I’ll win my picks more times than I lose. If not, then I’d conclude RPI doesn’t do a very good job of telling me which team is better. Can we agree on that? That’s how we evaluate models, by testing how well they represent what actually happens.
2) Margin of victory (and to clear up confusion, when I say “margin of victory”, I mean the average difference between your points scored and your opponents’ points scored. You don’t have a separate margin of victory and margin of defeat, we just average it all together and call it margin of defeat. So if your opponents have scored more than you on average, you have a negative margin of victory) is a better predictor of future success than W/L record. This is not up for debate. It’s been proven for basketball, baseball and football (and probably other sports I don’t care about) at all levels of competition. There is undoubtedly lots of writing on this that you could find, but I’ll just point to this post by Ken Pomeroy, which studies head to head matchups of conference teams. Just for example, this study shows that if you win your first home game by 5 points, on average you’ve got about a 35% chance to win the second road game. If you win by 20, you’ll win that second game closer to 60% of the time (There’s some nuance in there that Pomeroy discusses having to do with the fact that these are conference games, but the general gist is clear, MoV gives you significantly more information than W/L record). Now, referring back to point 1, something that has better predictive power is a better representation of how good a team actually is. MoV tells me much more about how good my team actually is than its record does.
I just posted a response that I’m not seeing. It had a single link in it, but it is also the size of a small atlas, so I think it probably also got caught in the spam filter.
RPI is ONE component that the committee considers.
This is true, but as people have consistently demonstrated, and as this very post is a perfect example of, you can pretty reliably project the NCAA field using only RPI data, which points to it being not just a piece, but a big piece of what the selection committee is doing.
I’ll quote a passage from this terrific article by Nate Silver from back when the NCAA held a mock selection committee back in 2012:
Over the long run, R.P.I. has predicted the outcome of N.C.A.A. games more poorly than almost any other system. And it shows some especially implausible results this season. Southern Mississippi, for instance, was somehow ranked ahead of Missouri, even though it has endured seven losses to Missouri’s four (some of them against middling teams like Houston, Texas-El Paso, Alabama-Birmingham and Denver).
The committee’s use of R.P.I. is not quite as obsessive as you might think: more advanced systems like those developed by Ken Pomeroy and Jeff Sagarin were just a mouse click away, they told us — and it was perfectly well within the rules to look at them. The discussion of each team, moreover, was exceptionally thorough. It was clear from the officials we met that the committee has plenty of basketball knowledge and cares passionately about getting things right.
But R.P.I.’s fingerprints were all over the process. When a computer monitor displayed the teams that we were considering for the bubble, the R.P.I. ranking was listed suggestively alongside them. The color-coded “nitty gritty” worksheets that the committee has developed, and which often frame the discussion about the bubble teams, use the R.P.I. rankings to sort out the good wins and the bad losses.
