15th March 2011
To get you prepared for the matchups in this year's NCAA Tournament, we now have printable game previews at SR/College Basketball:
Game Previews | College Basketball at Sports-Reference.com
Each preview contains key information about both teams, including SRS ratings; offensive and defensive ratings; and player statistics from the 2010-11 season. Check them out, and increase your knowledge when watching the games this month!
Posted in Announcements, Layups, NCAA | Comments Off on 2011 NCAA Tournament Game Previews
14th March 2011
Here's an interesting take on a March Madness pool from Gelf Magazine:
The Bracketless Bracket | Gelf Magazine
The premise is simple: everyone picks exactly one team at each seed #. You get 100 points when your 1-seed wins, 110 when your 2-seed wins, and so on and so forth up to 250 for a 16-seed win (hey, it has to happen eventually). It's pretty clever because in addition to testing on your ability to pick games, it also calls on your sense of who the committee over- or under-rated relative to the other teams at the same seed (hello, Utah State!).
Posted in Layups, NCAA | 3 Comments »
10th March 2011
I would have written a full summary of my trip to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last week, but A) I've been sick this week, and B) the guys at TrueHoop had it covered so well that my efforts would be totally extraneous:
It was such a blast to meet those guys, btw. You haven't lived until you've been out partying with stat geeks until 2:30 AM.
I'd be remiss if I didn't also link to Kevin Pelton's recap at Basketball Prospectus:
Recapping Sloan: Two Key Issues
And don't forget Ben Morris' summary at Skeptical Sports Analysis. Or Deadspin's "Dispatches From Dorkapalooza".
Finally, you can read all of the tweets I sent out as I covered the panels live via the Basketball-Reference Twitter stream:
Basketball Reference (bball_ref) on Twitter
Let me know if I'm forgetting anybody's recap/summary, and I'll add them to the list.
Posted in Layups, Statgeekery | 1 Comment »
1st March 2011
If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you know that Ken Pomeroy's Kenpom.com is one of my favorite college basketball websites (just a notch below CBB @ Sports-Reference, of course). So it's great to see that Ken will once again be using his ratings to generate win probabilities for each conference tournament (and the NCAA tourney) over the next few weeks. You can find all of those posts at the Basketball Prospectus Unfiltered Blog, but to start you off, here are the odds for some of the early tournaments:
Let log5 season begin (Big South and Horizon)
Log5: A-Sun, OVC, and Patriot
Posted in Layups, NCAA, Statgeekery | Comments Off on Layups: Conference Tournament Win Probabilities
15th February 2011
How in the cosmos did I miss this the first time around?
Two weeks ago, while I was busy with Super Bowl/Hall of Fame work at PFR, SBNation's Tom Ziller posted a story -- and an awesome graphic -- about the biggest "black holes" (players who never pass) in the NBA.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analysis, Just For Fun, Layups, Statgeekery | 21 Comments »
10th February 2011
Ken Pomeroy (of the outstanding college hoops stat site Kenpom.com) ran an interesting simulation last month with regard to the randomness inherent in single-game plus-minus scores:
A treatise on plus/minus - the kenpom.com blog
According to Ken's simulation, a player with precisely average "true +/- skill" can show up with wildly variant observed +/- values over the course of a game, or even 20 games.
Just for fun, I re-ran this experiment for ten thousand games, tracking the observed +/- impact of the player through various checkpoints. Here were the results:
| #Sims |
On |
Off |
MOV |
per40 |
| 1 |
5.00 |
-17.00 |
-12.00 |
44.00 |
| 10 |
0.70 |
-2.60 |
-1.90 |
6.60 |
| 100 |
0.49 |
-0.85 |
-0.36 |
2.68 |
| 500 |
-0.39 |
-1.02 |
-1.41 |
1.26 |
| 1000 |
-0.16 |
-0.46 |
-0.61 |
0.60 |
| 5000 |
-0.06 |
0.10 |
0.04 |
-0.31 |
| 10000 |
-0.13 |
0.12 |
-0.01 |
-0.51 |
Even after 10,000 games, a massive sample that would never be possible to achieve in real life, our perfectly average "player" appears to be a half-point per 40 min worse than average by raw on/off-court plus minus. As Ken says, "respect randomness"!
Posted in Analysis, Layups, Statgeekery | 3 Comments »
2nd February 2011
You gotta see this... Hoopism graphed every dunk in Slam-Dunk Contest history by year and judges' score, and put together an interface that allows you to call up video of the attempts from YouTube:
Every NBA Slam Dunk Contest Video Visualization - Hoopism.com
Amazing work... Hat tip to Henry Abbott for the link.
Posted in All-Star Game, Insane ideas, Just For Fun, Layups, No Math Required | 3 Comments »
1st February 2011
It's February now, and with the NCAA Tournament starting in 42 days, you probably need to study up on college basketball.
That means it's time for my annual plug of Ken Pomeroy's amazing NCAA advanced stats site. It serves as a great companion to our own College Basketball at S-R site, where you can grab the conventional numbers and get a big dose of NCAA history.
Together, those two sites should serve as vital weaponry in your bracket battles next month.
Posted in Layups, NCAA, Statgeekery | 1 Comment »
28th January 2011
A must-read: TrueHoop's Henry Abbott tries to dig through all the mythmaking and find the truth about Kobe Bryant in crunch time.
The truth about Kobe Bryant in crunch time - TrueHoop Blog - ESPN
Posted in Layups | 66 Comments »
