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John Hollinger, over at ESPN says the simple strategy in the NBA is to shoot a lot of 3’s. Doesn’t matter if you make them. Anyone who has ever taken a statistics class has probably been told that correlation does not equal causation, I don’t know if Hollinger has ever heard that phrase, but he wrote an article that seems to argue any team could win more if they start shooting more from the outside, regardless of how many of these shots go in the hoop.
He fails to point out (or perhaps notice) that every NBA team shoots over 33% from downtown, and only one shoots over 50% from inside the arc. That’s significant because those numbers are were you get parity between the two shots; a team shooting those percentages will get the same number of points per shot from inside and outside.
So maybe I was too hard on John, in this case we do may have causation, but teams would be well served to notice that they need to keep making those shots if they are going to take his hoisting advice.
Sadly, my philosiphical position on work (don’t do it) leaves me sadly without an office pool on this lovely Selection Sunday. So I will disperse my college hoops opinions out into the web-0-sphere.
First off, my Aztecs got snubbed, despite being on the bubble, then losing there conference championship game at the buzzer. The selection committee, which I assume is made up of Big Ten players and coaches (7 teams from that weak ass conference?) told the Mountain West that if you aren’t ranked and don’t get the automatic bid, you aren’t in. The West Coast Conference got the sting of East Coast and major conference bias as well, no St. Marys in the tournament.
So I ran a Monte Carlo simulation (or a thousand of em) using the Pomeroy rankings. I’m not sure how much stock I’d put into these rankings, but I had them bookmarked so thats what I used. Memphis is ranked 1 by Pomeroy, and they came through with the most simulated championships, with North Carolina, Louisville and Pitt far behind but each with about a 1/10 shot at cutting down the nets.
UConn’s draw looks tough, making the elite 8 in under half the trials. BYU, Purdue and Washington could all give them trouble (and that doesn’t account for Jerome Dyson being injured). If they do get to the elite eight they’ll most likely get Memphis who’s only real challenger will be Missouri.
Louisville, the over all one seed, looks to be a lock to get to the elite eight, were they will most likely play either Kansas, West Virginia or Michigan State (the only Big Ten team with a shot at the third round) who are fairly even with the edge to West Virginia.
Xavier looks like they have a shot at bumping Pitt in the sweet sixteen, but not a big one. The other side of that bracket comes down to Villanova, UCLA and Duke, but I can’t agree with the rating the Pomeroy gives UCLA (9th best in the country). Pitt goes to the Final Four in 322 of the thousand runs, Duke in 234. I usually bet against Duke in the Tourney, especially against tough physical teams like Pitt.
Gonzaga is another team higher than expected in the Pomeroy rating and came out of their half of the bracket to the elite eight in 374 runs compared to North Carolina’s 470. The bottom half of the bracket is the most open in the tournament, the four higher seeds here come out about even on the odds of playing to make the Final Four.
My most likely Final Four is the one seeds with Memphis replacing UConn, if you like a dark horse go with West Virginia. The finals are Memphis and Pitt (6th in the Pomeroy ranking but with a favorable draw) with Memphis the winner in.
This doesn’t account for injuries or geographic advantage, so adjust accordingly. If you’d like to see the full results let me know and I’ll email them to you (I assume I have your email if your reading my blog, otherwise leave an email).
And surprisingly, my Bad News Bears-ish intermural team won. Complete with bringing in a new kid with an attitude problem who was really good. Except he had a pleasent attitude and wasn’t particurlarly talented.
My intramural hoops team fell to 0 and 2 last night. Apparently putting together a team of graduate students in mathematics and statistics isn’t the best idea. On the plus side, I’ll be turning 30 in a few weeks and can still take most 20 year old’s off the dribble (about as many as I could at 20). If only I had a bunch of gym rats friends like I did ten years ago.
I also was about as ready to come to blows on the court as I’ve ever been when our opponents were pressing with a 20 point lead with 2 minutes left in the game. Poor form.
One of my three most hated sports franchises, the Oklahoma City Weasels Thunder made one of the best trades of the year the other day when they unloaded a couple of mediocre big men to New Orleans for Tyson Chandler, the strong rebounder and defensive presence the franchise destroyed itself chasing. The Hornets were unloading Chandler in an attempt to avoid the luxory cap.
This made me sad, as I have taken great pleasure in watching OKC suck after bolting from Seattle. However their young talent has started to show some promise, and adding Chandler would have put them in a position to possibly contend in a couple of years.
Then Chandler didn’t pass his physical. While I’m not happy to hear about people being hurt, I’m glad to see him stay in New Orleans. I like Chandler as a player, and I like the Hornets. I feel like I shouldn’t, since it would have made a lot more sense for them to move to OKC (they spent the Katrina season there, and the city could support a team better than struggling New Orleans) than my formerly beloved Sonics.
So I’m happy to see a little hoops karma fall on Oklahoma, may there draft picks shoot poorly and Kevin Durant leave the first chance he gets.
but I still enjoyed this piece on Shane Battier in the NYTimes by Michael Lewis. Lewis let the world in on the stat-geekery going on in the Oakland A’s front office in the 90’s in Moneyball (also WFS approved) and this is a similar look at the Rockets.
I’ve been playing with NBA numbers a lot lately to sharpen my skills with stat software I use for school so this was of interest to me. It’s also a good read for the casual basketball fan to understand there’s more to winning a game than scoring points and grabbing rebounds. That’s something I tried to take to heart when I played (or should I say practiced) in high school, but I’ve since given up for prolific 3 point hoisting.
But being a statistician in training and fan of basketball I think this is neat. The NBA is still dead to me. So is Oklahoma for that matter.
And as a public service announcement, if your at a Christmas party this holiday season and meet someone studying statistics, don’t insinuate that they should go into a career keeping track of batting averages.
I’ve been living without cable, a choice made by my new roomates that didn’t bother me. Didn’t. We get the major networks in HD anyway, so the Simpson, the Office, NFL, all covered. The NBA is dead to me, for reasons that should be obvious, so I wasn’t feeling the lack of cable pinch. But I’ve been reading on this here internet that “they” are playing college basketball again. Sure I’ll be able to catch a few games on CBS on the weekends, but I don’t know if that will cut it.
I do have the option of heading for the treadmills on campus that have ESPN blasting 24-7 (actually, they close for 8 hours saturday night, so 24-6, 16?). This could lead to one fit blogger.
Gmail puts little ads up based on the content of your emails. I’m often fascinated by what the collection of tubes thinks I might want to buy based on what’s in my inbox. This might be my favorite so far:
Bacon Salt www.baconsalt.com – The Official Condiment of Gotham Girls Roller Derby
Sadly the link had no mention of Gotham Girls Roller Derby. A quick google search revealed GGRD to be New York City’s only all female roller derby league.
Apparently, people in Washington get worked up when a blogger miss-spells the last name of the U-Dub QB. My response: when he learns to throw I’ll learn to spell his name.
