Everyone Read This (Basketball Prospectus Preview)

'cause it's pretty awesome. Basketball Prospectus | Indiana's No. 1

Cliff's Notes: super-involved projection based on last year's tempo-free stats, level of recruits coming in, and historical ability of coaches to develop players and teach offense/defense. Tennessee is projected to have the 15th best defense and 28th best offense in the country this year, with an overall projection of #17 nationally, fourth in the SEC (Kentucky is #2, Florida #6, Missouri #16), and a final SEC record of 12-6, tied for 3rd in the conference, which Kentucky wins at 15-3.

 

I'm not a number cruncher, but this is exactly the feel I have for the 12-13 season outlook. If anything, they are probably still underrating Cuonzo's teaching ability at this point.

 

Yeah, I think they hit it pretty well. Judging from the methodology post, it looks like they put a lot of weight on past results as far as teaching goes. Have players developed quickly? Have you put up lots of good defenses? The author admits that the numbers still give Howland a big coaching bump because of his track record, even though he's recently either lost something or recruited players who are unteachable. Cuonzo just hasn't been coaching long enough to generate the kind of data that will give him a big bump, but judging just from what we saw last year, I expect that he will.

 

That is good stuff.

I like numbers.

 

good read.

at this point, basketball season can't get here soon enough

 

The pythagorean stat is projected winning percentage right? How can they project so many teams to lose 5 games or less?

 

Can't be. I think it's more like how often the team would beat a perfectly average team. I don't see a projection for overall W/L, but there are CW and CL (conference wins, conference losses) columns

 

Pythagorean expectation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Estimated win percentage based on points scored and points allowed (or runs for baseball). But there's no way that column is right. Maybe it isn't averaged down from 100 possessions per game or something.

From the article:

 

I think that it's a Pythag with the schedule normalized so as to get a ranking of team quality instead of who has the easiest schedule.

 

That makes sense. Hopefully they do a better explanation in the book.