Friday, November 9, 2007

4. Virginia

2007 ACC Record: 11-5, t-1st Place
Projected 2008 Record: 9-7 (1164 PARTOBS*, .526 Raw W%)

Virginia plays a neutral schedule this year, just a quarter of a win easier than balanced, but it's enough to propel the Wahoos ahead of Clemson in the projected standings.

Projected Player Contributions:

Just how happy is Dave Leitao to see number 44 back in a Virginia uniform? Removing Sean Singletary from the roster and replacing his minutes with Calvin Baker and Sammy Zeglinski, the Cavaliers go from an above-average ACC team with a good chance to return to the NCAA tournament to one of the worst teams the conference has ever seen. UVa's Singletary-free projected PARTOBS score of 849 would be the fourth-worst since 1987.

Outside of the point guard position, however, Virginia has tremendous depth. With two walk-on players, Baker and Ryan Pettinella, capable of providing meaningful minutes, Dave Leitao's bench goes 15 players deep, without a whole lot of drop-off between number 2 and number 15. While that's good news if, say, your starting center hurts his knee in practice, the Wahoos would be even better off if one or two of their young players could manage a breakout season and provide a legitimate second option to keep opposing defenses from keying so much on Singletary.

*The PARTOBS number next to the team's projected record uses the projected Points, Assists, Rebounds, Turnovers, Blocks, and Steals to arrive at a number that correlates pretty strongly with a team's overall and conference record. The order of the PARTOBS number correlates even more strongly with the order of finish. The predicted order of finish and number of conference wins will be based on that number.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

just curious if you are going to keep this blog going. It's been some time since your last update and your info is great.

ken