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.

5. Clemson

2007 ACC Record: 7-9, t-8th Place
Projected 2008 Record: 9-7 (1215 PARTOBS*, .595 Raw W%)

For the second year in a row, Clemson gets the short end of the scheduling stick. With the maximum six games against the projected top three, and only one game against each of Virginia Tech and Wake Forest--both of those at home, no less, so the Tigers don't even have the opportunity to steal an easier road win--mean that Clemson finishes an average of .8 wins below what they would have with a neutral schedule. Those of you who believe in curses might want to look into this one.

Projected Player Contributions:

Clemson returns essentially the same team that they had last year, minus four-year starter Vernon Hamilton. Some are concerned about whether or not Cliff Hammonds will be able to effectively run the point for the Tigers in his absence. They shouldn't be. Even though Hammonds' turnover rate is higher than is normal for a point guard, his overall floor game is doubtlessly strong enough to lead this team. Hammonds had the highest offensive PAPER component in the league last year, and most of that was thanks to his high team component. Simply put, his teammates score more points when he's on the floor. Really, what else do you need from a point guard?

One more thing that I can't resist mentioning: Freshman point guard Terrence Oglesby (pictured here) joins fellow Clemson Tiger Khalil Greene on the Reggie Cleveland All-Stars.

*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.

6. N.C. State

2007 ACC Record: 5-11, t-10th Place
Projected 2008 Record: 7-9 (1092 PARTOBS*, .445 Raw W%)

State plays a completely unremarkable conference schedule in 2008, and it's unlikely to play much of a role in the Pack's progress.

Projected Player Contributions:

Gavin Grant predicts his team will only lose four games and make the Final Four. Some sportswriters think so, too. Three-quarters of the ACC sports media think the Wolfpack will finish in the league's top three. The future in Raleigh is brighter than Sidney Lowe's jacket (no fence is safe!).

I'm not buying it. State was a nice feel-good story last year. They exceeded all expectations (expectations that were unreasonably low, in retrospect). The wins over Carolina, the three-game sweep of Virginia Tech, and the runs in the ACC and NIT tournaments were impressive. But let's not get carried away here.

With everyone but Engin Atsur returning from last season's team, as well as the addition of talented freshmen J.J. Hickson and Tracy Smith, the Wolfpack will be better this year than last. They just won't be that much better. A .500 conference record should be a nice accomplishment for a young team without any experience at the point guard position, but it will probably be seen as a disappointment for this group.

*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.

8. Duke

2007 ACC Record: 8-8, t-6th place

Projected 2008 Record: 7-9 (1066 PARTOBS*, .414 Raw W%)

Duke's 2008 schedule is neutral. Five of their eight games against the top of the conference will be played in Cameron Indoor Stadium, but that is offset by playing only one game each against the projected bottom three teams, and all of those games are on the road.

Projected Player Contributions:

It's become conventional wisdom that the Blue Devils will be better off without Josh McRoberts, but I'm not buying it. McRoberts was the best defensive player on a team that relied heavily on its defense to win games, and it's hard to see how the Devils will be able to make up for the 58 points McRoberts was worth defensively in the conference season.

With freshmen Kyle Singler and Taylor King likely to log significant minutes for the Devils, it's likely that Duke will try to make up most of that deficit on the offensive end of the floor. Whether Mike Krzyzewski elects to return to the up-tempo pace that Duke teams played at throughout most of the last decade or spends another year playing at a Big Ten pace, the pressure will be on the offense to improve its efficiency.

9. Boston College

2007 ACC Record: 10-6, t-3rd place
Projected 2008 Record: 7-9 (1054 PARTOBS*, .398 Raw W%)

BC plays a remarkably neutral schedule in 2008. Their six games against the top four teams in the league are split evenly home and away. Four of the seven games against the middle of the league will be played on the road, but that leaves two of the three games aginst Virginia Tech and Wake Forest as highly probable wins in Conte Forum.

Projected Player Contributions:

Al Skinner has employed a very short bench in both of the seasons Boston College has spent in the ACC, and it will be interesting to see if he continues that trend with six new players joining the Eagles this year. Skinner seems to use players like Joe Torre uses relievers, and this much roster turnover could mean intense competition for playing time.

The most intriguing of those newcomers is Vermont transfer Joe Trapani. Trapani was a member of the America East all-freshman team in 2006, scoring 11.4 points per game while grabbing 4.4 rebounds for the Catamounts. If his adjusted numbers are to be believed (and I'm not sure they are--my system of adjusting numbers for transfer players needs some serious tinkering), Trapani could go a long way towards making up for what the Eagles lost when Jared Dudley's eligibility ran out.

*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.

10. Florida State

2007 ACC Record: 7-9, t-8th place
Projected 2008 Record: 6-10 (1027 PARTOBS, .370 Raw W%)

Florida State faces a tough slate in 2008 with seven games--only one fewer than the maximum--against the league's top four teams. The 'Noles have only one game (the home tilt with Wake Forest) in which they will be a strong favorite, compared with six games in which they'll be strong underdogs. With only nine "tossup" games on the schedule, the Seminoles have a much tighter bell curve than most teams.

Projected Player Contributions:

Would anyone be one bit surprised if it was revealed that FSU had been using the same 8 players for the last decade? Other than Al Thornton and Alexander Johnson, no Florida State players in recent have really distinguished themselves in any meaningful way. I really think they might just be giving guys new names when their eligibility runs out and running them back out there for another four years.

Much like the players, the teams have been unremarkable lately too. You always know what to expect from Florida State: an athletic team that, despite being dangerous and fully capable of winning on any given night, still finds itslelf in the league's second division. The backcourt of Isaiah Swann, Toney Douglas, and Jason Rich will keep the 'Noles in most ballgames, and will certainly win them a few, but this doesn't look like the year Florida State breaks through their glass ceiling.

11. Virginia Tech

2007 Record: 10-6, t-3rd place
Projected 2008 Record: 5-11 (953 PARTOBS, .293 raw W%)

Like Wake Forest, Virginia Tech has an accomodating schedule. The Hokies play only five games against the projected top four teams in the conference, and five of their eight games against the bottom half of the conference will be at home. Since young teams tend to struggle more on the road than they do at home--and the Hokies are nothing if not young--this is good news for the Hokie faithful.

Projected Player Contributions:

If ever there was a team for which expectations should be nonexistent, this is it. After losing Zabian Dowdell and the criminally underrated Jamon Gordon to graduation, the Hokies will look to a seven-man freshman class to provide around half of their floor minutes. Tech could become just the sixth ACC team since 1987 to have more than 50% of its floor minutes to first year players. The five previous teams to do so (Clemson '96, UNC '03, GT '98, and Wake '98 and '07) all won at least five conference games.

While it's hard to predict what freshmen will provide, it's easy to recognize that Deron Washington and A.D. Vassallo will have to carry the team. Washington is almost certain to find himself on one of the all-conference teams come March, and deservedly so; outside of leaping short Dukies in a single bound, there's little that Washington does particularly well, but at the same time, there are few holes in his all-around game. Vassallo is a very good scorer, and on occasion he can take a game over. He has been a defensive liability for his first two years in Blacksburg, though, and that will have to change for the Hokies to have any success.

How the freshmen develop, and how Vassallo, Washington, and the rest of the returnees play without the steady senior backcourt of a year ago will be interesting to watch. Seth Greenberg took a core group of freshmen that arrived in Blacksburg with him four years ago to heights not often reached by Virginia Tech basketball teams. Can he do the same with this group? And will Hokie fans deal with a four-year success cycle?

12. Wake Forest

2007 ACC Record: 5-11, t-11th in ACC
Projected 2008 Record: 5-11 (912 PARTOBS, .251 raw W%)

Update: It's been pointed out to me that with the unbalanced schedule, who a team actually plays (or avoids playing) can have a tremendous affect on where they sort out in the standings table. With this in mind, I used each team's PARTOBS-derived winning percentage and the LOG5 method to run a Monte Carlo simulation of the 2007-2008 ACC season 100,000 times. Using this information, I can assign a reasonable upside and downside to each team's chances, as well as find out who might have an easier schedule. This information will be included for all teams.

The good news for Wake Forest fans is that the Deacons have been blessed with one of the easier schedules in the league, and the schedule alone is probably going to be worth an extra conference win. Wake will play just six games against the projected top five teams in the league, maximizing their chances to steal games against relatively weaker competition. As a result, their projected record has been bumped up to 5-11.

The bad news is that the Deacons still have the worst projected record in the league.

Projected Player Contributions:

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.

Wake Forest figures to be the worst team in the league, and they've got a shot at being one of the worst teams in the last 20 years. Only eight times in those 196 team-seasons has a team finished with a PARTOBS of less than 912, and those six teams (Wake '88 and '99, Clemson '00 and '04, UVa '98, GT and NCSU '97, and FSU '00) combined for only 33 ACC wins in 126 tries.

Things aren't all bleak for the Deacons, however. Ishmael Smith had a fine freshman season, and freshman point guards who are able to contribute at above-average levels right away tend to have strong careers. Jamie Skeen has an intriguing list of comparable players. Wake has a strong complementary cast in place just waiting for superstars to arrive. The good news for Deacons fans is that help is on the way. The bad news is that it's going to be a long year in Winston-Salem before it arrives.

Preseason All-Conference Teams

I hate preseason lists and polls. They don't mean anything to anyone other than the folks that put the list together. They're generally hastily assembled with a minimum of research and wind up correlating much more strongly with teams' or players' Q ratings than what actually transpires in the subsequent season. The only useful purpose they serve is to provide a little bit of content before the games start.

With that said, you may have noticed that there's a Preseason All-ACC list in the sidebar. What gives? Well, I needed some fresh content to fill space until the actual season starts. Plus, I've got all these fancy player projections that I've been working on, and I want to put them to some kind of use. So they're meaningless and useless, but at least they're not completely subjective.

With all of the individual player projections done, over the weekend I put them into context by making some guesses at actual playing time. Those numbers will all be published in the individual team previews. The playing time-adjusted Points, Assists, Rebounds, Turnovers, Blocks, and Steals (or PARTOBS from now on, because I love acronyms as much as I hate typing) were plugged into a formula (P+A+R-TO+((B+S)/2), in case you were curious) and then ranked.

The end result doesn't line up very well with PAPER--defense, to the extent that it's even included in the PARTOBS calculation, is undercounted, and there's no adjustment for pace or teammates--but it includes all of the traditionally important counting stats. I haven't gone back and checked prior seasons (note to self: do this), but I'd guessthat it would track pretty well with the media's All-ACC teams.

For those of you who are either reading this in a feed aggregator, or even those who may be unwilling or unable to look at the right side of the screen, here's the full list:

First Team
Tyler Hansbrough, UNC (POY)
Sean Singletary, UVA
James Gist, MARY
Tyrese Rice, BC
Lewis Clinch, GT

Second Team
Brandon Costner, NCSU
Deron Washington, VPI
Trevor Booker, CLEM
Ty Lawson, UNC
James Mays, CLEM

Third Team
DeMarcus Nelson, DUKE
K.C. Rivers, CLEM
Ben McCauley, NCSU
Brian Asbury, MIA
Joe Trapani, BC

All-Freshman
J.J. Hickson, NCSU (FOY)
Kyle Singler, DUKE
Taylor King, DUKE
Gani Lawal, GT
Hank Thorns, VPI

...And the Rest

Virginia Tech and Maryland are up.

Why Isn't This Blog Ever Updated?

Duke and Carolina's projections are ready. Virginia Tech and Maryland are coming tonight. Over the next couple weeks I'll be posting team capsules with educated guesses on actual playing time as well as hopefully some data on what we can expect out of all the teams defensively.

In other news, I haven't completely been wasting my time over the last two months. I've been working on some exciting (well, exciting in the most nerdy way possible) additions that I'll be making to the site once the season starts. I'll be publishing PAPER for all Division-I players, plus some team stats for all 341 teams. I might even take a shot at some sort of power ranking, but only if I can think of a way of doing it that nobody else is doing.

This is still going to be an ACC-centric site, though. Most of the commentary is going to be about ACC games, basically because those are the ones I really care about. To that end, I'll be using full play-by-play data, rather than just box score data, for as many ACC games as possible. This should result in a finer granularity of data than what I've been using in the past, and a whole lot of the guesswork I've been making should be eliminated. All but one of the ACC schools (Virginia Tech is the lone holdout) hosts a live game application, either CSTV's GameTracker or XOS's GameWatcher, and these make getting full PBP data really simple. The upshot is that I'll have the data for at least 88 of the 96 conference games, plus most non-con games as well.

Tiger Beat

Clemson's individual projections are ready. Duke or Maryland will be next (and it shouldn't take two weeks between postings this time).

Georgia Tech Ready

Georgia Tech's projections are ready, and they're looking better than I thought they would. If Causey and/or Miller can run the point well enough for Clinch to play off the ball, and if they play any defense at all, the Jackets might just be better than they were in 2007.

Clemson is up next.

As for the positional inferences I talked about in the last post, nevemind. There's just too many variables at play to be able to get a good handle on positions played through the back door like that. While they're far from perfect, the size adjustments are just as good as anything I was able to come up with using the jury-rigged positions. More importantly, they take way less coding.

What I will do is create a new report that gives everyone's "effective" height. It won't mean anything, really, but it'll be a neat report to look at every now and then. I find it interesting, at least.

Hurricane Forecast

Miami's projections are ready.

I'm going to take a few days off from generating the projections. Half of them are up, and with the season still almost 4 months away I don't feel any real rush to get the rest out there. Instead I'm going to spend some time on a new project.

In developing the similarity scores used to generate the player projections, it's really jumped out at me just how close a correlation there is between a player's size and the statistics that he generates. Amazingly enough, height and weight are not used at all in generating the similarity scores, yet the top comps are almost always dead ringers, from a body-type perspective, for the base player.

I've been using player size as a proxy for position in PAPER, but that leads to a few different kinds of problems. First, sometimes there are guys--Ishmael Smith and Will Bowers, to cite one from either extreme off the top of my head--who are so far outside the normal range of players that the regressions that tell me what the "league average" player of their size should be doing just don't have enough good data to work with. They wind up with funky results (a player T.J. Bannister's size in 2005, for example, should have blocked -0.006 shots per defensive possession according to the model) that I've either got to just roll with or jury rig out somehow. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge deal, or one that affects the bottom line number much, if at all, but I've never cared for it.

The second problem is that it treats players who are big or small for their position differently than they probably should be. There's an adjustment using BMI that refines the raw height number into something a little bit closer to the truth, essentially adding an inch or so to the height of the stouter players while shaving one off of the scrawnier ones, but PAPER still treats Mamadi Diane and Greivis Vasquez exactly the same, even though they have vastly different responsibilities on the court.

Getting to the point, I think there may be a way to make PAPER better by scrapping the size adjustments and using positional adjustments instead. I'm already making what I think is a pretty safe assumption: players of similar size generally tend to play the same position. But if I can break that down, to find some markers in the numbers that say, "This guy is a shooting guard," or, "That guy is a defensive specialist," it will only make the system better.

I don't know if this will go anywhere or not, but I'm going to think on it for a few days and see what happens. In the meantime, if there's a player on a team that hasn't been posted yet, and you're just dying to see what the Magic Spreadsheet says he's going to do next year, drop me an email. Running the individual projections takes like 5 seconds, and I do them out of curiosity all the time; it's just the formatting everything into a nice little package that takes a couple hours for each team.

Pack Predictions Posted

Hey, I said no more bad puns. I didn't say anything about alliteration. N.C. State's projection is up. The full roster's not posted yet, but they've got all the returning players listed, and I used the LOI list from Rivals to populate the freshmen.

Miami is on deck.

FSU Ready

Florida State is up.

Nobody else has posted their full 2008 roster yet. I'll keep an eye on the official sites, and get projections up as the rosters are available.

Pre-Deac-tions

Yeah, that's bad. No more puns in the headlines unless they're really good. Promise. Anyway, Wake Forest's projections are ready.

Next up: Florida State.

The Eagle Has Landed

Boston College's predictions are ready.

N.C. State Wake Forest is up next.

Introducing a New Toy

I've started putting together individual projection pages for all new and returning players. I'm going to create a separate spreadsheet document for each team's roster, and each player will have his own sheet within the workbook. Teams are just starting to post rosters on their official sites, so I'll try and keep up with them as they're published. First up: Virginia.

I've included both per-40 and per-game projections for all players, but the playing time projections are based entirely on historical precedents. I'm not about to try and figure out who's going to get minutes and who's going to get splinters at this early stage. As a result, for example, you'll find that adding up all of the 50th percentile projections for the Virginia team would give you about 60 extra minutes.

Similarity scores are based on a comparison of players' per-40 numbers across 16 statistical categories. A score of 1000 would indicate an identical season; anything over 900 is a strong similarity, and anything over 920 or so is very strong. Career similarities are based on the same scale, but, obviously, for the players' entire careers through that class.

Freshman projections are based on what similarly-sized and similarly-touted players have done in their first years.

Boston College is up next, probably sometime over the weekend.

SAYING A SOOTH: Projecting 2008

With the deadline to withdraw from the NBA draft just two days away (and with the status of only two would-be returnees, Sean Singletary and Thaddeus Young still uncertain) it's time to start thinking about the 2008 season. I'll be running a detailed post on each of the 12 teams over the next few weeks, but today I thought I'd roll out the individual projections I've been playing with.

This spreadsheet contains a per-game prediction for every returning player who saw at least 5% of his team's floor time in 2007. Predictions were generating by comparing Player X's season to every other player-season in the database (which includes every ACC player back to the 1980 season) across 15 statistical categories. I then looked at how those 40-80 past players who were most similar to Player X had fared the following season, relative to the season of comparison. The rate of improvement (or decline) in each category was then applied to the numbers posted by Player X to arrive at the numbers you see on the spreadsheet.

I should note that these numbers are all very preliminary. They haven't yet been placed into team context. As the incoming freshmen and transfers are built into the system (which will come with the team previews), playing times will change. Since all of the other numbers in the spreadsheet are playing-time dependent, there'll be some significant changes to the final predictions.