Ukraine is game to Ra'Sean Dickey

The Jackets' center would have returned this season after sitting out last year due to grades, but Ra'Sean Dickey is headed to the Ukraine. Dickey would probably started at center, so now they'll have to rely on Alade Aminu and Brad Sheehan at the five, as well as go small with Gani Lawal or Zack Peacock playing undersized at center for stretches. Dickey's 50% line had him playing 20 minutes per game and averaging about 8 points and 5 rebounds. Tech now has absolutely no margin for attrition in the frontcourt.

Will this move be the start of a trend? There's already been much speculation on the future of non-college-type teenagers and under-compensated mid-level free agents after the Brandon Jennings and Josh Childress moves, so are we going to start seeing American-born players who would be long-shots to land in the Association leaving college with eligibility remaining? If so, that could be far more devastating to the college game than a couple dozen elite players leaving for the NBA every year. There are a whole lot more Ra'Sean Dickeys than there are Michael Beasleys.

2009 Player Projections: UVa, NCSU, and GT

I've uploaded the player projection reports for Georgia Tech (Mo Miller is poised for a breakout), N.C. State (the real Brandon Costner was the one we saw in 2007; Ben McCauley's great sophomore season looks like it was a fluke), and Virginia (a healthy Solomon Tat could be the Wahoos' best player). Boston College, Florida State, Miami, North Carolina, and Wake Forest have all posted their '08-'09 rosters on their official sites, so I'll have them up relatively soon.

There's a new section in the reports this year, and it's the key to the player comps. Each player-season in the database has been assigned these eight numbers, and each number represents a facet of the player's game:

• Size is height, with an adjustment for bulk using Body Mass Index (BMI). Skinny players tend to play shorter than their height, and bulky ones play taller. Each standard deviation of BMI adds or subtracts an inch from height.
• Physicality is Free Throw Attempts plus Personal Fouls, divided by 1 plus the ratio of 3-Point Attempts to Field Goal Attempts.
• Activity shows how often a player does something that shows up in the box score.
• Shooting is the average of: FT%; 3G% times 3GM, divided by 3; and 2G% times 2GM, divided by 8.
• Scoring is simply Points scored.
• Passing is Assists minus Turnovers.
  
• Rebounding is the number of Rebounds recorded.
• Defense is height-normalized Blocks plus Steals.

All the numbers used are per-40. Each category is then normalized to a 0-to-100 scale. The similarity scores are based on a combination of the correlation and the closeness of the two players' profiles. The projections based on the new system are about 25% tighter on average than the ones from a year ago.

Tourney Preview: (7) Georgia Tech vs. (10) Virginia

The tables below might not show up in an RSS reader; if all you see is text, either click back to the blog to see them, or click here to see the source spreadsheet.

The first game of the evening session is almost as close as the nooner. Instead of good defensive teams that like to play at a moderate pace, though, Virginia and Georgia Tech are both average to above-average offensive teams (and fairly lousy defensive teams) that like to push tempo. ESPN probably lucked into the most entertaining game of the first round for their national coverage. In the first meeting on January 27 in the Basketball Jones, Virginia jumped out to a big lead early thanks to hot three point shooting, then didn't adjust after the threes stopped falling, eventually losing 92-82 (79 possessions) in overtime. The second match was slated to be played on February 21, but was postponed by rain until March 3. A back-and-forth affair, Virginia won 76-74 (74 possessions) on a Calvin Baker three-pointer in the closing seconds.

Neither team has a significant advantage in any facet of the game, and whatever small edge either has is offset by a shortcoming in a different area. The difference between the Wahoos and the Wreck has been razor thin in the two previous meetings--in the breakdowns as well as in the final scores--and the only thing that would be a surprise in the rubber game is a blowout.

Game Previews: The Overshadowed

Let's be honest here: there's only one game that anybody outside of Atlanta, Chestnut Hill, College Park, Coral Gables, Tallahassee, and Winston-Salem really cares about tonight. It's a damn shame, too, because all three promise to be good games. I'm running short on time this evening, so I'll run a paragraph on each along with a link to the respective reports.

The closest of the three is the first game of the night, when Maryland travels to Chestnut Hill to take on the Boston College. Maryland has a small advantage on paper, but when the difference between two teams is 2/3 of a point over 74 possessions it's hard to call them a favorite to win.

Also tipping at 7:00 are Wake Forest and Georgia Tech. The two schools everybody used to get confused with one another when they were kids square off in a game whose winner will reach the halfway point of the ACC season at .500. Wake is just under a 2-point favorite, and they won 55% of the simulations.

A half hour later, Florida State and Miami will tip off before a crowd of dozens. Miami's advantage on the glass makes them a 7-point favorite, making this the biggest mismatch of the night.

Game Preview: Maryland at Georgia Tech

Turnovers are the point of separation here. Georgia Tech does a decent job of taking care of the basketball, but Maryland has been uncharacteristically bad at forcing their opponents to turn the ball over this season. At the other end of the floor, the Terps have been giving away possessions like candy, ranking 248th in adjusted turnovers per possession. If the Terps can even out the turnover margin this shapes up as a tight game.

Game Preview: Georgia Tech at Virginia

Those using a reader will probably need to click over to the blog to see the tables.

Virginia poses a tougher matchup for Georgia Tech than the teams' respective rankings would indicate. Based purely on a log5 analysis of their respective TAPE, which is based on how teams would perform against an average Division I team, the 33rd-ranked Wreck should win a neutral-site game against the 79th-ranked Wahoos roughly 2/3 of the time. Instead, Virginia's strong outside shooting and willingness to shoot from outside match up very well with a Georgia Tech defense that tends to allow opponents to take outside shots in exchange for a strong interior defense. The result is that in a holistic simulation of a matchup between the two teams, Georgia Tech is only a 54% (1.3 point) favorite on a neutral court. That translates into a 4.3-point advantage for Virginia when the game's played inside the Basketball Jones.

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.

SHINY HAPPY WAHOOS

Saturday's Virginia-Georgia Tech game featured something I'd never seen before. As fans entered the Basketball Jones they were given what looked like a rolled up-scroll with a handle at each end (no, that's not the weird part; fans are often given cheaply-manufactured objects which they can use to litter the floor of the grandstands show their school spirit). When unfurled, these scrolls said "Go Hoos Go" in blue on an orange background. They were made of mylar, so the reverse was a mirror-like surface.

When the teams changed ends in the second half, and the Yellow Jackets started shooting into the end of the arena with the bulk of the student section, the Virginia students started shaking the scrolls with the shiny surface toward the court, which had the effect of reflecting the arena lights back at the court, making for a very tough shooter's backdrop, and evidently also was hell on the TV cameras (it didn't seem to affect the Tech shooters all that much, though--they hit 3 of their 5 shots in that stretch).

At the first media timeout, the public address announcer told the kids to cut it out, and that if they didn't the 'Hoos would be assessed a technical foul. Fun over. (Incidentally, since there's nothing in the rules to specifically prevent fans from flashing shiny film at the court, Karl Hess and crew had to use the artificial noisemaker clause of the rulebooks to get the things put away.)

Some friends and I were talking about this yesterday, generally agreeing that the officials had every right to make the kids stop, when one of the guys brought up the subject of the big spinners--you know, the ones that look like hypnosis spirals) the Maryland student section has been displaying this season, and wondering why they've been allowed, and, more importantly, whether the suckers work.

Well, it turns out that they do. Obviously, small sample size cautions apply any time we're talking about seven games, but Maryland's opponents have shot .138 points worse in the Comcast Center than they have in their other games. That's 17 points that, one could argue, Maryland's student section has given their team over 7 games. Let's have a table, eh?

Date	Team	gFTM	gFTA	gFT%	sFT%	exFTM	netFTM
1/10/2007	Miami	22	29	.759	.742	21.5	0.5
1/13/2007	Clemson	5	13	.385	.579	7.5	-2.5
1/24/2007	Georgia Tech	6	16	.375	.698	11.2	-5.2
2/ 6/2007	Virginia	11	13	.846	.741	9.6	1.4
2/11/2007	Duke	6	13	.462	.688	8.9	-2.9
2/21/2007	Florida State	16	27	.593	.775	20.9	-4.9
2/25/2007	North Carolina	8	17	.471	.708	12.0	-4.0

gFTM, gFTA, and gFT% are the stats for each team in the respective games; sFT% is the team's season free throw percentage in all ACC games; exFTM is the number of free throws each team would make if they hit their season percentage in each game; and netFTM is the difference between the actual and expected free throws made.

I haven't dived into the full play-by-play for these games, but it'd be interesting to see that broken down even more by half, as the Comcast Center (I think) only has student seating at one end of the court.

Update: Maryland's opponents have hit 60% of their first half free throws and 56.4% in the second half.