A Quarter Win from Normal: Tyler Hansbrough in 2009

30 Helens 76 ACC-Area Sportswriters agree: Tyler Hansbrough is awesome. And if you look at the numbers, everybody appears to be right. The guy scored 19.9 points and grabbed 8.8 rebounds per game in ACC play. He willed himself to the free throw stripe almost 8 times a game. He extended his range beyond the three-point line. He intensely out-intensified everyone who crossed his path, and he carried his team to first place in the conference.

Here's the thing, though: there wasn't anything extraordinary about Tyler Hansbrough's 2009 season. And I don't mean that in an "After three years we've come to expect greatness from Psycho T, so he has to do something more in his senior year to really impress" way. I mean that he didn't do much more than would be expected of any ACC-level big man.

The one thing Tyler Hansbrough did very well, just as he has throughout his career, was score points. Even after adjusting for the pace of play (Carolina plays 6.8% faster than the league average) and the quality of his teammates (Hansbrough was set up well and often by three better-than-average passers in Lawson, Ellington, and Green), Hansbrough would score 16.9 points per game for a typical ACC team in conference play. That rates Hansbrough best among big men and 8th-best in the league.

As a rebounder, Hansbrough racked up large numbers, but on a percentage basis he was just about average. A 6'9" and 250-pound player should rebound 1 out of every 9 of his team's misses; Hansbrough rebounded 1 out of every 9.5. Someone that size should rebound one out of every 6.2 of his opponents' misses; Tyler rebounded 1 out of every 5.8.

Defensively, Hansbrough grades out below average. Someone his size is expected to block 1 out of every 22 two-pointers attempted by his opponents; Hansbrough blocked one out of every 72. He should have recorded a steal once every 59 defensive possessions; Tyler made a steal once every 119. Even with a better than normal foul rate and slightly better than average defensive field goal percentages, Hansbrough was a little more than a point per game worse than an average big man.

All in all, Hansbrough was a slightly better-than-average ACC big man this year. His reputation and eye-popping counting stats made him a shoo-in for first-team all-league honors (and, it would seem, the frontrunner for a repeat as ACC Player of the Year), but in terms of actual value he was the fifth-best player on his own team.

2009 Player Projections: UNC, VPI, and Wake

North Carolina is going to be silly good.

Virginia Tech's Jeff Allen should be a superstar in his sophomore season, but don't expect big breakouts from his four classmates who helped the Hokies to a surprising 9-win ACC season in 2008.

Wake Forest would have a solid 8-man rotation of returnees. Throw in three high-quality incoming freshmen and Dino Gaudio might have trouble finding enough minutes to go around, especially once Jamie Skeen returns to the team in December.

Tourney Preview: (1) North Carolina vs. (9) Florida State

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.

Florida State took its best shot at North Carolina in the first regular season meeting on February 3 in Tallahassee, forcing overtime before losing by a score of 84-73 (79 possessions). Ty Lawson hurt his ankle 3 minutes and 47 seconds into that contest, and the Heels were out of sorts without him. They turned the ball over 21 times, their highest turnover rate in any game this season, and those free possessions allowed the Seminoles to stay in the game. The second regular season contest went more according to form, with Carolina bettering FSU in nearly every aspect of a 90-77 (70 possessions) win on March 4 in Chapel Hill.

Game Preview: Boston College at North Carolina

Those of you reading this in a feed reader might need to click back over to the blog to see the tables.

This is the biggest ACC matchup that my system can find. BC doesn't grade out very well in the TAPE system--they've had some bad losses, and even in the games they win it seems they do just enough to barely get by--and they don't match up well with the Heels at all. It's also interesting to note that the Pythagorean method starts to break down at the extremes. Using an exponent of 8.5, most of the trials have lined up pretty well with our Greek friend, but an exponent closer to 11 is necessary for the games in which the two teams aren't very close. I'll have to look into that more later on.

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.