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.

CBI Preview: Richmond at Virginia

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The College Basketball Invitational--the NIT's NIT--tips off its inaugural (and something tells me final) event tonight. The CBI features a few decent-but-still-not-really-all-that-good teams and a bunch of others whose Athletic Directors I'm assuming just happened to be in the office on Sunday night and answered the invitation with something along the lines of, "Sure, what the hell." Virginia is the only ACC team involved in this mess (when a 15-15 team is one of your marquee names it becomes clear that this isn't exactly a promoter's dream), and the Cavaliers take on Richmond tonight in the Basketball Jones.

Virginia should win this one, but if Richmond springs the upset it'll most likely be thanks to their three point shooting. The Spiders aren't a great shooting team from outside--they're just a little bit better than the national average with an adjusted 3G% of 36.1%--but they shoot often from outside in their Princeton-style offense, and Virginia has been abysmal at defending three pointers of late.

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

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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 Preview: Virginia at Virginia Tech

Why is this game being played right now? It's Groundhog Day, and these two in-state rivals will be finished with their season series by dinner time. Granted, this rivalry doesn't have the cache of Duke-Carolina or a history of memorable games, but these two have still been designated as Primary Partners by the league office. They should rightfully be playing each other in the last week of the season. It's bad enough that the league is still only playing a laughably unbalanced 16-game schedule, but to compound that mistake by lumping home-and-homes so close together is just ridiculous.

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.

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.

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.

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.