Saturday, September 1, 2007
It's always difficult to evaluate college basketball vs. pro basketball because player performance is not quite as consistent from year to year. Our problem is made all the more difficult because of the new coach. However, I think in our case player performance can be reasonably evaluated due to Tubby Smith's ability to craft efficient players (I, as big of a Smith critic as anyone else, hate to admit this, but it's true). The good thing about an efficient player is that they are less likely to see erratic changes in performance from year to year. Of course, with a new coach this changes just a bit, but we can assume that the players will at least keep some of what they learned from their previous coach.
In this blog I'll be using various metrics, most of which designed to calculate efficiency, to predict how the Cats will perform in the 2007/2008 season. Once we have in hand the players' efficiency, we can use news reports and rumors to speculate what their playing time will be like, and from that we can predict the team performance as a hole. It will be a long and complicated process, but one that I look forward to undergoing. I plan on basing the blog mostly around the Win Score stat (calculated as Points + Rebounds + Steals + ½Assists + ½Blocked Shots – Field Goal Attempts – Turnovers - ½Free Throw Attempts - ½Personal Fouls), and hopefully D. Berri will release the formula for Wins Produced /48 next year as promised (because doing so will make predictions much easier).
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Example post