The NEC already released its conference schedule, so Long Island did everyone one better and released its entire schedule from the opening game at Hofstra on November 11 until the final conference tilt at Monmouth on February 25, 2012. The fact that the schedule is bookended by two road games is no accident. The Blackbirds are going to be road warriors in 2011-12.
Category: LIU Brooklyn
Are Iona and Long Island closer than people think?
It seems like the prevailing opinion heading into the season is that the Iona Gaels are the best mid-major team in the New York City area. The team that went to the CIT championship returns all its key players and might add Momo Jones, so Tim Cluess’ squad has a good argument. But Long Island went to the NCAA Tournament last season, returns a number of key pieces – including Julian Boyd – and is bringing in a recruiting class that includes junior college transfer Brandon Thompson. College Sports Madness ranked Iona 81st and Long Island 85th in its preseason preview. Is it really that close?
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Scheduling details beginning to leak
The 2011-12 schedules are getting set and some of the details are beginning to leak. Today Manhattan announced that it’s first round opponent in the NIT Season Tip-Off will be Syracuse at the Carrier Dome. (Lenn Robbins has more and quotes from head coach Steve Masiello.)
Andy Katz’s blog has some news and notes about both Iona and Long Island’s schedule as well. It looks like it’ll be a long start to the season for the Blackbirds.
Wishful thinking thanks to Schedulematic
Noted basketball stats maven Ken Pomeroy tried to solve the NCAA’s poor first week of the season by scheduling interesting, local match ups using a system he created and dubbed Schedulematic. Some of the results are really feasible, but when there’s a top mid-major team in a local area the results get a bit harder to fathom.
A Bleacher Report article worth reading
I tweeted about this over the weekend (and you should follow my account), but this article on Bleacher Report about the Top 30 Mid-Major Players at every position for 2011-12 is actually pretty insightful. The ranks of the New York area players are after the jump.
Updates to NEC and Ivy League value added posts
The best part about the internet is that people keep building on the work that others are doing. Today on Cracked Sidewalks is a post about predicting the future using value add and there’s a lot there you should check out. Using some of those concepts I wanted to update my posts about the NEC and the Ivy League before moving on.
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Surprise at the top of NEC value added rankings
This afternoon on Twitter I got asked about the Value Added rankings for the NEC. Long Island is the defending champion and is going to be returning a number of players, including 6’7 forward Julian Boyd, from a team that ranked 118th in Ken Pomeroy’s rankings last season and went 27-6 (16-2). Thus the Blackbirds should be the favorite again in 2011-12, right? Not so fast suggests value added.
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Ratings systems didn’t understand Long Island
Not all numbers are created equal. While there are a number of widely accepted methods of figuring out which teams are the best in college basketball, not even they completely agree. Statisticians like Ken Pomeroy and Ken Massey lead the way, but the College Basketball Rankings Comparison page lists 42 different ones.
Some are tempo-free, others are based on human intuition. They’re all some sort of ranking of the 345 teams in Division I college basketball (or some subset of that group). Good luck figuring out which one is right.
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Charles Jenkins wins another award
Congrats to Hofstra’s Charles Jenkins. He picked up another today with the announcement of the Haggerty Award, which goes to the player of the year in the New York metropolitan area. (Which means it includes the major conference guys as well.)
It was Jenkins’ third straight season winning the award. I guess he’ll have to give it up to someone else next season. (Since he’s graduating at all.)
Coaching Resumes on KenPom
Have you always wondered what makes a coach tick? How his scheme translates into tempo-free numbers? Well, now you can figure it out with one click of the mouse. Ken Pomeroy’s coaching resumes are the hot new thing in tempo-free college basketball.
Click on a profile and learn a lot about a coach. (Well at least the past 10 seasons of their career when they were a head coach.) Observations about each school’s head men coming up.
NYC Buckets Archive 