Last week, I unveiled my personal preseason power rankings for 21 teams in the area. Well, it obviously got some attention and two more teams (Yale and Marist) were added for a total of 23. And now we’re adding more voters! I’ve teamed up with eight assorted media members (with more to come!) and team bloggers from around the metro area to get a look at who they think are the top teams around the city. The answers might surprise you.
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The Transfer List
Ken Pomeroy posted a master list of all the transfers that are eligible this season. It’s a good reference. One of the things to note though is that there are two limitations to the list. 1) It only includes players that played at least 10% of minutes at their last destination. 2) It doesn’t include players that went to junior college and then came back.
The notable players from this blog’s perspective are: SG Melquan Bolding (Duquesne to Fairleigh Dickinson), PG Stevie Mejia (Rhode Island to Hofstra), SG Chris Prescott (Saint Joseph’s to St. Peter’s) and Kenneth Ortiz (Southern Miss to Wagner).
Officially back in NYC
Yesterday marked a big step in this little blog’s development, because on September 11, 2011 I became a resident of New York City. Oh sure, I’m couch surfing at the moment, but I’m in the Big Apple and thus this blog can begin in earnest.
New York basketball and 9/11
The 10-year anniversary of 9/11/2001 is tomorrow and many of the student athletes that are now on teams around the New York City area experienced it first hand or hand their lives significantly impacted. Eamonn Brennan did an incredible job of putting together some of their thoughts in a piece that is part tribute, part searching for answers, part interview, but all very deep.
Summer Wrap Up: St. John’s Roster Remade
Last season Steve Lavin surprised some people by taking a veteran St. John’s team and going 21-12 to earn a six seed in the NCAA Tournament. The Red Storm played a rotation with eight seniors. The players had been around for a long time, but none really became household names until 2010-11. Maybe that would’ve changed if people knew they’d already seen these guys before?
Summer Wrap Up: The Unlucky Crusaders
Holy Cross was featured today on SI.com by Andy Glockner for doing something that must be a pretty rare occurrence, being the unluckiest team in America for two seasons in a row. The Crusaders are an astounding 3-20 in games decided by five point or less the past two seasons.
It’s generally assumed that luck doesn’t carry over in that fashion. It’s much more likely that a team will drop back into the middle of the pack the next season. That’s because being “unlucky”, at least how Ken Pomeroy defines it, isn’t caused by any single attribute in a basketball game. Want proof? Just look at teams similar to those Holy Cross squads have done in the past.
New APR standards really raise the bar
The NCAA Division I Board of Directors approved a raising of the Academic Progress Rate benchmark from 900 to 930 today. A four-year rolling APR below the 930 threshold will now force teams to sit out postseason competition. Currently there are penalties for when a team falls below 900 (Ballin’ is a Habit did a great look at APR in May). Suffice to say, it’s going to be quite the adjustment.
The All-Big East Doppelgangers
One of the fun things to do with similarity scores is see what might’ve been. Who could you swap onto a team and get similar results? (Well sort of, you get the point.) The All-Big East Teams seemed like the perfect opportunity to do such a thing. I ran the BCS conference similarities for each of the All-Big East Teams (First through Third, plus Rookies) and the top comparison for each player is presented after the jump.
Big Men Can Shoot: Kevin Durant’s College Comparisons
The NBA lockout has Kevin Durant dominating the New York Summer Leagues this week instead. But back during the 2006-07 season Durant was dominating college basketball as a member of the Texas Longhorns. While he spent just one season in college, he instantly made his mark.
Continue reading “Big Men Can Shoot: Kevin Durant’s College Comparisons”
BCS Similarity Scores are working!
I just wanted to post here that tonight I went and created a separate database to run similarity scores for BCS level players. I grabbed 9,849 player records from 2002-2011 from the Big East, ACC, Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12 and Big 12. 6,784 of those players played more than 150 minutes in their respective season.
I crunched the numbers, the standard deviations are a little tighter than they were with the non-BCS conferences I was looking at earlier, and created new similarity scores and started cranking players through the system. Some fun things I found are after the jump.
NYC Buckets Archive 