Does NIT success bring future NCAA appearances?

I got asked a question on Twitter the other day about how teams that make the Final Four of the NIT do the next season. It’s an interesting question partly because it’s a difficult one to really solve. There’s a lot that goes into a team’s season a success or failure. One obvious question though is: Do teams that make the NIT Final Four at Madison Square Garden then go onto to make the NCAA Tournament the next season? That is something we can take a look at, and there seems to be something to it.

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Doug McDermott, Ray McCallum and special cases

When a freshman steps right into a major role on a college basketball team chances are there were some special circumstances. That player is probably extremely talented and worthy of some buzz. If it happens at somewhere like Creighton or Detroit, certainly not the land of one-and-dones, it’s even more special.

For Doug McDermott and Ray McCallum there were some extenuating circumstances, for one their dads happened to coach their teams, but by the end of the season they both deserved the minutes and accolades they received.

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5 Questions about Wisconsin basketball Ultimate Frisbee

Today The Dagger’s Jeff Eisenberg broke up the monotony of the college basketball offseason with a fun post about the Wisconsin basketball using Ultimate Frisbee to train. As an Ultimate player myself (all four years in college, a little club afterward, lots of recreational play) I started wondering about a few things. After the break are five burning questions I want answered.

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2011 Team Similarities: Indiana

Yes, the Indiana Hoosiers were a little unlucky last season. Whether it was the injuries that limited Maurice Creek to 18 games, the bad bounces that caused the Hoosiers to finish 343rd (a.k.a third to last) in KenPom’s luck metric, or Victor Oladipo getting superglued to the bench (oh wait, Tom Crean did that), Indiana definitely faced its fair share of adversity.

In the end it all amounted to a 12-20 record, including a 3-15 mark in the Big Ten. Could the season have gone differently? Well, maybe. But the Hoosiers’ comparisons suggest there’s still a long way to go in the rebuilding process.

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2011 Team Similarities: Connecticut

The Connecticut Huskies rebounded from not even making the NCAA Tournament in 2009-10, to winning the whole thing in 2010-11. It was an impressive display of defense from the team that finished ninth in the Big East during the regular season.

When you look at the similarity scores of Connecticut’s national championship team, you realize just how fragile college basketball is. The Huskies’ closest comparison? That 2009-10 version that lost in the second round of the NIT.

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100 Days Until Basketball Starts!

The July recruiting period is heating up, but in just 100 days we’ll be done talking about recruiting and last season and onto 2011-12. That’s because, as Jon Rothstein’s countdown pointed out today, we’re just 100 days away from October 15, 2011 – the official start of fall practice.

I remember back in kindergarten when we had a party after the first 100 days of school. (We also learned about a googol, well before Google ever mattered.) This is like that, but so much better. It’s time to start getting excited.

2011 Team Similarities: Belmont

Now that we’ve established the methods for the team similarity scores (and thanks everyone for feedback) let’s look at a team as a test case. One team that was particularly unique last season was Belmont.

The Bruins absolutely dominated the Atlantic Sun last season and finished with a 30-5 record after a first round loss to Wisconsin in a game between two underseeded teams. Their comparisons though make it obvious they might’ve missed out on a lot of more.

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Introducing team similarity scores

The impetus for my player similarity scores was a post last season by John Ezekowitz about team similarity scores. I found the methodology introduced by Neil Paine to be interesting, but college basketball isn’t the NBA and thus I wanted to refine the method a bit. I want to go over the method I used here, but tomorrow I’ll start in with some interesting things I’ve found.

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Is slower better in college basketball?

Everyone knows the story of The Tortoise and the Hare. Slow and wins the race. But that hasn’t always been the case in college basketball. Teams like North Carolina, with Roy Williams’ Secondary Break, or Arkansas, and Nolan Richardson’s 40-minutes of Hell, conjure up breakneck paces and 100-point games. The game has been subtly slowing down and teams that can play that game are becoming more successful.

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Sports analytics are a chance to learn

Today on Grantland there is a post about statistical analysis in sports and the perils and pitfalls of some of the possible applications of data entitled The Math Problem. It is written by Wired’s Jonah Lehrer, who seems to be a really reasonable guy. I guess that’s what makes the post so perplexing. The argument is that statistical analysis is becoming a crutch and that an over reliance on it is preventing teams from focusing on more important aspects of the game.

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