2011 Team Similarities: Princeton vs. Harvard

The Ivy League during the 2010-11 season was about two teams, Princeton and Harvard. The Tigers and Crimson battled it out all season with Sydney Johnson’s team eventually prevailing after a last-second 63-62 victory in the teams’ third meeting of the season.

The two teams were almost inseparable by any metric. Princeton won 25 games, Harvard won 23. Harvard finished 83rd in KenPom, Princeton 84th. It was obvious that these were two very good, not just Ivy League, but basketball teams in general. But what do similarity scores say about the debate?

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Mid-Majors to watch shows difficulty of the label

Yahoo!’s Jason King recently posted about the top mid-major teams to watch for the 2011-12 college basketball season. It’s an interesting list and certainly worth checking out, but I have a few issues with it. One is that Iona isn’t on the list – in fact not a single MAAC team is. The other is that some of the teams on the list really don’t seem like mid-majors at all.

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Looking at conference strength through value add

As a sort of follow up to Cracked Sidewalks’ post about the Top 16 teams using value add I wanted to look at conference strength. Using the formula for returning players I calculated the average team strength for each conference. I also calculated the standard deviation as sort of a way of showing team strength. The chart is here, my thoughts are after the break.

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Value add likes Columbia’s offense

Is it possible that after finishing right around .500 last season, and 6-8 in league play, Columbia might be a team that’s ready to make the leap in the Ivy League? Well, the one metric that seems to support that theory is offense “value add.” (For more background on the stat see this post and Cracked Sidewalks.)

A break down the Ivy League’s returnees through the lens of the statistic suggests that Harvard is going to run away with league crown. The Crimson combined for a very solid overall number of 15.1% value added when you add up all the individual contributions. I haven’t run the numbers for every school, but I bet that’s high even amongst BCS teams. That’s just another reason to watch out for Harvard next season. But it was the second rated team in the Ivy League, Columbia, that really stood out when I looked at the numbers.

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The Ivy League’s wide recruiting world

On one hand Ivy League schools have one of the toughest sells in Division I basketball. The schools commit a lot of money to athletics, but not always to college basketball. There are no scholarships, but there is financial aid. Then there are the academic requirements. You might not have to be Bill Gates to play basketball at Harvard, but you can’t be dumb either. They want you to stay in school for four years.

Thankfully, the Ivy League has a way to combat this problem, by offering some of the best “names” in collegiate education. There are only five Top 20 News and World Reports schools that aren’t in the Ivy League and play Division I basketball. (They are: Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame.) The educational success of the league’s institutions thus gives them national appeal in education, and this year’s recruiting class shows how powerful it is.

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