College Basketball Open Discussion

Random, but I’m very confused why X is not on the KPOY list. For example: here are two other point guards on the list

  1. Cassius Winston - 73.9% Min, 115.5 Orating, 29.4 Poss%, 37.9 Assist%, 7.6 DR%
  2. Payton Pritchard - 84.3% Min, 114.2 Orating, 27.9 Poss%, 31.8 Assist%, 12.2 DR%

NR. Xavier Simpson - 76.1 %Min, 121.7 ORating, 26.0 Poss%, 50.8%, 13.2 DR%

Feels like Xavier’s numbers are strictly better. These dudes have an advantage in usage… but Xavier has just as much true usage/burden in the offense, he’s just successfully converting that extra usage into assists instead of missing shots. Seems like there’s a major flaw in KP’s POY formula where it’s overrating points of usage at the high end and not valuing Assist Rate as much as it should.

Note: I didn’t include TO Rate since that’s already factored into the overall ORating.

10 Likes

I think they are closer to that ceiling than when they arrived in The Bahamas. Feels like they are starting to click in that offense now.

1 Like

Well, certainly now that Wagner is playing, but he has a ways to go yet. I will be more interested to see how we do against Louisville and Oregon. We added nicely to our resume over the weekend, but a holiday tournament in a tropical paradise is a bit like a bowl game-mental preparation has a tendency to outweigh talent more than it might in a regular season game on someone’s home court. Scores can get a little skewed.

1 Like

This sounds like an opinion presented as a fact. I don’t mean to say that you are wrong, but I don’t know how you could prove this and even if you did for one team that doesn’t mean it translates to every team. The more I think about it though, the tv programming for the tournaments kept mentioning the tournament winner going on to with the big dance, but even that is anecdotal.

1 Like

I think that tournament says more about SDSU than anything else. Dutcher has a monster

3 Likes

It seems to me that what a team can do in tournaments is the most important thing of all in CBB.

1 Like

Of course it’s an opinion. As many things stated on this board are. Even though they are not always prefaced with “in my opinion”, that doesn’t mean that people are declaring them to be unquestionably true.

2 Likes

Well, there are tournaments and there are Tournaments. What we just played in was the former. That doesn’t mean we weren’t impressive or that those wins won’t be important come March.

SDSU is top ten in Torvik. That’s insane they could be real scary this season.

I guess all those quality wins over Georgetown weren’t very good now.

It looks like CBS updated their top 25 as of this morning and put Michigan at #5. Not sure how/if that correlates with the upcoming AP rankings, but I guess we’ll see.

2 Likes

I haven’t gotten to see them live yet but I’ve been watching their numbers and the amount of quality wins they have. They played a bunch of solid mid majors and beat them handily. 25-35 point thumpings.

Then beating creighton by 31 is extremely impressive. Even though Michigan won I was pretty impressed by creighton, particularly if they were short handed like they stated. They were a top 40 team all day in my book. To beat them by 31 is serious. Then a nice win over Iowa, I don’t even know who they have.

1 Like

Louisville finished last year #23 on Kenpom. Now, despite playing the 306th best schedule so far, they’re #1? How does that work?

2 Likes

Very good question.

Last year during the season I very much appreciated the Kenpom analytics approach to ranking basketball teams.

Now this year I have learned that their rankings a month into the season are still very much skewed by their preseason assumptions. I think that sucks!

The rankings are meant to be predictive. If they weren’t at all based on some kind of preseason projection, that would be almost impossible early in the season because there would be no way to determine how good most wins are.

7 Likes

One guy that does these types of rankings for football (Bill Connelly), actually found that including preseason projections throughout the whole season makes them more predictive. Or maybe it was KenPom himself that found that, but said he doesn’t do it anyway since it’s a small difference.

Michigan #1 in Seth Davis and Jeff Goodman’s individual polls.

2 Likes

That was Connelly. Also worth noting that preseason polls have more accurately bpredicted the tournament than the final polls of the season.

2 Likes

Just wonder how did their prediction work so far, against Vegas?

And their historical performance against Vegas.

This season is very strange, I don’t remember two #1 teams lost to low mid-major opponents at home ever.

The preseason numbers make the predictions more accurate or he wouldn’t have them. They’re useful for keeping you from overreacting to one early season win or loss.

2 Likes