Statistics

HISTORIC TRENDS: 25 YEARS OF WOLVERINE BASKETBALL

This week’s diary is mainly designed to graph out some of the trends in box score statistics (and a few derived from the box score) that we have seen over the last 25 seasons of Michigan basketball. What I hoped to achieve here was merely to provide a visual for the increases and decreases in these statistics over time, but also to look at the averages in this period  to get some idea of how well the current team is performing compared to the last, well, several teams. It is important to note that all totals for the current team are to date – I didn’t want to do a projection of future totals simply because of the potential error that would be part of that projection.

TABLE 1 – COMPARISON OF CERTAIN AVERAGES

The charts below are admittedly exaggerated via some varied scaling in order to show clearly some of the cycles and trends in some of the statistics. I will apologize in advance for this, but it seemed like a good way to show this.

For example, you can see average rebounds per game on a trend of general decline for years, bottoming out over the last few seasons before a definite recovery in this season:

You can see with average assists per game several cycles of varied length, but another generally steady downward turn from the 90s through the last few seasons:

In average points per game, there was a very protracted trend of general decline (with noted spikes) that seemed to get reasonably flat at time wore on. Again, this year, the trend is reversing.

Looking at offensive and defensive efficiency, you will see that, most years, we hung out somewhere around 1.000 for offensive efficiency, but have had widely varied performance on defense. A similar tale can be told for offensive and defensive rebound %, but here, it is defensive rebounding % which is relatively stable in comparison to its counterpart. This is less obvious when looking at rebound totals for the season, of course.

On this chart, you’ll find field goal percentage, three-point percentage and free throw percentage trends so you can see the interplay between the three. Free throw shooting and field goals seemed to actually be relatively stable over time, with our three-point percentage being by far the most variable aspect of our shooting offense.

Here are the trends for turnovers, blocks, personal fouls and steals.

TL;DR CONCLUSION:

I am not sure there is a fixed conclusion here only because the current season is not yet finished, but no it is even clear in the numbers that, at least in a few important regards, Michigan basketball is coming back to levels of production and play that it has not seen in quite some time. We can see it on the court, but the statistics definitely do back up the so-called “eye test” comparisons we tend to make of this team.

OBLIGATORY:

“ATTEMPT AT A BIG TEN HOOPS SCORECARD”

Over this past weekend, I began to frame out the hoops version of the football scorecard that I had advanced last month on the board. Indeed, I have already made some enhancements to that one thanks to the input of board members. This one, however, is indeed another rough attempt at correlating various productivity measures into a relative measure of success.

I took eighteen typical boxscore statistics and gathered the season-to-date totals for each team in the conference. When the season is complete, it might be intriguing to do a “conference vs. overall” sort of analysis with this, but for now, I am presenting merely the overall card to this point. There were a few things that I admittedly waffled on leaving here, but did for purposes of discussion. Most notably, the actual totals of FGs, 3PTs, and FTs both made and attempted are analyzed along with success rate. My thought here was – among other things - that it indicates potentially where teams could be doing a lot of work for very little return and could show inefficiency.

Obviously, it is not by any means an exact science, and although I show that the results are rather highly correlated to actual win percentage, they obviously do not take into account the whole set of variables active in a game, and indeed, in a season, such as strength of schedule. This is merely an attempt to apply a similar scoring approach to basketball as I had done with football. It is fairly similar to the football scorecard in that there are certain statistics where being above the conference mean is decidedly better, and a few where actually being below the mean is preferred.

The larger table is linked below – there is no way to compress the overall scorecard to make it fit easily into the diary setup on the blog, so the link should take you to the relevant images in my Photobucket account.

OVERALL CARD (THUMBNAIL):

SUMMARY CARD:

DISCUSSION:

The idea of "grading" teams on these 18 metrics seems to bear itself out fairly well if we correlate it to current win percentage. One of the noted anomolies here is Ohio State, which falls into the "red" zone, but yet has a fairly decent win percentage. This might be an example of one of the thing which mere productivity does not catch, which is a team with erratic shooting success that plays decent defense, enough so to win a majority of the time. If anyone has some suggestions on ironing such things out, I would love to hear them as I want to make these as accurate as possible.

Comments and suggestions are welcome as always. My intent here is to develop tools which can be used perhaps by the whole community here to gauge relative performance among our fellow conference members.

FOR THOSE WHO MERELY WANT THE CAT PHOTO:

Prediction for Iowa: The FEI Forecast for this Saturday is Michigan 28 – Iowa 16 with a 78% Probable Win Expectation for Michigan. Michigan's offense continues to be excellent (4.81 PPPo) against poor teams (AFA, UMass, Purdue, Illinois, Minnesota, Northwestern) but has struggled (0.90 PPPo) against every good team (Alabama, ND, MSU, Nebraska). Iowa is ranked #88 in OFEI and #30 in DFEI. Looks like FEI has it just about right this week.

Strength of Schedule: Michigan's SoS for Out of Conference games is much harder than the B1G games. This is quite unusual and because of the OOC Strength of Schedule, M is actually doing better in B1G games versus OOC for both offense (2.7 vs. 2.5 PPPo) and defense (1.3 vs. 2.0 PPPo). The defense had their worst game (2.8 PPPo) since Alabama.

Fremeau Efficiency Index: Michigan improved in both overall and offense FEI with defense basically unchanged. In the detailed chart below, GE represents the raw data for FEI before adjustments for opponents.

The S&P Ratings (Also from Football Outsiders) is a play based analysis (rather than possession based) and M is ranked #19 overall, #18 in offense, and #27 in defense. The S&P ratings DO include games against non-FBS opponents (go figure).

The FEI is a drive based analysis considering each of the nearly 20,000 drives each year in FBS vs. FBS college football. The data is filtered to eliminate garbage time (at the half or end of game) and is adjusted for opponent. A team is rewarded for playing well against good teams (win or lose) and is punished more severely for playing poorly against bad teams than it is rewarded for playing well against bad teams.

National Rankings: The rankings for offense and defense are based on scoring (yardage statistics are inherently flawed). These are simply raw numbers without any adjustments for opponent, garbage time, or anything else. The data is from TeamRankings and includes only games between two FBS teams.

FEI Details: Here are the FEI numbers for Michigan and their opponent ( Football Outsiders FEI ).

Points Per Possession: Cumulative PPPo is 2.6 for the offense and 1.6 for the defense. M finished 2011 outscoring opponents by almost a 2:1 margin with PPPo for offense of 2.8 and defense of 1.4. The 2 charts show the raw data for offense and defense with the number of possessions adjusted for "kneel downs" at the half or end-of-game (maximum deduction = 2).

Using Scoring Offense and Scoring Defense National Rankings for the past 5 years (FBS AQ teams only), this table shows the percentage of teams that finish the season with a +WLM and a +5 WLM. For example, teams that finished in the Top 40 in both offense and defense had a 100% chance to be +WLM and an 82% chance to be +5 WLM (9-4 or better).

Prediction for Northwestern: The FEI Forecast for this Saturday is Northwestern 22 – Michigan 21 with a 52% Probable Win Expectation for Northwestern. Another toss up game? NSFMF! FEI is wrong yet again and M wins this one 31 —13. M has the #3 ranked Strength of Schedule and NW is #69 in SoS. In National statistics, M & NW are ranked about equal in scoring offense (#50 & #53) but M is ranked #13 in scoring defense with 16.8 PPG and NW is ranked #43 allowing 24.2 PPG.

Michigan's offense continues to be excellent (4.81 PPPo) against poor teams (AFA, UMass, Purdue, Illinois, Minnesota) but has struggled (0.90 PPPo) against every good team (Alabama, ND, MSU, Nebraska). Northwestern would be classified as a poor defensive team.

Fremeau Efficiency Index: Not much movement in the FEI. In the detailed chart below, GE represents the raw data for FEI before adjustments for opponents. M is ranked #28 in GE and overall FEI is #34. This seems about right since M has lost 3 of the 4 games to their highly ranked opponents.

The S&P Ratings (Also from Football Outsiders) is a play based analysis (rather than possession based) and M is ranked #20 overall, #19 in offense, and #20 in defense. The S&P ratings DO include games against non-FBS opponents (go figure).

The FEI is a drive based analysis considering each of the nearly 20,000 drives each year in FBS vs. FBS college football. The data is filtered to eliminate garbage time (at the half or end of game) and is adjusted for opponent. A team is rewarded for playing well against good teams (win or lose) and is punished more severely for playing poorly against bad teams than it is rewarded for playing well against bad teams.

National Rankings: The rankings for offense and defense are based on scoring (yardage statistics are inherently flawed). These are simply raw numbers without any adjustments for opponent, garbage time, or anything else. The data is from TeamRankings and includes only games between two FBS teams.

FEI Details: Here are the FEI numbers for Michigan and their opponent ( Football Outsiders FEI ).

Points Per Possession: Cumulative PPPo is 2.5 for the offense and 1.5 for the defense. M finished 2011 outscoring opponents by almost a 2:1 margin with PPPo for offense of 2.8 and defense of 1.4. The 2 charts show the raw data for offense and defense with the number of possessions adjusted for "kneel downs" at the half or end-of-game (maximum deduction = 2).

Using Scoring Offense and Scoring Defense National Rankings for the past 5 years (FBS AQ teams only), this table shows the percentage of teams that finish the season with a +WLM and a +5 WLM. For example, teams that finished in the Top 40 in both offense and defense had a 100% chance to be +WLM and an 82% chance to be +5 WLM (9-4 or better).

Prediction for Minnesota: The FEI Forecast for this Saturday is Michigan 24 – Minnesota 19 with just a 61% Probable Win Expectation for Michigan. If Denard is able to play most of the game, I don't think it will be that close. Michigan's offense has been excellent (3.8 PPPo) against poor teams (AFA, UMass, Purdue, Illinois) but has really struggled (0.90 PPPo) against every good team (Alabama, ND, MSU, Nebraska). In 2011 this was not the case as M scored about the same versus poor teams (3.7 PPPo) but was much better (2.2 PPPo) against good teams  (ND, MSU, Nebraska, and Iowa). That said, Minnesota would be classified as a poor team (sorry Goldie).

Fremeau Efficiency Index: Not much movement in the overall FEI or DFEI but the OFEI went from #40 to #56 (no surprise there). In the detailed chart below, GE represents the raw data for FEI before adjustments for opponents. M is ranked #34 in GE and overall FEI is #36. This seems about right since M has lost 3 of the 4 games to their highly ranked opponents.

The S&P Ratings (Also from Football Outsiders) is a play based analysis (rather than possession based) and M is ranked #12 overall, #16 in offense, and #16 in defense.

The FEI is a drive based analysis considering each of the nearly 20,000 drives each year in FBS college football. The data is filtered to eliminate garbage time (at the half or end of game) and is adjusted for opponent. A team is rewarded for playing well against good teams (win or lose) and is punished more severely for playing poorly against bad teams than it is rewarded for playing well against bad teams.

National Rankings: The rankings for offense and defense are based on scoring (yardage statistics are inherently flawed). These are simply raw numbers without any adjustments for opponent, garbage time, or anything else. The data is from TeamRankings and includes only games between two FBS teams.

FEI Details: Here are the FEI numbers for Michigan and their opponent ( Football Outsiders FEI ).

Points Per Possession: The offense has now struggled against ALL the good opponents. The TOs in the Nebraska game put the D at a significant disadvantage and the stats reflect that.

Cumulative PPPo is 2.4 for the offense and 1.5 for the defense. M finished 2011 outscoring opponents by almost a 2:1 margin with PPPo for offense of 2.9 and defense of 1.5. The 2 charts show the raw data for offense and defense with the number of possessions adjusted for "kneel downs" at the half or end-of-game (maximum deduction = 2).

Using Scoring Offense and Scoring Defense National Rankings for the past 5 years (FBS AQ teams only), this table shows the percentage of teams that finish the season with a +WLM and a +5 WLM. For example, teams that finished in the Top 40 in both offense and defense had a 100% chance to be +WLM and an 82% chance to be +5 WLM (9-4 or better).

Prediction for MSU: The FEI Forecast for this Saturday is Nebraska 27  – Michigan 24 with a 57% Probable Win Expectation for Nebraska. This difference is entirely the home field advantage. Basically a toss up and, like the Purdue and MSU games, FEI is wrong and Michigan wins the game 31 – 10. For whatever reason, FEI remains unimpressed with the Wolverines. As you can see  below, M is ranked better than Nebraska in every FEI category except offense.

Fremeau Efficiency Index: Even though it was a low scoring and close victory, FEI rewarded Michigan and moved M from #47 to #36 because MSU is still ranked very high by FEI (#29 if you can believe that!). The S&P Ratings (Also from Football Outsiders) is a play based analysis (rather than possession based) and M is ranked #11 overall, #5 in offense, and #29 in defense.

The FEI is a drive based analysis considering each of the nearly 20,000 drives each year in FBS college football. The data is filtered to eliminate garbage time (at the half or end of game) and is adjusted for opponent. A team is rewarded for playing well against good teams (win or lose) and is punished more severely for playing poorly against bad teams than it is rewarded for playing well against bad teams.

National Rankings: The rankings for offense and defense are based on scoring (yardage statistics are inherently flawed). These are simply raw numbers without any adjustments for opponent, garbage time, or anything else. The data is from TeamRankings and includes only games between two FBS teams.

FEI Details: Here are the FEI numbers for Michigan and their opponent ( Football Outsiders FEI ).

Points Per Possession: The defense continues to excel. After those first two games, M is allowing just 9.8 points per game (13, 13, 13, 0, and 10).

Cumulative PPPo is 2.7 for the offense and 1.4 for the defense. M finished 2011 outscoring opponents by almost a 2:1 margin with PPPo for offense of 2.8 and defense of 1.4. The 2 charts show the raw data for offense and defense with the number of possessions adjusted for "kneel downs" at the half or end-of-game (maximum deduction = 2).

Using Scoring Offense and Scoring Defense National Rankings for the past 5 years (FBS AQ teams only), this table shows the percentage of teams that finish the season with a +WLM and a +5 WLM. For example, teams that finished in the Top 40 in both offense and defense had a 100% chance to be +WLM and an 82% chance to be +5 WLM (9-4 or better).