An Attempt At A Big Ten Hoops Scorecard: (Approximately) Midseason Review

“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: