Michigan vs. Louisville

With just over an hour left until the final college basketball game of the 2013 season, I give you one last look at Michigan and Louisville. Michigan comes in with the number one ranked offense in the country, Louisville comes in with the number one ranked defense in the country. Obviously the reason Louisville is favored is their "weakness" (offense) is better than Michigan's "weakness" (defense). Weakness is in quotes, because this is relatively speaking. It's difficult for a team to make it this far with a truly big weakness on either offense or defense.

John Gasaway explained how Louisville's offense has been really good in the tournament to date. I took a look at how both teams have done game by game this season on their weaker side of the ball. Tournament games are in blue:

Louisville's offensive performances in their five NCAA tournament games have been some of their best of the year. Michigan struggled some on defense against Kansas and they will need to be great tonight in order to cut down the nets.

Enjoy the show!

Keys for Wichita State

Earlier this week I wrote about what I call opponent "compatibility". I basically wanted to know if there was any evidence for bad matchups beyond simply the general strength of the two teams. Now, I decided to use that same sample to take a look at the Louisville-Wichita St game today. My sample includes every game from the 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 season. It also has 2013 games from up until the first week of March.

I started my analysis by looking at defenses over the five years that force turnovers between 26 and 29 percent of possessions. Louisville is right in the middle of these teams at 27.5%. I identified 508 games where there was a defense with this high of a forced TO%. The following is a histogram of the TO% these defenses forced in the 508 games:

Obviously, 25%-29% is the most likely outcome. Overall, we have a very symmetrical distribution. The next step was to look at the result of game TO% on offensive efficiency. We would expect the lower TO% to be better for the offensive (higher points per possession), but it should be noted that there are correlations between the four factors themselves. In other words, a good TO% is more likely to be good at shooting, rebounding, and getting to the line than a bad TO% team. With that in mind, here's how offenses fared against pressure defenses:

The final step for this post was to look at the best offensive performances against high turnover defenses. Basically a visual look at how teams in Wichita State's position tonight have been successful:

In every single case, the offense shot the ball at a high percentage. There has been a lot of focus on if Wichita State can take care of the ball against the Louisville pressure. However, the recipe for success for teams in the Shockers' position has been to get hot from the floor and keep the TO% on a manageable (low to mid 20s) level. Easier said than done against Louisville.

A Video Charter’s Guide To The Final Four | Stat Geek Idol

The following is the third (Final Four) post I wrote for TeamRankings' Stat Geek Idol. For more information on the competition click here.

Last week, I attempted to quantify Wisconsin’s Swing Offense through the use of video charting. With the Final Four, I set out on a similar goal for Louisville, Ohio State, Kentucky, and Kansas.

To analyze each offense I watched each offensive possession from the Elite Eight of the Final Four teams in slow motion and charted categories such as: number of passes, shot location, defender proximity, number of dribbles the shooter takes, time of possession, number of players crashing the boards, and more. When it was all said and done, I was about 3% closer to becoming a video charting expert.