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.

Final Four Values

The running narrative for the NCAA this season has been all about the parity at the top. Yet here we are in mid March and despite "the field being wide open", everyone is taking Louisville. Now I'm not saying this is a bad idea. Louisville may end up cutting down the nets in Atlanta. However, by picking Louisville you are forcing yourself to have a "near" perfect bracket in order to win your pool. In a standard scoring system, you generally have to get the national champion right to win it all (with an example of an exception being if Butler had won). If you are one of the few people in your pool to take a unique team to win it all, you don't have to be all that great with your earlier picks. With Louisville, however, you're going to have to somehow pick up points on other people with Louisville.

On ESPN, you can currently look at the percentage of people in the country taking any team to reach any round. I thought it would be interesting to compare the average person's picks to Ken Pomeroy's log 5 projections. This will help determining the "value" of final four picks. If a team's value is especially high, it might be worth it to take the gamble in order to attempt to position yourself better among other Louisville brackets. Obviously the log 5 projections aren't perfect. Thus, I decided to include the Vegas odds that each team reaches the final four in the table too. The Vegas odds weren't actually used in finding value teams, but they can either reinforce (or not) the log 5 rankings.

The DIFF column on the right is simply (log 5 final four%) - (ESPN final four%). The thing that jumps out is the "Florida Effect". Not only does Florida shatter the top spot for best value, but they also turn Georgetown and Kansas into bad values. There's a whole bunch of uncertainty surrounding the Gators, but if you trust log 5 (and Vegas) they are nearly a must in your bracket. Miami and Ohio State are the other two that stand out. The conference tournaments have a ridiculous amount of pull on ESPN brackets, or so it seems. Ohio State, Miami, Kansas, and Louisville are all in the top five most picked final four teams (with Indiana) and are coming off conference tournament championships. Syracuse has struggled, but they seem like a much better alternative to Indiana in the East than Miami. Finally, if you decide to go with Pitt in your final four, log 5 says you have an 11.7% chance of taking a commanding lead in your pool.

The Effects of Offense on Defense

Last month, I looked at the effect of Louisville's offense on its defense. When a Louisville offensive possession ends, they get to set up their press. Setting up their defense makes it dramatically more difficult for opponents to score. Both field percentage and turnover percentage are influenced by the Louisville press.

The one and done nature of the NCAA Tournament does not allow for teams to have an off night. Poor shooting can knock a heavily favored team out for good. A poor shooting night is fairly difficult to control because it happens to all teams at some point. Going back to the Louisville example, a team is going to be even more vulnerable to an upset if their bad shooting also affects their defense.

I looked at the 10 teams with the best NCAA Championship odds according to Vegas Insider (note: the odds were made before the Michigan-Michigan State game). I then took these 10 teams and compared their opponent's shooting efficiency when they make a shot leading to the defensive possessions versus when they don't. This data comes from hoop-math.com:

As you can see, Indiana and Louisville's defenses are most negatively influenced by missing shots. This does not account for the extra turnovers caused by the Louisville set defense, so Louisville is probably more dependent on making shots than Indiana. On the flip side, Michigan and Arizona's defenses hardly change regardless of their previous offensive possession. Defense is not quite Michigan's specialty (41st in AdjD), but Arizona is definitely respectable (23rd in AdjD). Thus, Arizona may be less susceptible to a bad shooting night because of strong "transition" defense than other championship contenders. I'll attempt to take a closer look at this in the near future.

How to Beat Louisville

On January 18th, the Louisville Cardinals sat at 16-1 (4-0 in the Big East) and number one in the country. Louisville featured the number one ranked defense (efficiency-wise) in the country and a greatly improved offense from 2011-12. Now, 10 days later, the Cardinals are 4-3 in the Big East with losses to Syracuse, Villanova, and Georgetown.

In the final minute of Louisville's first loss (in the streak) to Syracuse, it was a Louisville turnover leading to a Michael Carter-Williams dunk that propelled Syracuse to a victory. I immediately thought that had to be the most costly turnover in a single game to date. Not only did Louisville lose the ability to score any points of their own on that possession, but they gave Carter-Williams a free fastbreak to take the lead. All turnovers are not created equally. Live ball turnovers lead to fastbreaks (and thus a higher expected point value for the team forcing the turnover), while dead ball turnovers simply lead to an offensive possession similar to when a shot is made. Going even further, Louisville turnovers are even more valuable for their opponents, because you get to skip the daunting task a beating Pitino's fullcourt press.

Using the numbers at hoop-math.com, we can see how preventing Louisville from scoring impacts BOTH defensive and offensive efficiency:

After Louisville makes, the press has forced teams into an eFG% of just 40% (0.8 points per shot). When Louisville does not make a shot on offense, their next defensive possession has been significantly affected. Opponents are scoring over 1 point per shot in those scenarios. Furthermore, this does not take into account turnovers, which are presumably higher against the press than otherwise.

I broke down Syracuse's offensive possessions in a similar manner. The sample size here is obviously smaller, but the results are in more detail:

*I did not look at anything past the initial shot, offensive rebounds (and the 2nd shot attempts that comes with them) were excluded from the data

Key Takeaways

Louisville's press was lethal. Of the 27 times Louisville was able to press, Syracuse scored just .63 points per initial play (which excludes second chance points). Without the press, Louisville allowed a very human 1.11 points per initial play (which excludes second chance points).

Syracuse's guards played a bigger role in the offense when Louisville pressed. Pretty obvious point here, but the data backs it up very nicely (see the orange chart).

Syracuse was unable to get to the rim frequently against the press. This one surprised me, but Syracuse took a lot of three against the press and not a lot of the threes against the halfcourt match-up zone (counterintuitive).

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.