" title="Spartans Weblog">Spartans Weblog

A statistical look at Michigan State basketball, with a dash of football talk


Tuesday Night Links

Posted by kj on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Some non-poll-related conversation topics:

Filed in links3 responses so far

3 Responses to “Tuesday Night Links”

  1. Mark in Chicagoon 25 Feb 2009 at 1:13 pm 1

    KJ,

    Your comments on Izzo’s concerns over the offense got me thinking: is there a way to back out the effects of offensive rebounding on our efficiency stats? Basically just look at each posession and see if it ends in a missed shot, made shot, free throws or turnover? If a missed shot was the result, we would stop the analysis there, even if an offensive rebound led to points. Further, can we compare this with the rest of the Big 10?

    I’m not trying to assign you homework, I’m just curious if this could even be done, and how you think we might compare to the rest of the league.

  2. kjon 25 Feb 2009 at 1:29 pm 2

    I think you could approximate it by calculating this equation for each Big Ten team:

    (1 – TO%) * (PTS / (FGA + .475 x FTA))

    But ultimately you can’t separate offensive rebounding out entirely without doing a play-by-play analysis, since part of a team’s success in making shots is determined based on the shots they made after getting a rebound.

  3. Chrison 25 Feb 2009 at 1:30 pm 3

    While were assigning homework, has anyone calculated efficiency margins only using teams in the top 100 rpi/Ken Pom rankings? Everything now focuses on conference only stats which can be deceiving if you have had a favorable schedule. At this point in the season the major conferences should have played enough game to compile some useful statistical data. The fact that State and PU have only played IU once makes it that much more impressive that those teams are #1/2 in EM.