2019-2020 KenPom is out....kenpom.com
Mich St. in a different tier than the rest....Duke at 4 and UNC at 6.
2019-2020 KenPom is out....kenpom.com
Mich St. in a different tier than the rest....Duke at 4 and UNC at 6.
Apparently Michigan State just lost to Gonzaga in a scrimmage.
Apparently Gonzaga beat them in a scrimmage last year, too. The Zags played without Tillie, out with a knee injury, but they are still pretty good. Kispert started last year, and was efficient, even if not one of the top options on o. Petrusev was a good bench pieces last year and a top 100 RSCI guy. Timme and Watson were top 50 guys coming in as freshmen. Admon Gilder, grad transfer, was a good 3 shooter and 12-13 ppg guy at Texas A&M. Woolridge is another decent grad transfer from North Texas. Few has them at the stage where they basically just reload.
Izzo has a teachable moment here, probably.
After last night, we’re 10th in AdjO and 3rd in AdjD. We also lead the nation in turnover percentage. Hopefully these numbers stay pat.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. - Winston Churchill
President of the "Nolan Smith Should Have His Jersey in The Rafters" Club
Can someone explain to me how Duke and Kansas have different tempo ratings? I guess there is some adjustment for opponent in there but we have exactly 1 game of tempo evidence on Duke and Kansas... maybe I am not good enough at math or stats or something.
Also Duke just played the 10th best team in the land but Duke has the 22nd best schedule. I guess the home adjustment makes some of the teams who are ranked lower than Kansas a tougher opponent after 1 game.
-Jason "the lesson is to not look at statistical models after one game... it will just confuse you and has very very very limited value" Evans
Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?
Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?
I heard Gary Parrish note that today may be the only day in KenPom history when a team below .500 was ranked #1.
While it's too early in the season to take any one team's efficiency ratings too seriously, in the aggregate there are definitely trends to pick up on in how teams are different this year than in years past. Every year around this time, Ken Pomeroy will tweet nationwide FT%, 3PT%, etc. to show how those rates tend to establish themselves pretty early in a given season. While each team has only played 2 or 3 games by now, in the aggregate that means hundreds and hundreds of D1 games have been played already.
This year, what he's been harping on is overall offensive efficiency. The trend is down across the country, and it doesn't take a genius to theorize that the longer 3pt line is the culprit. My opinion/hope when the rule change was announced was that this would benefit teams with better talent overall, like Duke. I don't even think it's necessary that Duke in particular is proficient at shooting 3s to be helped by the rule change (although, it certainly won't hurt if Stanley, O'Connell, Hurt, Jones, White, Moore, Carey, etc. find themselves making a high % of their 3s). What I do think is that by making the offensive footprint bigger, more talented players all over the floor are going to have more opportunity to succeed against their less talented counterparts. Good for programs like Duke.
I'm interested to follow this trend this season. Pomeroy has noted that offensive efficiency and shooting percentages tend to increase throughout a season, but the point this year is that the starting point is much lower than previous years. He has noted in several tweets, if you follow him there, that 2019-20 will end up as the worst overall offensive efficiency season since the shot clock was reduced to 30. And, that this season already has more games in which a team failed to score 35 points (in 9 days!) than in any of the previous 4 full seasons. That last stat was the mind-blowing impetus for me to make this post.
Anyway, I'm very interested to follow this trend throughout the season, and I'm excited to test my hypothesis that better teams are helped by the rule change. If I'm right, I'd expect that the gap between the best teams in terms of their offensive and net rating will be greater than in years past, and upsets will be harder to come by. (Just don't tell Evansville that!)
Four ACC in top 7 and four in top 6 in Coaches
Louisville #2
uncheats #5
Virginia #7
no other ACC ranked though FSU is 26th.
https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/rankings
If the rankings of these early season polls proves somewhat accurate, it would appear that Duke has one of the easiest possible schedules in the conference. Of the top 5 teams in the ACC, Duke plays Virginia, Louisville, and Florida State just once each (which is fairly lucky considering we are playing 20 conferences games this season), with Virginia being the only road game of those 3. Duke cannot play against itself, and we have the home and home with UNC of course. All things considered, this is a relatively easy conference schedule.
Our non conference schedule is also is pretty easy. Aside from top 10 opponents Michigan State and Kansas, who we already played, there are only 2 possible teams we will be facing currently in the top 100 on KenPom: Georgetown (#69) and Texas (#26), and we will only face one of those teams if we reach the championship of the 2K classic event.
Pretty cupcake schedule this year, at first glance. But then again, Georgia St. (#147 currently) gave us a pretty good game in Cameron. We have a very young team, so an unexpected loss could happen. And also, I did caveat this in the first sentence of my post, but it's extremely early, and these rankings probably don't mean all that much yet.
Last edited by kAzE; 11-18-2019 at 04:22 PM.
Man, I really expected the middle of the league to come a lot closer to the top this year. With UVa, Duke, and UNC losing soooooo much production, I really expected the lines between the "tiers" in the league to get a little blurry this season. Instead, it seems that the gap between the top teams (FSU notwithstanding, or heck, you can even throw them in with the other top 4) and the middle of the league has widened.
I'll also say that based on the dreaded eyeball test, I don't think ANY team in the league is very close to where Duke, UNC, and UVa were last season from a quality-of-play standpoint.
I think the top ACC teams will come back to the pack as the season progresses, as I am highly suspicious of some of those rankings. Starting with UVA, to be frank, as I don't think you guys are really a top-5 team. (I will add that a good case can be made that Duke won't be top-5 on a long-term basis either. Louisville at #2 also seems like a stretch, but we'll see). With UVA, I'm wondering if we'll see a repeat of 2017 when kenpom actually loved you guys through January before the team somewhat collapsed in February and March.
Much has been made of the fact that teams this year are much weaker than in past years. I have mentioned on the podcast a couple times that the top Kenpom team in 2019-20 would barely be a top 10 team in most other years. In each of the past 14 years, there has been at least 1 team that managed to have a Kenpom efficiency margin of +30 or greater. For a very long time it looked like no team would achieve that this year.
And then along came the post-SFA Duke team.
Following the walloping of Miami, Duke's EM has moved to 30.19. By comparison, last year's Duke team finished the season as the #4 team in Kenpom with a +30.62.
Obviously there is a lot of basketball yet to be played and if there is one dead-certain sure thing about the rankings it is that they will change, but at the moment Duke is quite clearly the best team in the land. Kansas (who we beat) is the #2 team in KenPom with a +27.41 and the #3 team is Michigan State (who we also beat) with a +25.98.
-Jason "in case you have not been paying attention, Duke has been really, really, really good the past few weeks" Evans
Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?