No, I don't really know what it would be like to do that. But I've just had what felt like an out-of-this-world college basketball statistics experience. It's certainly nothing like anything I've ever felt before.
See, I was looking at the Basketball State box score for last night's St. Joe's-Syracuse game and all of a sudden... whoa. I was moved.
Okay, I have to put in a disclaimer here. Basketball State is the brainchild of Kyle Whelliston. He's the guy who writes The Mid-Majority (including some astoundingly good travelogue essays), and more than occasionally serves as a pundit for ESPN.
He's also a known reader of this blog and a guy I know as more than a passing acquaintance (though I might never live down interviewing him).
But lest you think I'm shilling for him, fear not. He has not bribed me at all to praise his site -- in fact, I stumped up the $20 for a subscription to his stuff. And so should you, not least because I'm going to link to his site a lot.
He's got a lot of really interesting data comparing teams, conferences, players, and so forth. It's a bit denser (and in a smaller font) than Ken Pomeroy's site, but there's some really amazing things.
Among the cooler toys are a map showing every basketball game in the country on a given day and a nifty way of graphically representing how good all the teams in a conference are on offense and defense (this is the A-10's for last season).
Anyway, here's what I've figured out so far about last night's game that you won't find in the box scores in the Inquirer and Daily News:
-- St. Joe's had a higher points-per-possession average, 1.13 to 1.06. That's a pretty big differential as this thing goes.
-- St. Joe's had a lower turnover rate (TOs per 100 possessions), 20.9% to 23.0%.
-- The teams were almost dead even in the percentage of baskets that were assisted: 70.8% for St. Joe's and 70.4% for Syracuse. That's a little less than three out of every four. I'm inclined to think that for two teams with young backcourts, that's pretty good.
-- Although St. Joe's shot a lower 3-point percentage (42% to 43%) and FG percentage (44% to 46%) than Syracuse, the Hawks had a higher effective FG% (which gives 1.5x weight to threes), 54.6% to 50.8%.
-- Despite that, Syracuse had almost seven more statistical possessions than St. Joe's, 74.0 to 67.1.
-- That's because the Orange had more of all the factors that go into the possessions formula (field goal attempts + turnovers + [0.475 x free throw attempts] - offensive rebounds) than the Hawks did.
-- St. Joe's had more "points per weighted shot," a measure of how efficiently a team scores, by 1.13 to 1.06. But Syracuse had a higher "floor percentage," which measures the percentage of offensive possessions in which a basket is scored, 50.0% to 47.1%.
Now, I've thought all this time that scoring efficiency and scoring on a percentage of possession basis were the same thing. So if there any lawyers or law school students out there -- or if Kyle himself stumbles across this when not sleeping for 84 minutes -- can explain the difference between the following, please do:
Floor % - Floor Percentage. Measures the percentage of offensive possessions in which there is at least one point scored.
PPWS - Points per Weighted Shot. Measures how efficiently a player translates field goal attempts and free throw attempts into points. Formula: PTS/(FGA + (0.475 x FTA))
UPDATE: The best way to describe it, apparently, is that Floor % is the number of made baskets as a percentage of shot attempts, while PPWS is the number of points as a percentage of shot attempts.
That explains why PPWS is a number greater than 1, because you score more points than your number of attempts (unless you miss a ridiculous number of shots). It also explains why St. Joe's had a higher PPWS, as they made 11 three-pointers to Syracuse's 6 even though the percentages were similar.
My preferred reason for why the Hawks lost last night, though, has nothing to do with any of what I just wrote:
That was one clutch shot by Jonny Flynn.
Okay, I'm off to see if Davidson can keep North Carolina from being No. 1 when the Tar Heels come here next month.
And by the way, the hoops on TV start bright and early at 9 a.m. tomorrow with Houston against Eric Maynor's Virginia Commonwealth on ESPNU. The game is in the same Puerto Rico tournament in which Temple plays Providence at 2:30, also on ESPNU.
