So 6 teams are in the A bracket for the tourney. I really like the format they are using. Two pools of three teams apiece. You play the other two teams in your pool. Based on your standing in the pool you then either get a bye (if you finish first) or play a team from the other pool, with the 2nd place teams playing the 3rd place teams.
About a week ago I sent Emily an email asking for a copy of the tourney rules. Today, after numerous emails and phone calls from her, I got a copy. Somehow, it does not surprise me that the HP Park District still does not have their act together. Reminds me of why I chose to coach the Spartans rather than in HP and just how right I was with that choice. Anyhow the tourney rules are:
1. All games are officiated under IHSA rules
2. All games have two, 20 minute running halves. The clock will stop only during the last two minutes of each half. Three timeouts per half.
3. 4th grade level may press only during the last 5minutes of each half with a 10 point limit.
4. Half times and warm-ups are five minutes long. All teams must provide a volunteer to work the table. Duties may include working the scoreboard or keeping the book
5. All teams must have light and dark color uniforms and bring them to each game.
6. No protests allowed. All scores are final.
8. Overtimes are two minutes long, 1 timeout per team no carryover.
I’m not really sure how the running clock will effect us, but I don’t think it’ll be our friend. We’re an aggressive team and we foul a lot. If the clock runs during free throw shots (which is sometimes done on running clocks and sometimes not) it’ll cut way down on possessions. On the other hand a running clock can increase the tempo of the game, and an increased tempo? Good for us.
In our pool we play HP. They’re a middle of the road team in the A bracket, 3-3, which suggests to me that we should have a shot, as I would guess we’d be a middle of the road team. I hope we win this game, because our next game is against the JCC team.
Now, that JCC team? It’s a good team. I know we didn’t play our best basketball against them. But, I’m not sure that even our best is good enough against them. I am glad we get another shot. I think we’ll be able to play #3 much better and our ball movement has looked good the last couple of games which should help us even if we can’t run our zone breaker. Of course that’s really the deal breaker. I expect us to get more transition points this game than we did last game. But even if we get more transition points, if we can’t beat their zone, which gave them numerous transition points, than we can’t beat them.
I haven’t told the team that we’re playing the JCC team again. I am glad that they’re the second game we play. I think it’ll mean they’ll come into the game warmed up and hopefully we can get off to a bit of a quick lead and place some pressure on them. Of course if we get blown out in the first game, or lose a real nail biter, we’re likely dead in the water once they see who we’re playing. On the other hand, if we can beat HP, I think we can build off that momentum and give the JCC team a surprise.
The only other team I can find out anything about is WM, another A bracket team. However, they’re in the cellar of the A bracket, having yet to win a game, so it’s likely if we can get the #2 seeding out of our pool we’ll make it into the final four.
I’m very excited to see how we fair against this tougher competition. There’s little doubt in my mind that we’ll lose more than 2 games in the regular season, and there’s an excellent chance we’ll go undefeated. If we win the post-season tourney, as I expect we will, there would be a lot of pressure to move up to the A bracket next year. This will be a preview of whether we have what it takes to succeed there.
Conference Update
We are, for the time being, the undisputed first place team, though MP is clearly nipping at our heels. We’re in good shape for the tie breaker, however, currently owning the first one (head-to-head record). The second one is points allowed in head-to-head games, so even if we were to lose to MP in the rematch, we’d just need to keep the margin of victory to with-in 12 to keep the tie breaker. After that it’s overall points allowed, and removing our game from the record, MP has been doing better than us here, allowing fewer points against the same teams. However, because of our 36 point game we are ahead here as well for the moment. Of interest is that MP is playing in the B bracket of the HP tourney. I’d have to think they’d stand a chance of doing well.
After us, there’s then the middle tier. In this grouping you have HP, MP2, and LS. MP2 is clearly the top of this heap and LS the worst. I think HP is a scrappy team and if they were to get the #4 seed in the post season tourney could upset us.
At the bottom of the barrel you have NF, NF2, and WK. None of these teams will give us any trouble, but it’ll be interesting to see how they sort themselves out.
Wages of Wins
I’ve mentioned several times that I like to use Win Score (WS) as a measure of player’s productivity. This stat (really more of a formula) came out of the book Wages of Wins, by Dave Berri (and several other authors whose names I don’t remember). This was a great book where three economists use the tools of economics to analyze sports.
They spend a lot of the book arguing that the current measures of performance in basketball do not strongly correlate to wins. In essence, they argue that scoring is over valued, and other statistics, such as turnovers, assists, rebounding, and the like are undervalued. To counter this perceived problem they formulated something called Wins Produced. This is an incredibly complicated formula. So, they made a simplified version of this called Win Score that an average fan could use from the box score to see how players on their teams performed. It is this measure that I use to evaluate my team. The formula is
Points + Rebounds + Steals + ½Assists + ½Blocked Shots – Field Goal Attempts – Turnovers - ½Free Throw Attempts - ½Personal Fouls
I take this total and divide by minutes played to give me WS/M.
There has been some criticism of the methods that were used in this method, but none which I really felt exposed a flaw. That is until today. Over at the Saving Darko blog there is a post which suggests that while scoring might be over valued, this is because scoring is a far riskier proposition than rebounding, assists, and the such. One of the things that I like about WS is that unlike some other stats, such as PER, it recognizes the full opportunity cost of a possession. However, taken to its extreme players would have a disincentive to shoot were WS/WP to become the norm because, again, shooting is more risky.
So one needs to still encourage shooting, while looking at the other parts of the game as well. Now granted my players don’t know that I’m rating them on this, thought they do receive feedback in practice during drills/games based on what their WS is showing, but despite my thinking quite highly of WS, I still think highly of Jack P. This is a kid who shoots a lot, and misses a lot. However, his willingness to try and score, even if he’s not the highest % shooter, is helpful overall to the team. I’m happy that I intuitively made the adjustment that Saving Darko seems to be suggesting.
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