Learning to Love Advanced Metrics

Over the last few weeks, I crisscrossed the Midwest for Horizon League soccer championships and the start of the men’s basketball season, racking up 2,906 miles along the way.

There are a lot of ways to kill time on the road, from flipping through the Sirius/XM dial (channels 34, 35, 36 happen to carry me most of the way), to calling friends to checking in at the office. But what I’ve noticed is calculating mileage is a sure-fire way to burn the clock.

Whether it’s figuring out how to boost the miles per gallon from 24.6 to 24.8 and at what optimal speed is best for maximizing mpg (simple math tells me I drive too up-tempo to optimize fuel efficiency).

All of this serves as a roundabout way of saying what you have hopefully noticed in the first round of nightly recaps and notes from the Horizon League – we’ve joined the statistics revolution.

Admittedly, I’m not a math major (though I did receive an “A-“ in my college statistics class); but I find the statistics presented by Ken Pomeroy and Basketball State to be fascinating. For me, they serve to reinforce what the eye sees:

• Ryan Broekhoff was the 2012 Horizon League Player of the Year. He fills the box score, but just how good was he last year? According to Ken Pomeroy, Broekhoff had an offensive rating of 121.8, which was the 57^th-best nationally.
• Additionally, we learn that Valpo loves to have Broekhoff crash the defensive boards, where his 24-percent defensive rebounding rate was 42^nd in the country.
• Early this year, Broekhoff hasn’t been quite as strong offensively, rating a 117.4, but he has upped his defensive rebounding efforts to the tune of 25.2 percent.
• What are some of the reasons behind UIC’s 3-1 start and fourth-place finish at the Paradise Jam? Stifling defense, for one.
• UIC is allowing 0.879 points per possession, which is third in the Horizon League and 63^rd nationally.
• Even when forced to play up-tempo against Iona, UIC still found success. Averaging 65.4 possessions per game, one of the slower rates in the country, UIC had 76 against Iona’s up-tempo, full-court game. Most importantly, UIC had 1.14 points per possession in the game.
• It’s easy to see that UIC outscored Iona by 12 points at the free-throw line, but examining the free-throw rate further underscores the important of Josh Crittle and Hayden Humes down low, where UIC held a dominating 25.5% difference in free-throw percentage.

There is plenty of information to be gleaned from the advanced stats, from checking in to see if Wright State is really playing faster this year (after its win over Idaho, WSU has slowed back to the offense of last year), or trying to find out what has been the catalyst for the Raiders’ 3-0 start (start with their defensive rebounding).

Throughout the year, we’ll try to enhance what the fan is seeing with some insights into player and team performance. If you head to the Weekly Release, page 7 has all of the metrics on each team from Ken Pomeroy (KenPom.com) and Basketball State.

Enjoy.