Thursday, July 22, 2010

Minutes Breakouts

There is (was?) a discussion on HoyaTalk about predicted player minutes for the upcoming season.

This - in and of itself - wasn't all that interesting to me, but a comment by a particularly angry fellow over there piqued my interest:
Just to demonstrate how pointless this is - could any one even produce a chart . . . for the actual minutes played this past season?
Perhaps needlessly, I said that it wasn't actually that hard to make a chart of player minutes. The grumpy fellow still babbled on about how it was truly impossible.

I pointed out that you only need to make an arbitrary index of players (for example, simply rank them by height), and you're off. There's no need to get hung up about whether Julian Vaughn was playing center or power forward (as if those positions have meaning in Georgetown's offense), but just call him position "5" if he was the tallest player on the court, or player "4" if he was the second-tallest.

This seemed to sail past our moody friend.

But, in the interest of proving I'm not just all talk, I went ahead and made the table.  

A couple of caveats and the table, after the jump.