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.

The data I'm using is for what I've been calling meaningful games - that is all games played from vs. Washington forward, as the Butler win didn't have accessible play-by-play stats.

I've ranked all the players on last season's roster by height, with weight serving as a tie-breaker.  Here's the list, courtesy of Georgetown's athletic department web page:

Name       Height    Weight
Wright      6-1       208
Clark       6-2       170
Sanford     6-3       180
Freeman     6-4       227
Thompson    6-7       205
Benimon     6-7       242
Vaughn      6-9       247
Sims        6-10      230
Monroe      6-11      247

I'm ignoring Dougherty, Stepka and Mescheriakov here, as they combined to play 12 minutes in these games.

Players who miss time because of illness or injury will have that held against them here, mostly because I'm too lazy to correct for that.  Most obviously, Austin Freeman's diabetes, which knocked him out of the West Virginia road game (and greatly limited him in the previous game), will skew the minutes slightly.  Deal with it.

Finally, not all position numbers will add up to exactly 40 minutes, due to rounding and ignoring the aforementioned trio.

And with that, here's the list.  Enjoy.

1. Wright [36], Clark [3]
2. Clark [30], Freeman [8], Sanford [2]
3. Freeman [26], Thompson [12], Sanford [1], Benimon [1]
4. Vaughn [19], Benimon [11], Thompson [7], Sims [2]
5. Monroe [35], Vaughn [3], Sims [1]