Is Georgetown overrated?

Yes.

The Hoyas came into this week with their AP ranking dropping from 9th to 14th (or 18th on KenPom, if you prefer a rational metric), and fans across the Hoya-nation spectrum are fretting that their plans of a Final Four trip might not happen.

I think it might be time to lower your expectations a bit.


As our regular reader knows, we don't update this blog nearly as often as we used to - hell, it took me two weeks to get all the stats pages updated.  But there is one set of stats that we do track religiously around here, and that's the "Big East Snapshot" page.  Not so much because it's a better set of stats than the others, but because I actually bothered to make those stats more automated than the rest.

You probably don't check that page often, if at all, but you should.  It provides you with two main pieces of information: a set of summary tables (more on those in a minute) and a handy chart for each Big East team.  Here's the Georgetown chart (click to enlarge):

There's a previous post where I explain how to read these charts, but here's a brief summary:

• The top of the chart shows how well the Hoyas played in any game, accounting for the quality of the opponent and the venue.  A black dot means a win, a grey dot means a loss. We rate the team's performance by the final score, and with some tricky math figure what rank you'd give the team based only on that single game.
• The middle and bottom of the chart are how well the team played on offense and defense, respectively, again accounting for opponent and venue.  These are the offensive and defensive efficiencies (points per 100 possessions) that Ken Pomeroy made famous.
• Home games are in all caps; since Chaminade is not a Division-I team, that game doesn't get rated.

Now if you put your thumb over that dot that represents the win at St. John's, you should notice a disturbing trend - since the second win against Memphis, the Hoyas have begun an inexorable slide throughout January.  Note: the chart is dynamic and will update as the season progresses, so the above discussion may or may not be valid in a few weeks.

Why?

Well, if I knew exactly what was wrong I probably wouldn't be posting from my mother's basement, but I think the chart shows two clear issues:

• The defense stopped playing lights-out after the Memphis game (excluding the win vs. Providence), although there seems to be a trend towards getting back to the early season prowess.
• The offense is going into the tank (and you probably didn't need a chart to know that).

Putting this in some context after the jump

Introducing a new stats page

I've been both sick and out in the field for the past week, so things have been more quiet than normal around here.  Most stats pages are updated - the rest will have to wait until the weekend.


Meanwhile, I've been sitting on a new stats page that has been gestating for the past couple of weeks - it's certainly not in a finished state (I've only been able to incorporate a couple of suggestions), but I figured I'd just get it out there with minimal explanation, and come back and clean it up when I get the chance.

The new page is currently called "Big East Snapshot" and can be found on the tabs at the top of the page.  It is a re-packaging of Ken Pomeroy's adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency statistics, so if margin-of-victory statistics are not of much interest to you, you should probably stop reading right here.


The purpose of the page is two-fold:

• Give my reader an idea of how well each Big East team has played within conference so far this season, both over the entire conference season and over the last five games (the "snapshot").
• Provide something of a new-and-improved version of the performance charts that I generate for Georgetown after each game, but now for all Big East teams.

This is a follow up on a previous post here, where I criticized John Gasaway for using unadjusted efficiency stats for his Tuesday Truths columns.  It occurred to me that it wouldn't be hard to generate the adjusted stats myself, and from that flowed the conference snapshot.

The idea is simply to correct each game's margin-of-victory statistics for both the quality of the opponent and the game venue. For instance, in Georgetown's last game, the Hoyas beat Marquette 69-60 in a 68 possession game.  This translates into offensive and defensive efficiencies of 102 and 89, respectively, for the Hoyas (or 89 and 102 for Marquette).

But if I account for who the Hoyas were playing and that it was a home game, we get adjusted efficiencies of 111 and 86 for Georgetown and 109 and 90 for Marquette.

That is to say, if Georgetown would have played equally as well, but on a neutral court and against the average Div-I opponent (right now St. Peter's), we'd expect the Hoyas to end with efficiencies of 111 and 86 for the game; if it were a 68-possession game, that'd be a final score of 75-58.  For Marquette, if they played equally as well as last Sunday, they would also beat St. Peter's, but with a final score of 74-61 in a 68-possession game.

The biggest difference between this analysis and the "Performance" stats is that here, I'm now giving equal credit to both teams for each game's result.  For instance, in the shellacking that Seton Hall put on Syracuse, I'm giving equal credit to the Pirates for playing out of their minds and the Orange for mailing in the game.


That's it in a nutshell, and I'm working this through for all games played by all Big East teams. The main caveat here is that Ken also employs a weighting factor for more recent games, which I'm currently not doing.  I think this is a very small effect (well under 1%), so the stats I'll be posting are very close to what Ken would have.

There are also couple of technical reasons why I'm unveiling this page, which you won't likely be much interesting in.  Suffice it to say that the underlying statistics for the new page are generated in a more automated fashion, so it takes only a few keystrokes to update the tables, and a few more to update the charts shown after the tables.



That's about all the time I've got right now, so I'll just go ahead and hit the publish button for now.  I'll try to come back and add another post discussing why I think the new page is kind of interesting.