Big East preview

The Big East conference season kicks off tonight with a match-up of top-10 teams as the UConn Huskies head to the Peterson Event Center to take on the Pitt Panthers.

The Hoyas don't tip off their conference slate until Wednesday with a tough road game at Notre Dame, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to run through a few of the normal features we run at the end of the pre-conference season, all in one big blog post.


First, Alan joined a number of fellow Big East bloggers in answering a series of questions over at the east coast bias.  Parts one, two and three have already posted, with at least two more to follow this week.  And VBTN takes a look at Big East home/road splits so far in the respective non-conference schedules.


One bit of eye candy we haul out each season around this time is the Big East aerial, which shows the relative offensive and defensive strengths of all of the conference teams right as conference play gets rolling (2008-9 link; 2009-10 link).

Here's how the teams stand right now:

You'll need to read this post to understand everything in this figure, but simply:  upper-right = good; lower-left = bad.

Some observations:

• Pitt is currently rated as the best team in the Big East, and their doing it mostly with their offense.  This isn't a surprise, as the last great team at Pitt (2009) was also dependent upon their offense.  Right now, Pitt's adjusted OEff is actually higher than the '09 team, mostly due to an obscene 48% off. rebounding rate.  They're also turning the ball over less this season.

• There are no elite defensive teams in the conference, at least not yet.  Villanova and Louisville are the best two heading into conference play, although they're doing it differently.  While both defenses are ranked in the top 10 in eFG% allowed, the Wildcats are also doing a great job on the defensive glass while the Cardinals are turning teams over at a high rate.

• UConn is currently ranked 4th in the country but only 7th in the conference by Pomeroy - we should learn a lot tonight.  Ken also has Louisville pegged as an elite team while they are NR/25 in the AP and coaches polls, respectively.

• Pitt, Georgetown and Notre Dame are the most dependent upon their offense, while So. Florida is the only team with a big defensive lean.

Big East Aerial Update

At the start of the Big East season, I posted an aerial showing where each of the sixteen teams stood at the start of conference play.

I'll reproduce it here.  This is based on KenPom's adjusted offensive and defensive efficiencies, through games played 31-Dec-2009 (click to enlarge):

Here's an explanation of the plot, cribbed from the first time I ran one of these:

• Note that the ordinate axis (defensive efficiency) is scaled backwards, from high to low, so that better defensive teams are at the top of the graph

• I've color-coded the team markers, from black to yellow, indicating the nominal Pythagorean Rating, using Rating = A_OE^11.5 / (A_OE^11.5 + A_DE^11.5)

• The solid grey line is a sort of 1:1 line, indicating where a team would be equally capable at offense and defense. Teams to the left or above the line are better defensively, while teams below or to the right are better offensively.

• The diagonal blue dotted lines are isopleths. Teams that are the approximately same distance from a line (e.g. Notre Dame and Seton Hall) should be equally good, although they may do so by different means (here, Notre Dame by offense, Seton Hall by defense). 

Now that a month of basketball has gone by and almost half of the conference regular season is in the books, I thought I'd update the aerial with Ken's stats posted for game played through 31-Jan-10.

Here it is:

A comment for each team, then a table to sum it all up:

• Cincinnati: In terms of overall ranking (i.e. position relative to the isopleths), they've been treading water for the last month, but they've actually had a nice improvement in off. efficiency that's being offset by a concurrent decrease in def. efficiency.

• Connecticut:  Another team without a big change in ranking, and here the underlying stats are also stable - DEff is a bit worse while OEff is just a touch improved.

• DePaul:  Thankfully, the Blue Demons have been playing better this last month on offense - I was worried they were going to fall off the graph.

• Georgetown:  The Hoyas are rating as a better team now than at the end of December, as they are now touching that isopleth that was just above them on the first plot.  The Hoyas offense has greatly improved over the last month.  Unfortunately, the defense has regressed (about as much as Cinci's), and that is keeping Georgetown from making the leap to truly elite

• Louisville:  The Cardinals have actually improved over the last month, in spite of a couple of tough losses.  Louisville has the same basic movement as the Hoyas (big improvement on offense somewhat offset by a poorer defense), but at a smaller scale.

• Marquette:  The unluckiest team in the nation have been playing at the same def. efficiency over the last month as in the early season, but their offense is a bit better so they get a small uptick.

• Notre Dame:  Speaking of teams falling off of the aerial, the Irish came into conference play with a horrible defense, and it's only gotten worse over the last month.  Unfortunately, their great offense also has cooled a bit so the Irish have begun to slide down the ratings.

• Pittsburgh:  The early season story in conference was the great start (5-0) that the Panthers got off to, including a win at Syracuse that will likely be very important on Selection Sunday.  They've gone 1-3 since, but even with the swoon, Pitt is rated higher than a month ago thanks to a much improved offense offsetting a weakening defense (are you starting to catch onto a theme yet)?

• Providence:  The Friars are gaining fast on Notre Dame and USF for the 12th slot in conference, with an improving offense.

• Rutgers:  "The ship be sinking" on both ends of the court, even accounting for their 1st conference win this weekend over Notre Dame.

• Seton Hall:  At the start of conference play, the Pirates were a better defensive than offensive team, which didn't jibe with what I expected from South Orange.  Well, the offense has gotten better in conference, but the defense has gotten even worse.  Natural order is restored.

• South Florida:  Same story as Seton Hall, although the worsening defense isn't quite as dramatic as with the Pirates.  Could this be from the loss of Gus Gilchrist?

• St. John's:  Leave it to the Redmen to buck the overall trend here.  The Johnnies have taken a major step backwards on offense in conference, and a somewhat improved defense hasn't been able to make up the difference.

• Syracuse:  The good news?  The Orange aren't quite as good now as they were a month ago.  The bad news?  They're still better than everyone else.  The conference's best defense slips just slightly while the offense is getting less efficient.

• Villanova:  The Wildcats have shown by far the largest improvement over the past month.  Their offense is much better and now easily the best in the conference while the mediocre defense is sliding up to middle-of-the-pack.

• West Virginia:  Just a small drop-off in the defense, as the offense holds steady.  The Mountaineers still rate as the second-best team in the league.

And here's the table to quantify my ramblings:

Change in Adj. Efficiencies (31-Dec to 31-Jan)

.                                Net       Rel.
Team            O.Eff   D.Eff    Eff       Net
Cincinnati       3.8    -3.6     0.2      -0.2
Connecticut      0.3    -0.6    -0.3      -0.7
DePaul           0.9    -0.1     0.8       0.4
Georgetown       6.0    -3.4     2.6       2.2
Louisville       3.7    -1.6     2.1       1.7
Marquette        1.4     0.1     1.6       1.1
Notre Dame      -0.6    -1.4    -2.1      -2.5
Pittsburgh       4.3    -2.0     2.3       1.9
Providence       3.5    -0.9     2.6       2.2
Rutgers         -0.7    -0.8    -1.5      -2.0
Seton Hall       4.0    -5.1    -1.1      -1.5
South Florida    4.1    -4.6    -0.5      -1.0
St. John's      -5.0     1.9    -3.1      -3.5
Syracuse        -1.8    -0.9    -2.7      -3.1
Villanova        5.0     1.7     6.7       6.2
West Virginia    0.0    -1.0    -1.0      -1.4

Average          1.8    -1.4     0.4

Hopefully all the columns are self-explanatory, except perhaps the last.  As I alluded to above, the general trend across the conference is for teams to improve offensively while sliding (although not as much) on defense.  I'm not clear if this is real or just an effect of KenPom's adjustments.

In any case, I simply subtracted that +0.4 average Net Eff. from each team's Net Eff. to give a measure of change in team performance relative to the rest of the Big East:  Villanova is easily the most improved team in January.

Looking back in anger

As the Big East regular season gets under way, it comes time to wonder what we've learned about the Hoyas so far this year.

About this time last season I also wondered what November and December had demonstrated - heading into a home game against Pittsburgh, Georgetown was ranked #1 overall by Ken Pomeroy, with a net adjusted efficiency (adj. off. eff. - adj. def. eff) of + 42. That is, we expected that the Hoyas would outscore the median Div-I team (e.g. Holy Cross or Hofstra in 2009) by 42 points in 100 possessions.

I was so excited that I made one of those fancy-pants graphs to demonstrate visually just how good Georgetown was (click any figure to enlarge):

2008-09 Big East Aerial (31-Dec-08)

You'll need to read this post to understand everything in this figure, but simply:  upper-right = good; lower-left = bad.

The Hoyas went 6-14 the rest of the way.  Obviously, that figure - and the Hoyas early season performance - didn't tell us what was to come, only what had happened so far.

Now I could simply knock out this year's version and let it rest, or I could stare at a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet and try to understand why the early season performance by the Hoyas was such a poor predictor of the rest of the season.

Let's do both.

First, here's this year's aerial, through games played Monday:

2009-10 Big East Aerial (28-Dec-09)

As conference play gets underway, Syracuse and West Virginia appear to be the class of the Big East, both with fairly balanced teams (offense vs. defense efficiencies).

Georgetown, surprisingly, is a solid third by KenPom's ratings, although the team is highly dependent upon its defense (#1 in the conference) as the offense is merely average.

Following is an enormous cluster of teams, headed by Marquette and Villanova and followed by St. John's, Pitt, UConn, Louisville, Seton Hall, Cincinnati and South Florida.  That's nine teams all grouped together.

Notre Dame - which almost fell off the chart with its extreme of the league's best offense and worst defense - and Providence are slightly behind the peloton, and Rutgers and DePaul hold the final two spots.

A few points to make:

• Note that the scaling on this year's aerial is slightly different than last year's.  The offensive scale doesn't go quite so high and the defensive scale doesn't go quite so low.  For instance, Notre Dame had better adj. off. and def. eff. stats last year, while this plot may lead you to think that their offense is actually better this year.
• The elite teams this year aren't quite as elite as those from last season headed into January.  Since four Big East teams made it to the Elite 8 last year, a drop-off this time isn't unexpected.
• No team last season made it to the NCAA tournament from behind the isopleth that crosses the solid diagonal at OE=107, DE=93.  This year, S. Florida sits just behind that line.  Three teams that were ahead of that line last year (Georgetown, Notre Dame and Cinci) failed to make the tourney, although they were bubblicious until the end.  If that's any sort of bellwether, it would mean 12 Big East teams are capable of making the NCAAs this year (although obviously some will not).
  
• A few teams may look out of place:
• Georgetown's pedestrian offense may seem unusual, but did you know that the Hoyas have finished higher than 8th in off. efficiency in the Big East only two times in JTIII's first five seasons (2006 & 2007)?
• Louisville's offense is better than their defense?  The Cardinals have finished 4th, 2nd, 1st and 1st in def. efficiency in conference their first four seasons.  If the offense can tread water, expect Louisville to improve as its defense does.
  
• Pitt was one of the most lopsided teams last year - they had a great offense and mediocre defense.  It's the opposite so far this year.
• To my eye, the most dramatic year-over-year improvement is S. Florida, but I'm not sure how they'll do without Gus Gilchrist for the foreseeable future.  St. John's is also far ahead of last year.
  

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Okay, that was fun, but what about the real issue - how well can we predict the rest of the season from how well a team plays in November and December?

Here's Georgetown's won-loss record for the past 6 seasons in the early part (all games in Nov. and Dec.) and late part (Jan. - Apr. games) of the schedule:

.                Early                  Late
Season       W   L     Net         W   L     Net 
2003-04      9   0   + 28.8        4  15   - 11.8
2004-05      8   3   + 13.7       11  10   +  1.1
2005-06      8   2   + 21.2       15   8   +  7.7
2006-07     10   3   + 23.1       20   4   + 15.7
2007-08     10   1   + 31.9       18   5   + 12.1
2008-09     10   1   + 29.6        6  14   -  3.6

That third column for each segment ("Net") refers to the difference between off. and def. efficiency during those games.  It turns out that the best two W/L records, and the 2nd and 3rd best net efficiencies from early season preceded two epic collapses - yes, this dataset goes back to the final Esherick season, although this is just a coincidence since this is as far back as KenPom's database goes back in time.

Now hopefully, if you're my regular reader or you've bothered to make it this far down the article, you'll want to dig a bit deeper into those numbers above.  For instance, what was the quality of competition like during each early season?  If we adjust the underlying off. and def. efficiencies for that competition, what would the net eff. numbers look like?

Let me tackle those one at a time.  First, I'll re-post those net. eff. numbers with the opponents' average KenPom rating:

.             Early                    Late
Season      Net   Rating             Net  Rating
2003-04   + 28.8   258             - 11.8   63
2004-05   + 13.7   175             +  1.1   55
2005-06   + 21.2   190             +  7.7   49
2006-07   + 23.1   150             + 15.7   48
2007-08   + 31.9   160             + 12.1   59
2008-09   + 29.6   119             -  3.6   61

Clearly, JTIII does not subscribe to Esherick's (and by proxy, his father's) scheduling philosophy.  The 03-04 team was simply getting fat on a bunch of low-major teams early season, and never had its mettle tested until conference play got rolling.  The 08-09 bunch, however, played the toughest early-season schedule so far - remember that the UConn game last year was played before New Year's, so it is included.  The huge drop in net efficiency last year came after the team looked to be able to handle just about anyone early on.

Let's now take a look at each of the individual efficiencies, now adjusted for competition during the segment.  This is analogous to looking at KenPom's Adj. Efficiencies, rather than raw efficiencies.  As I mentioned at the top, when we discuss adj. efficiencies, what we mean is how would we expect the team to perform against an average Div-I team.

Here we go, looking at offense first:

.                Off. Eff.
Season     Early  Late   Diff.
2003-04    103.9   96.2  -7.7
2004-05    106.9  113.2   6.3
2005-06    109.9  117.7   7.7
2006-07    113.8  125.9  12.1
2007-08    119.1  114.3  -4.8
2008-09    117.4  108.3  -9.1

The last Esherick team was the worst offensive team in the group, both early and late season, once you adjust the stats for the level of competition.

One of the great mythical concepts of the Georgetown/Princeton offense is that it is massively complex and takes considerable practice time and game experience to master.  The first three seasons under JTIII certainly give evidence to that, as the team improved from early season to late season.  This wasn't the case in 07-08, where the team was stocked with upperclassmen and operated at a high level even with the step back in conference.  But last year's team showed the biggest overall drop intra-season, and the roster had only 1 junior and 1 senior - surely an improvement should have come.

It's also worth noting that, in spite of the collapse last year, the team was still scoring more than 12 points per 100 possessions more than the 03-04 club.

.                Def. Eff.
Season     Early  Late   Diff.
2003-04     91.6   92.8   -1.2
2004-05     97.3   94.4    2.9
2005-06     92.9   92.6    0.3
2006-07     89.1   88.7    0.3
2007-08     87.2   85.3    1.9
2008-09     82.6   95.0  -12.4

Excluding last season, this table just makes a lot more sense to me.  I can understand offenses going to slumps, for example due to a prolonged stretch of poor outside shooting, but I'd expect that a team's defensive ability will be fairly well established in the first two months of the season, once the level of competition is accounted for.

An important trend, and one that I don't think most fans or analysts are picking up on, is that each Hoya team in the JTIII era has been better defensively than the previous year's team, and had improved from early-season to late-season.  Heading into Jan. 2009, Coach Thompson was beginning to look like some sort of defensive genius.

Then the wheels came off.

If we use the Esherick team as an archetype for one that had lost its confidence, or perhaps better a coach that had lost his team, we still see only a small drop in the quality of defensive play.  Last season, there were no significant injuries yet the defense on the court in conference play not only didn't resemble the early season team, it broke with a general trend over a five-year period.

.                Net Eff.
Season     Early  Late   Diff.
2003-04     12.3    3.4   -8.9
2004-05      9.6   18.8    9.2
2005-06     17.1   25.1    8.0
2006-07     24.8   37.2   12.4
2007-08     31.9   29.0   -2.8
2008-09     34.8   13.3  -21.4

Finally (for tonight), I'll summarize the previous tables with the net adj. efficiencies for the past six seasons.  I think its worth noting that, as much as we like to decry the late season swoon last year, it's worth recognizing that the early season performance was about as good as the Hoyas have played since JTIII arrived, just a touch below the 06-07 team during its run to the Final Four.  The shock wasn't so much how poorly they were playing by the end of the season, but rather how far they had fallen in such a short period of time.

While the Esherick team's collapse wasn't nearly as large, that team simply wasn't good enough to start with to be able to collapse very far.

Tomorrow, I'll dig a bit deeper into the underlying stats, and take a look at what we've learned so far this year.

Updating the Big East Aerial

I'm still in the throes of an amazingly hectic schedule, but I thought I'd post some non-recap content to prove I'm still a contributing member of society.

First, some housekeeping:

• Most of the stats on the upper right sidebar are now updated (all except individual net points, which isn't really conveying what I'd like, so I'll let that sit).

• The Big East HD box score project has obviously fallen by the wayside. I'll try to get it rolling again this weekend, but I can't make any promises as I don't know what my schedule will look like more than a couple of days ahead.

• I have promised some additional functionality in my play-by-play parsing program, but that will likely have to wait until the off-season due to my current amount of free time.

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About a month ago I trotted out an aerial for all Big East teams, to take a look at where everyone ranked as the conference schedule got underway. I thought I'd update that graph with stats through yesterday (Feb. 5th) [click on graph to enlarge].

This graph, like most I produce, will take some explanation.

• Adj. offensive and defensive efficiencies come from KenPom.com, and are through games played 5-Feb-09. These are the large circles that are also color coded. The old off. and def. efficiencies (from 31-Dec-08) are the small blue circles.

• The team labels are next to their current marker, while the thin black line connects the label to the previous position. This allows one to judge the change over the last 5 weeks - the Hoyas have taken a precipitous decline in both offense and defense, Marquette had improved its offense while maintaining its defense, West Virginia had fallen off defensively while its offense has shown only a slight decrease.

• A couple of teams have their old positions obscured: Syracuse from 12/31 is under G'town's current spot, and Rutgers from 12/31 is under S. Florida's current spot.
  

• Note that the ordinate axis (defensive efficiency) is scaled backwards, from high to low, so that better defensive teams are at the top of the graph

• I've color-coded the current team markers, from black to yellow, indicating the nominal Pythagorean Rating, using Rating = AOEff^11.5 / (AOEff^11.5 + ADEff^11.5)

• The solid grey line is a sort of 1:1 line, indicating where a team would be equally capable at offense and defense. Teams to the left or above the line are better defensively, while teams below or to the right are better offensively.
  

• The diagonal grey dotted lines are isopleths. Teams that are the approximately same distance from a line (e.g. Marquette and Villanova) should be equally good, although they may do so by different means (here, Marquette by offense, Villanova is equally good on both ends).

An important consideration here is that the isopleths can be a bit deceiving, since the scaling there is not linear - the difference in "goodness" of teams between the two upper right isopleths is much smaller than the difference between the two lower left isopleths. This is a result of the way the Pythagorean rankings are calculated. So, the most improved team over the last 5 weeks is S. Florida, rather than Marquette.

Here's a table for all teams' change in the ratings between 31-Dec and 5-Feb, in Pythagorean change (remember, Pomeroy's ratings scale 0-1):

Team            Rating    Change
South Florida    0.652     0.129
Marquette        0.935     0.030
Providence       0.793     0.007
Seton Hall       0.714     0.003
Villanova        0.941     0.003
Connecticut      0.977     0.002
Louisville       0.957    -0.008
Pittsburgh       0.969    -0.008
West Virginia    0.956    -0.029
Syracuse         0.905    -0.034
Rutgers          0.592    -0.044
St. John's       0.644    -0.054
Georgetown       0.936    -0.055
Notre Dame       0.860    -0.064
Cincinnati       0.798    -0.088
DePaul           0.430    -0.173

From the table, we can see that a number of teams have been holding steady the last 5 weeks (Providence, Louisville, etc.) with only S. Florida and Marquette making strong improvements. A number of teams have declined since December, and Georgetown's huge drop on the graph isn't nearly as severe in real terms (e.g. Notre Dame has declined more). DePaul is serving as a good example of a team where the bottom really has fallen out.

Imitation is the sincerest form . . .

Edited (see below).

I'm an avid reader of Yet Another Basketball Blog, since Dan Hanner is both a lucid analyst of college basketball, and a Georgetown season-ticket holder. A recent post there linked to a conference season-preview of the Big Ten by Spartan Weblog, by means of a tempo-free aerial pioneered (?) by Hawkeye Hoops. Also, Villanova by the Numbers posted a Big East conference review aerial for last season over the summer.

So, while we're just a few games into the Big East conference season, let's take a look at Big East aerial (click to enlarge). With most teams having played 10-15 games so far, the uncertainty of the stats is large, so any results taken from this exercise should be taken with an enormous grain of salt.

A quick explanation of the chart:

• Adj. offensive and defensive efficiencies come from KenPom.com, and are through games played 31-Dec-08.

• Note that the ordinate axis (defensive efficiency) is scaled backwards, from high to low, so that better defensive teams are at the top of the graph

• I've color-coded the team markers, from black to yellow, indicating the nominal Pythagorean Rating, using Rating = AOEff^11.5 / (AOEff^11.5 + ADEff^11.5)

• The solid grey line is a sort of 1:1 line, indicating where a team would be equally capable at offense and defense. Teams to the left or above the line are better defensively, while teams below or to the right are better offensively. Edit - I had this screwed up in the original plot - now corrected (I know, how hard is it to draw a 1:1 line).
  

• The diagonal grey dotted lines are isopleths. Teams that are the approximately same distance from a line (e.g. Syracuse and Villanova) should be equally good, although they may do so by different means (here, Syracuse by offense, Villanova by defense). Edit - I realized after posting this piece that my isopleths were drawn incorrectly. I believe they are now correct, but because the isopleths have moved, I've amended the text below.
  

At this point early in the season, there appears to be several tiers of teams, but not many surprises:

1. Georgetown currently is the class of the Big East, as KenPom has them ranked #1 overall in adj. offensive efficiency and #7 in adj. defensive efficiency.
2. West Virginia (!), UConn and Pitt represent the three biggest threats to G'town's supremacy, with the Mountaineers slightly ahead of the other two. Pitt has a relatively balanced offense and defense, while UConn relies more on offense (as discussed previously here by SFHoya) and WVU is starting to take on Huggins' reputation for strong defense.
3. Louisville (even after yesterday's loss to UNLV) is somewhere between the top four teams in the league and the next cluster afterwards. The Cardinals play the best defense in the league (and 2nd nationally) per KenPom.com, but struggle to score (12th). It turns out that being a great defensive team is better in Pomeroy's ratings than a great offensive team - I'll discuss this further below.
   
4. Syracuse, Notre Dame, Villanova, Marquette and Cincinnati are grouped closely enough to be considered a third tier. The Orange and the Warriors/Golden Eagles are more dependent upon their offense, while the Wildcats and Bearcats rely more on their defense. In fact, you could say that Cinci is a poor man's Nova, and Marquette is a poor man's 'Cuse, but don't quote me on that. Notre Dame (like Louisville) represents a true extreme - the Irish have the league's 2nd best offense but a surprisingly porous defense (15th). I'd say that right now, the teams capable of making the NCAA tournament ends here.
   
5. Finally, the gang of six that make up the have-nots in the Big East (Providence, Seton Hall, St. John's, Rutgers, DePaul and South Florida), with no extreme outliers in offensive/defensive balance. The Friars look to be the best of this bunch, but even they have a long way to go to make it up to the next tier.
   

With regards to the value of offense versus defense in KenPom's rating system, you may notice that as you head from the lower-left to the upper-right corner of the chart, the slopes of the isopleths changes from 45° (or -1, to be mathematical) to more horizontal slopes (or closer to 0). The contour line that G'town is next to has a slope = -2/3. This is a result of the Pythagorean Rating method - I won't go through the math here, but will be happy to explain in comments if someone is interested.

What this means is that, as a team moves into the upper end of the ratings, there is a larger return in improved defense rather than improved offense. You can see this if you pick a team, and then estimate how much it would have to improve on offense or defense to make it to the next isopleth. For example, for WVU to make it to G'town's line, they'd need to improve ~5 points in Adj. Off. Eff., or ~3.5 points in Adj. Def. Eff. Do keep in mind that I'm not talking about the real world here, just how to game KenPom.com's ratings.

One other point, that I hope the color-coding of the markers brings out, is that the difference between Georgetown (1st) and UConn (7th) in rating points is quite small (0.016), while the difference between UConn and Syracuse(30th) is larger (0.036), and the jump from Syracuse to Providence (79th) is much larger still (0.152).


As I said at the top, it's still early in the basketball season, and the underlying uncertainties for these stats are large - small sample size and differences in schedule quality foremost. I'd like to return to this chart in a month to see how all the teams have moved. If I forget, please prod me to do so.

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Just an FYI that I've started posting HD Box scores for conference games. Right now, I've got 4 out of 5 posted, with the Syracuse / Seton Hall game a no-go since no substitution data was listed in the play-by-play. My first real test will be this Saturday (5 games) - I'm expecting the divorce papers on Monday.