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

Examining the slump -- offense or defense?

One of the first things I do when dissecting why a team is winning or losing is simply to check whether the offense or defense is more to blame. People inherently focus on scoring -- there will be a game where the team loses 97-95 and their fans will scream about a turnover or missed shot, all the while ignoring the sieve that was the defense.

So what about the Hoyas? The team is slumping badly with its most recent loss to a good WVU squad on the road (which, as Brian points out, was mostly caused by offensive turnovers and a distinct lack of defensive turnovers).

One simple way to look at a team is to look at offensive and defensive efficiencies. As of the WVU game, Georgetown has an adjusted offensive efficiency of 114.5, good for 20th in the country.

What does this mean? That Georgetown could be expected to score 114.5 points in 100 possessions against an average D-I team. Georgetown's defensive efficiency is 92.4 (43rd), which means it could expect to give up 92.4 points versus that same average team.

In short, the offense has been better than the defense right now.

But that hasn't always been the case.

I went game by game and took Georgetown's offensive and defensive efficiency in each game, adjusted for home/away games and the opponent's current efficiency for the season, to see how well Georgetown's offense and defense performed over the course of the season.

To put this in the context of a typical Georgetown game, I converted those efficiency numbers into points, based on a 67-possession game.

In short, the numbers below are the number of points per game that Georgetown played above or below an average NCAA in each game. The average NCAA team is someone like Loyola Marymount, Lipscomb or Indiana this year; so being average here is not a good thing, and decidedly worse that being an average team in the Big East.

How is this different than what Brian did here?

Well, Brian was looking at how Georgetown performed relative to its own expectation;. I'm trying to evaluate Georgetown's performance against a standard baseline (i.e. the average NCAA team) to see, overall, how the offense and defense have performed, given the competition.  It's really just an offset between the two analyses.

.                 (Above Avg. Team)  (Below Avg Team)
Games               Points Scored     Points Allowed
First 7 Games             7.8               9.2
Second 7 Games            6.3               8.2
Third 7 Games            12.1               4.8
Fourth 7 Games            8.7               4.2

In the first seven games, the Hoyas had some creampuffs, the Temple offensive debacle and a rather balanced performance versus Butler.

Starting with the Butler game and running through much of the second 7 games (including Washington), the defense carried Georgetown for the most part. In the Old Dominion game, the offense was actually below NCAA-average.

Starting with Seton Hall, the team started to get hot on offense, but also a bit schizophrenic. In four of the seven games in this quartile, the Hoyas posted offenses 18+ points above NCAA Average in a 67-possession game. Yes, NCAA-average isn't very good, but 18 points differential due to the offense in a regular Georgetown game is pretty darn good.

The defense started to decline, though, and in the South Florida game, neither the offense nor defense was any good.

By the last set of games, the offense had come back to earth but the defense hadn't revived.

Looking at the losses:

Game              Offense        Defense
ODU                 -1              5
South Florida       -1             -4
at Rutgers           8             -5
Notre Dame           3            -11

at Marquette         9              7
at Villanova         5             11
at Syracuse          0              7
Syracuse             6              6
West Virginia        6              5

I divided them up into perceived "bad" losses and "acceptable" losses. It's worth noting that versus Marquette and Nova, Georgetown played better than in some of their wins. The Syracuse games were pretty bad; at home the Hoyas played better than versus Temple but that's about it.  Overall, the defense plays as well or better than the offense in losses against marquee opponents.

In the three "bad" in-conference losses, the defense has been more to blame. But aside from the Rutgers game, the offense wasn't exactly pulling its weight, either. Still, 11 points worse than an average D-I (read: Indiana) defense versus Notre Dame? Ughh.  Overall, the defense plays terribly in losses against "easier" opponents.

Here's the whole season, along with the season to date running average after the seventh game -- you can see how the defense has slowly declined:

Game                   Offense  Defense  Total  O Avg  D Avg
Tulane                   12         5      17   
Temple                  - 9        19      10   
Savannah St.              6        10      16   
Lafayette                23         1      24   
Mount St. Mary's         10         6      16   
American                  2        13      16     7.5    8.9 
Butler                    9        11      20     7.8    9.2 
Washington                1        19      20     6.9   10.4 
Old Dominion            - 1         5       4     6.1    9.7 
Harvard                   6         9      15     6.1    9.7 
St. John's                9         3      12     6.3    9.1 
DePaul                   15        10      25     7.0    9.1 
Marquette                 9         7      15     7.2    8.9 
Connecticut               6         6      11     7.1    8.7 
Seton Hall               18         0      18     7.8    8.1 
Villanova                 5        11      17     7.6    8.3 
Pittsburgh               21         5      27     8.4    8.2 
Rutgers                  20         3      23     9.0    7.9 
Syracuse                - 0         7       7     8.5    7.9 
Duke                     22        10      32     9.2    8.0 
South Florida           - 1       - 4     - 4     8.7    7.4 
Villanova                16         7      23     9.1    7.4 
Providence                7        13      20     9.0    7.6 
Rutgers                   8       - 5       3     9.0    7.1 
Syracuse                  6         6      12     8.8    7.0 
Louisville               15        14      29     9.1    7.3 
Notre Dame                3       -11     - 8     8.8    6.6 
West Virginia             6         5      11     8.7    6.6

Notice that the offense got better as the season has progressed before stabilizing in February, while the defense has been steadily trending downward since the Washington game.

Good Wins, Bad Losses

The current motto of Hoya Prospectus is "thinking rationally about Georgetown Hoyas basketball so you don't have to."  What we set out to do here is discuss basketball in an objective and statistically defensible manner.

So when I saw the shrill reaction to yesterday's loss, I got to wondering about where the loss ranked for Georgetown and within the Big East generally.

There are two ways to think about the results of basketball games:  wins and losses, and the final score.  Stat-heads tend to use the latter - probably to a fault - since it has proven the best means of predicting future results.  But at the end of the day, wins and losses are what get you paid.


Let's take a crack at each.


Margin of Victory

If you're just wondering where a Georgetown game ranks in terms of the difference between final score and expected final score, you can always find that here at the Performance Charts page (link).  The math behind the performance charts (original discussion here and here) is not perfect, since it applies teams' current stats from KenPom.com retroactively, but I think it does a good job providing context to a game.

I'll reproduce the Georgetown's current overall performance chart below (note that I also break out offensive and defensive performance on that page):

By this metric, yesterday's loss was Georgetown's worse of the year.

As of this morning, if Georgetown and Notre Dame played again at the Verizon Center, we'd expect Georgetown to win by 7 points; instead they lost by 14.  Of course, our system is blind to certain vagaries, such as Austin Freeman trying to play with a viral infection or Notre Dame enjoying some new-found ability without their purported leader (more on that in my next post).

Yesterday's game noses out the South Florida loss as the worst performance of the year by the Hoyas.

This got me to wondering how this game fits into the Big East picture as a whole.  Was this the worst performance by a Big East team all year?  In conference?

Here are the worst perfomances for Big East teams so far this year, using today's stats.  Note that I'm being more tempo-free rigorous by sorting by efficiency difference [actual eff. margin - expected eff. margin] rather than scoring difference [actual score - expected score].  Also, I'm using efficiency as points per 100 possessions to avoid those pesky decimals.

Team           Opponent         Site    Result  Score   Poss.  Eff. Diff
Louisville     Charlotte        Home       L    87  65   67      -50
Georgetown     Notre Dame       Home       L    78  64   58      -37
Louisville     Western Carolina Home       L    91  83   83      -36
Pittsburgh     Indiana          Neutral    L    74  64   74      -34
South Florida  St. John's       Home       L    74  58   59      -32
Louisville     St. John's       Away       L    74  55   64      -32
Connecticut    Cincinnati       Home       L    60  48   63      -30
Notre Dame     Loyola Marymount Home       L    87  85   71      -29
Georgetown     South Florida    Home       L    72  64   65      -29
DePaul         Mississippi St.  Neutral    L    76  45   68      -28
St. John's     Providence       Home       L    74  59   73      -28
Pittsburgh     Notre Dame       Away       L    68  53   51      -28
Notre Dame     Idaho St.        Home       W    80  70   65      -28
Syracuse       Pittsburgh       Home       L    82  72   75      -28

I've arbitrarily picked the 14 worst games in order to make the point that a team can win a game but still play terribly doing so, if they're playing a massively inferior opponent.

A few other thoughts:

• This is a glass half-empty, glass half-full sort of analysis.  You can also say that Notre Dame's win over Georgetown was the Irish's best performance of the year.

• Four teams show up with multiple slots on the list (Louisville, Georgetown, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame).  Both of Louisville's and Notre Dame's games and one of Pitt's games were in the early going.  Both of the Hoyas' bad performances were in February.

• Generally, it's harder to have a bad performance on the road, since teams are expected to play worse on the road. Louisville and Pitt are the exceptions to the rule here.

• Speaking of the Cardinals, one game is unlike any other on that list.  Hopefully, that 22-point blowout at home has some extenuating circumstances that I'm not privy to.

• It's hard to believe that losing by 10 points to Pitt would be considered a terrible performance, but that should provide some context as to just how well Syracuse is playing this year.

Allow me to produce a second list, looking only at conference games:

Team           Opponent         Site    Result  Score   Poss.  Eff. Diff
Georgetown     Notre Dame       Home       L    78  64   58      -37
South Florida  St. John's       Home       L    74  58   59      -32
Louisville     St. John's       Away       L    74  55   64      -32
Connecticut    Cincinnati       Home       L    60  48   63      -30
Georgetown     South Florida    Home       L    72  64   65      -29
St. John's     Providence       Home       L    74  59   73      -28
Pittsburgh     Notre Dame       Away       L    68  53   51      -28
Syracuse       Pittsburgh       Home       L    82  72   75      -28
Providence     Louisville       Home       L    92  70   71      -27
Syracuse       Louisville       Home       L    66  60   58      -26
Providence     Marquette        Away       L    93  63   67      -26
Seton Hall     Pittsburgh       Away       L    83  58   66      -25
Villanova      Connecticut      Home       L    84  75   70      -23
Connecticut    Providence       Away       L    81  66   78      -23
Rutgers        West Virginia    Away       L    86  52   64      -22

Georgetown's loss yesterday was the worst performance in conference so far this season, by a substantial margin.  Interestingly, the loss at Rutgers doesn't look as bad now as it did then (it's way down the list here:  -19 eff. difference), as the Scarlet Knights are 5-3 in their last 8 conference games.

Syracuse has lost only two games all year, and they both rank as some of the lousiest performances of the year in the Big East. Translation: a team will have to play brilliantly to beat them.

There are some schizophrenic teams in the league:

• Providence has two Top-14 performances (at St. John's and vs. UConn) and two of the Bottom-10 (vs. Louisville and at Marquette).

• St. John's, Pitt and Louisville have two great games and one terrible one on the list; UConn has one great performance and two terrible ones.

Wins and Losses

I suspect that my reader is blinking his eyes a bit by now, wondering why I'm so obsessed with scoring margins when the bragging rights and suffering are determined only by whether the Hoyas can win the game.

So how do we rank wins and losses?  Well, I can calculate the win probabilities (as seen on KenPom's scouting report pages) for each game played, and look for the biggest outright upsets, here as losses when expected to win.  I'm limiting this to just conference games:

Losing Team    Opponent         Site    Score      Odds
Georgetown     South Florida    Home   72   64      86%
Syracuse       Louisville       Home   66   60      85%
Marquette      DePaul           Road   51   50      85%
Syracuse       Pittsburgh       Home   82   72      83%
Georgetown     Rutgers          Road   71   68      82%
Connecticut    Cincinnati       Home   60   48      78%
Georgetown     Notre Dame       Home   78   64      78%
Villanova      Connecticut      Home   84   75      76%
Notre Dame     St. John's       Home   69   68      76%
West Virginia  Villanova        Home   82   75      72%
Notre Dame     Rutgers          Road   74   73      72%
St. John's     Providence       Home   74   59      70%
Marquette      Pittsburgh       Home   58   51      68%

This should all be straight-forward except the odds column, which is the odds that the losing team would have of winning the game if it were to be replayed today (same venue).  The list is limited to games with the odds greater than 68%, i.e. games where the favorite is more than one standard deviation above even odds.

About half of the games show up on both lists: MU at DePaul is the worst outright loss that didn't make the worst performance list, and South Florida hosting St. John's is the worst performance that didn't make the worst outright loss list (the Bulls would be 64% favorites in that game today).

It should be noted that good teams are far more likely to be here than bad teams - for example, DePaul would only be a favorite to win one game this season (at home against Rutgers [61%], a game they lost).

• Georgetown once again has the worst loss, now as an outright loss rather than as performance.  The Hoyas are also the only team with three bad outright losses on the list.  This is making me more and more depressed as I write this up.

• Both of Syracuse's losses were games they should have won easily.

• The worst road loss so far is Marquette's 1-point loss to DePaul, a game that didn't show up on the performance lists (since Marquette only lost by one point, it wasn't as bad a performance as their home loss to NC State [77-73].

• Showing up on the "Opponent" column multiple times is a mixed blessing - Rutgers will be a big underdog even in some of their home games, so many of their wins are a big deal, while Pitt would probably prefer to have not been such an underdog at Marquette in the first place.

• Four of the upsets were 1-possession games:  Marquette/DePaul, Georgetown/Rutgers, Notre Dame/St. John's and Notre Dame/Rutgers. It's tempting to invert the results of each of those games, making Marquette 10-5, Georgetown 10-6 and Notre Dame 10-6 heading into Sunday's games.

So there it is.  Georgetown holds the distinction of having the worst performance and the worst loss in conference play so far this year, and they're not even the same game.

Once more unto the breach

I can't speak for the rest of Hoya-dom, but the coincidence of the next stretch of games with the date on the calendar brings to mind the dreadful memory of last season's implosion:  on January 16th, 2009, the Hoyas sat at 12-3 (3-2) heading into a road game against stiff opposition (Duke).

We all know how the rest of the season went:  4-12 (4-9).

In the next 5 games, Georgetown plays four of KenPom.com's top-25 (through Friday's games), with three of those games on the road.  Ken's predictions:

.                                    KenPom
Date          Opponent    Rank     Exp. Score
17-Jan      @ Villanova   [22]      L: 75-78
20-Jan      @ Pittsburgh  [25]      L: 60-63
23-Jan        Rutgers     [168]     W: 77-57
25-Jan      @ Syracuse    [6]       L: 68-77
30-Jan        Duke        [1]       L: 67-72

Regardless of what you think about Ken's methodology, the fact is that the Hoyas are likely underdogs in four games the rest of this month, and will likely lose multiple times.  The question, to me, is not how the Hoyas do in this next stretch of five games, but rather how the team responds after this death-march.

To be clear, the remaining schedule is no cake-walk with two tough road games (Louisville and West Virginia) and several other toss-ups.  Indeed, right now Georgetown's RPI strength-of-schedule projects to be #2 at the end of the regular season.

This all got me to wondering how this year is stacking up against last season, at nominally the same point.

My favorite comparison for this sort of thing is performance.  Simply put, I use KenPom's expected point spread, adjusted for the actual pace of the game, and compare it to the actual point spread of that game. That is, if the Hoyas are expected to beat Team A by 10 points, based on KenPom's stats, but actually win by 14 points, the net performance for that game is +4 points.

I usually update the performance charts (linked at upper-right) after each game, but I won't hold it against you if you've never looked.  Here's team performance for last season and so far this year (click on any figure to enlarge):

What's immediately obvious to me is that there's a lot less variability game-to-game.  The 2008-09 team could be tremendous (+20 points above expected against Maryland, Savannah St. and UConn) or lousy (-15 points below expected against West Virginia, Louisville and St. John's (II).  And remember, these expected point spreads are worked out using end-of-season stats (i.e. after the great collapse).

Meanwhile, this season the Hoyas have played every game within 10 points of expectation - their best game was +6 points vs. DePaul, the worst was -9 points vs. Old Dominion.

Allow me to quantify this variability, going even further back for context:

Season        Games          SDev. of Perf.
2007-08       First 17       ±  8.6 points
2007-08       Last 17        ±  9.4
2008-09       First 15       ± 14.6
2008-09       Last 16        ±  9.3
2009-10       First 15       ±  4.3

It looks like typical variability for a ~16 game stretch is around ±9 points; that's to say that most games (about 2/3) should end up within 9 points of KenPom's predicted outcome, adjusting for actual game pace.

As you can see, the early season last year was all over the place.  I'm not sure that was some sort of harbinger of impending doom, but it does show that you never knew what kind of performance Georgetown would bring to each game (despite going 12-3).  Also interesting to me is that the Hoyas only played 2 games all year slightly better than expected (here defined at 0-10 points above expected).  Essentially, either the Hoyas were very good - mostly early in the season - or they just weren't good at all.

So far, this season is another matter entirely.  Most games the Hoyas are performing within ~4 points of what KenPom tells us to expect - good news for gamblers, I suppose.  As the great Dennis Green would say, they are who we think they are.

But why?

As my loyal reader knows, I can never leave well enough alone.  Instead of just looking at net performance, I can also look at offensive performance (points scored - expected points scored) and defensive performance (expected points allowed - points allowed).

.                            SDev. of       SDev. of
Season        Games          Off. Perf      Def. Perf
2007-08       First 17        ±  6.9         ±  5.8
2007-08       Last 17         ±  7.7         ±  6.8
2008-09       First 15        ± 10.2         ±  8.3
2008-09       Last 16         ± 10.5         ± 10.6
2009-10       First 15        ±  7.0         ±  5.7

What we see early (the first three lines) is that the variability of the offensive or defensive performance is less than the overall performance.  That's what we'd expect if the two are uncorrelated or vary together (i.e. when the team is playing well on offense, it's also playing well on defense).

Also, for four of the five cohorts the variability of the defense is smaller than the variability of the offense.  This also makes intuitive sense, along the lines of the baseball adage that "speed never slumps." A several game hot- or cold-streak from outside is much more likely to manifest itself in these stats than running into several hot or cold teams consecutively.

However, starting in the 2nd half of last season, and much more strongly now, we see that the variability of the offense and defense are larger than the overall variability of team performance.  What's happening now is that when the offense is playing poorly, the defense plays well (and vice versa).

Excuse me while I whip this (graph) out:

as compared to previous times:

If I were a clever fellow, I'd be able to tell you why this is happening.  Maybe it's just small sample size.  I don't think it's related to rotations, especially this year (what rotations?).

But if the trend continues, it means that, at the end of the game, Georgetown is performing about what KenPom's stats predict.  And he's predicting a whole lot of pain over the next two weeks.

Recap: Louisville 76, Georgetown 58

Well, this isn't much fun anymore. If you're looking for a meltdown, head on over to HoyaTalk.

I don't have too much to say about tonight's game, other than it was - statistically - the worst game of the year for the Hoyas. Worse than the Pitt game, where DeJuan Blair did whatever he wanted; worse than the Tennessee game, where Cameron Tatum likely had the game of his life, all in the last 6:00; and even worse than the West Virginia game, where the Mountaineers made sure to squeeze out the largest margin of victory possible.

Now a large reason for this being the worst game of the season is that Louisville was completely unconscious from deep, making 8 of their first 10 3FGA. That's gonna tend to skew Georgetown's defensive numbers. But the Hoyas also played poor offensively, even accounting for the customarily stellar Louisville defense.


All of this comes from the Performance Charts I update weekly (and now updated through tonight's game). If you have a look at the overall performance for the Hoyas this season (reproduced here), its clear that a sea change took place between the UConn and Pitt games.



After the UConn game, KenPom.com rated Georgetown the best team in the country. The Hoyas have been sliding down the ratings / rankings ever since, but that early season run is still skewing the overall computer numbers for the season, along with the expectations for Hoya fans going into each game.

If I look only at the 15 games played in 2009 (Pittsburgh forward), I can recalculate G'town's Pythagorean rating (per KenPom): Georgetown would rank 65th (with a rating = 0.814), just behind Siena (and 2 places ahead of Maryland), well off the NCAA bubble.


There's no cut-and-dry explanation for the free-fall - the defense has been mostly poor since the UConn game, with Georgetown defending better than expected only in the Rutgers and S. Florida games. But, if you'll forgive a fitted line, it looks like the defense has actually been trending worse all season:



For an eight game stretch between the Pitt and first Cincinnati games, the D was mediocre but never horrible. Since, there have been two strong performances (the aforementioned Rutgers and USF games), an average game (2nd game vs. Cinci) and four lousy efforts, including three of the last four. I don't see any common thread to account for the results from game-to-game, but would be happy to hear any suggestions. Pomeroy's analysis suggests all four factors contribute.


Offense, to me, is only slightly less troubling. Here, to my eye, there is a distinct declining trend since either the Maryland romp or soon afterward:



It looks like the offense declined strongly in December and January, and has now plateaued. For the middle part of the season, the offense was the great-unknown from game-to-game, leading to the blow-out win against Syracuse and the blow-out loss against West Virginia. Unfortunately, the defense has recently become even more unpredictable, making each game a crapshoot at best.


If you combine the two fitted lines and apply them to overall performance for this season since the Maryland game, you get this:



Not a pretty picture. If it's any consolation, it appears that the Hoyas may have finally hit bottom. We can only hope.


Well, that's all for tonight. I'll update the stats pages tomorrow.

As for tonight, let's run the numbers:

TEMPO-FREE BOX SCORE
 
.            Home                            Visitor   
.            GU                              Louisville 
.            1st Half  2nd Half   Total      1st Half  2nd Half   Total
Pace            33        34        67

Effic.         93.9      78.6      85.8       124.2     102.0     112.5

eFG%           57.9      32.8      42.2        85.0      45.8      63.6
TO%            27.3      17.5      22.2        27.3      20.4      23.7
OR%            15.4      37.5      29.7        28.6      35.3      33.3
FT Rate        78.9      25.0      45.1        55.0      87.5      72.7

Assist Rate    30.0      40.0      35.0        71.4      70.0      70.8
Block Rate      0.0       5.6       3.1         0.0      12.5       8.6
Steal Rate     21.2      11.7      16.3        18.2      11.7      14.8

2FG%           72.7      37.5      48.6        57.1      44.4      50.0
3FG%           25.0      12.5      18.8       100.0      33.3      66.7
FT%            60.0      75.0      65.2        63.6      61.9      62.5

INDIVIDUAL NET POINTS STATS

GU                    Off    Poss           Individ     Def             Individ             
Player                Poss   Used    ORtg   Pts Prod    Poss    DRtg   Pts Allow   Net Pts
Summers, DaJuan        49     6.5    53.5     3.5        50    113.2     11.3       -7.8
Wright, Chris          61    15.5    71.2    11.0        60    110.2     13.2       -2.2
Mescheriakov, Nikita   27     4.5    71.6     3.2        27    118.9      6.4       -3.2
Monroe, Greg           51    10.7    89.0     9.5        50     95.3      9.5       +0.0
Freeman, Austin        46     5.4   126.1     6.8        47    107.6     10.1       -3.3
Clark, Jason           35     7.6    71.1     5.4        36    105.3      7.6       -2.2
Sapp, Jessie           40     9.1   100.4     9.2        40     87.5      7.0       +2.2
Vaughn, Julian         11     1.8   257.7     4.7        11    156.3      3.4       +1.3
Sims, Henry             6     0.5   200.0     1.0         6    132.2      1.6       -0.6
Wattad, Omar            9     1.0     0.0     0.0         8     76.8      1.2       -1.2
TOTALS                 67    62.7    86.7    54.4        67    106.6     71.4      -17.1    

Louisville            Off    Poss           Individ     Def             Individ             
Player                Poss   Used    ORtg   Pts Prod    Poss    DRtg   Pts Allow   Net Pts
WILLIAMS, Terrence     64    14.4   109.7    15.8        64     76.5      9.8       +6.0
CLARK, Earl            63    17.0   115.2    19.6        62     71.1      8.8      +10.8
SAMUELS, Samardo       42    10.1   106.9    10.8        41     84.8      7.0       +3.8
McGEE, Andre           38     0.8   253.4     2.1        38     70.5      5.4       -3.3
SMITH, Jerry           35     6.2    93.7     5.8        36     81.9      5.9       -0.1
KNOWLES, Preston       31     5.9   116.3     6.9        29    101.2      5.9       +1.0
SOSA, Edgar            29     4.2   109.2     4.6        29    101.3      5.9       -1.2
SCOTT, Will             4     0.0     -       0.0         5    136.0      1.4       -1.4
SWOPSHIRE, Jared        4     1.0     0.0     0.0         5    100.0      1.0       -1.0
GOODE, George           7     1.4    47.6     0.7         8    131.6      2.1       -1.4
JENNINGS, Terrence     18     5.0   141.5     7.0        18     69.6      2.5       +4.5
TOTALS                 67    66.1   110.9    73.3        67     82.9     55.5      +17.8

HD BOX SCORE

Louisville vs GU
02/23/09 7:00 at Verizon Center
Final score: Louisville 76, GU 58

Louisville              Min   +/-   Pts  2PM-A 3PM-A FTM-A  FGA    A    Stl    TO   Blk    OR    DR   PF
WILLIAMS, Terrence     38:36  +14  10/72  3- 7  0- 2  4- 9  9/42  7/19  2/64  2/64  1/35  2/24 10/36   2
CLARK, Earl            36:29  +19  22/72  2- 7  3- 3  9-13 10/42  3/18  4/62  4/63  0/31  1/23  7/35   1
SAMUELS, Samardo       21:39  +12  10/47  4- 5  0- 0  2- 4  5/22  2/11  1/41  4/42  1/18  1/11  3/21   3
McGEE, Andre           21:22  +17   3/45  0- 0  1- 1  0- 0  1/26  2/14  2/38  0/38  0/15  0/13  1/20   4
SMITH, Jerry           22:09  +14   8/40  1- 3  2- 3  0- 0  6/24  0/11  0/36  2/35  0/12  0/11  2/17   0
KNOWLES, Preston       17:15  + 9  10/35  2- 4  2- 3  0- 0  7/20  1/ 6  0/29  0/31  0/22  1/13  0/20   2
SOSA, Edgar            18:38  + 1   6/31  3- 3  0- 0  0- 0  3/18  2/ 6  0/29  2/29  0/20  0/11  0/17   3
SCOTT, Will            02:00  - 1   0/ 5  0- 0  0- 0  0- 0  0/ 2  0/ 2  0/ 5  0/ 4  0/ 1  0/ 0  1/ 1   1
SWOPSHIRE, Jared       03:31  - 1   0/ 4  0- 0  0- 0  0- 0  0/ 2  0/ 1  0/ 5  1/ 4  0/ 4  0/ 1  0/ 2   1
GOODE, George          05:57  - 4   0/ 5  0- 1  0- 0  0- 0  1/ 9  0/ 2  0/ 8  0/ 7  0/ 9  1/ 7  0/ 9   0
JENNINGS, Terrence     12:24  +10   7/24  1- 2  0- 0  5- 6  2/13  0/ 6  1/18  0/18  1/ 8  1/ 6  1/ 7   4
TOTALS                 40:00       76    16-32  8-12 20-32    44 17/24 10/67 16/67  3/35  8/24 26/37  21
.                                        0.500 0.667 0.625       0.708 0.149 0.239 0.086 0.333 0.703    

GU                      Min   +/-   Pts  2PM-A 3PM-A FTM-A  FGA    A    Stl    TO   Blk    OR    DR   PF
Summers, DaJuan        28:21  -20   4/38  1- 4  0- 4  2- 4  8/42  1/13  2/50  0/49  1/18  0/32  4/13   3
Wright, Chris          36:02  -12  12/52  2- 8  1- 4  5- 8 12/47  1/15  0/60  4/61  0/30  1/35  3/23   4
Mescheriakov, Nikita   14:24  -14   5/21  0- 0  1- 1  2- 2  1/12  1/ 5  0/27  3/27  0/15  0/ 9  0/ 8   4
Monroe, Greg           29:52  - 7  10/45  4- 7  0- 0  2- 2  7/32  1/11  2/50  3/51  0/23  1/20  4/18   3
Freeman, Austin        27:02  -20   8/38  4- 5  0- 1  0- 1  6/34  0/ 9  2/47  0/46  0/22  1/27  2/18   3
Clark, Jason           22:37  -10   4/30  1- 3  0- 1  2- 2  4/26  1/ 9  1/36  2/35  0/18  2/18  0/13   2
Sapp, Jessie           25:02  - 3   9/41  2- 5  1- 5  2- 4 10/36  2/12  4/40  0/40  0/21  1/25  1/18   4
Vaughn, Julian         08:37  - 5   4/12  2- 2  0- 0  0- 0  2/16  0/ 3  0/11  0/11  0/ 8  3/13  0/ 6   1
Sims, Henry            03:12  - 3   2/ 4  1- 1  0- 0  0- 0  1/ 4  0/ 1  0/ 6  0/ 6  0/ 1  0/ 2  0/ 0   1
Wattad, Omar           04:51  + 4   0/ 9  0- 0  0- 0  0- 0  0/ 6  0/ 2  0/ 8  1/ 9  0/ 4  0/ 4  0/ 3   0
TOTALS                 40:00       58    17-35  3-16 15-23    51  7/20 11/67 15/67  1/32 11/37 16/24  25
.                                        0.486 0.188 0.652       0.350 0.164 0.224 0.031 0.297 0.667    

Efficiency: Louisville 1.134, GU 0.866
eFG%: Louisville 0.636, GU 0.422
Substitutions: Louisville 32, GU 32

2-pt Shot Selection:
Dunks: Louisville 3-3, GU 4-5
Layups/Tips: Louisville 7-16, GU 8-16
Jumpers: Louisville 6-13, GU 5-14

Fast break pts: Louisville 11 (0.196), GU 4 (0.093)
Seconds per off. poss: Louisville 18.0, GU 17.8

Team Performance Update

I've finally started to get around to posting final stats for the 2007-8 season. I've run into a bit of a snag, in that I don't have 1st half / 2nd half split box scores for the NCAA games (Tom Gower, help!!), so I've only posted the final performance charts.

A few points:

• Before I get into the details of Georgetown's perfomance this season, I thought I'd direct my reader's attention to a post on VBTN (yes, a month ago), reviewing Big East teams' offensive and defensive ratings. greyCat may have the axes mislabelled, but he does a nice job explaining the relative strengths of the 16 BE teams. In a nutshell, Louisville and G'town played defense at a much higher level than the other 14 teams, while G'town's offense was only slightly better than league average. I believe that greyCat is using the entire season for his analysis, and I'd like to see his analysis reworked for only conference games, as the non-conf. SOS varied widely.

• The winner(?) for worst game of the season goes to the BET final against Pitt, where the Hoyas were more than 13 points worse than expected. This number is likely skewed by the fact that Pitt was playing much better at that point due to the return of Levance Fields - indeed, this is a great example of a shortcoming of using Pomeroy's stats to predict performance, as his system isn't "aware" of injuries.

• In their last 10 games, Georgetown was 7-3 versus expectation. That is, the Hoyas played better than Pomeroy predicts in 7 of their last 10 games (averaging +1 point versus the "spread"). G'town was 8-2 in those ten games, with the lackluster win against St. John's being the only disappointing win. The previous season, the Hoyas finished 4-6 versus expectation (+0.1 net), with a terrible game at Syracuse and disappointing efforts against Vanderbilt and Ohio State in the NCAAs.

Finally, I thought I'd break down the team's performance into their four factors, aggregated by performance. I've separated the season into 3 chunks, good performances (> ~3 pts. above expected), poor performances (< ~6 pts. below expected) and middling (those games in between). This is somewhat similar to KenPom's correlations, found at the bottom of his game plan page, reprinted here for reference.

                          Correlations
               to OE       to DE
        Pace:  +0.13       -0.08

        eFG%:  +0.71*      -0.24
         OR%:  +0.32       -0.07
         TO%:  -0.44*      -0.07
         FTR:  +0.09       -0.16

    Opp eFG%:  -0.03       +0.65*
     Opp OR%:  -0.26       +0.26
     Opp TO%:  +0.14       -0.55*
     Opp FTR:  -0.18       +0.33

    Bold  values are significant with a 95% confidence
    Bold* values are significant with a 99% confidence

First, general info:

          Good  Middling  Poor
Record    11-0    10-2    7-4
Pom Rank 100.0    92.6    91.0
Pace      64.8    62.9    61.9

Even when Georgetown played poorly they usually won; since performance accounts for opponent quality, a close win against a big underdog would be considered a poor performance. The Hoyas best games came against the weaker teams, but this is a small effect. Faster pace seems to track performance (the "good" pace appears significantly faster).


Next, offense:

          Good  Middling  Poor
OEff      121.1   114.4   104.1
eFG%       60.9    58.2    53.9
OR%        33.3    32.9    30.8
TO%        19.4    20.8    22.8
FT Rate    25.2    22.3    24.1

It's no surprise that Offensive Efficiency tracks performance; after all, it represents half of performance. As Pomeroy suggests, eFG% shows a good correlation with OEff, the other factors less so. What can be seen here is that the Hoyas shot well even in average games, but poor shooting meant poor performance. Georgetown shot 34% (76/223) on 3FG in their poor performances, versus 40% (193/478) in other games; the Hoyas were 54th of 341 teams in dependence on 3FGs, and this shows here. I was expecting a bigger difference in TO% (turnovers committed), but the effect seems small here.


Finally, defense:

          Good  Middling  Poor
DEff      85.9    90.1    98.9
eFG%      37.0    42.0    42.8
OR%       34.1    32.1    31.0
TO%       21.8    22.0    15.5
FT Rate   39.1    35.6    39.0

The difference between middling and poor defensive games wasn't opponents' shooting or defensive rebounding, but turnovers forced. I didn't expect that, although the Davidson game would be a clear example of this. When Georgetown played very well, their opponents had a miserable time putting the ball in the basket.

Analysis: It's the defense, stupid

While I haven't read every post on HoyaTalk since the Memphis beat-down, I've read enough to know that there is a wide spectrum of opinion on which players performed well and which did not.

But it should be made perfectly clear that, as ugly as the 2nd half was for Georgetown, the failure was not on the offense, but entirely by the defense. I'll explain how I think I know this.


I've touched on this in a previous post, but I'll reiterate here that it is possible to evaluate team performance, using the information in KenPom.com's stats database. If you look at the Georgetown schedule page on his website, you'll see a prediction for the remaining games, as a result (W/L), score, pace and probability. However, for games completed, this information is removed (why?).

Fortunately, I've worked out enough of KenPom's system so that I can calculate the expected offensive and defensive efficiency for any team against any other team, using KenPom's adjusted OEff and DEff posted on his website. This system isn't perfect, or even close to that, since it doesn't know about injuries, suspensions, etc. on the date of any game, but it can give you a rough idea how well Georgetown should fair against any opponent, accounting for game site, if they played today.

The result is what I call performance. Here, I use KenPom's expected point spread, adjusted for the actual pace of the game, and compare it to the actual point spread of that game. That is, if the Hoyas are expected to beat Team A by 10 points, based on KenPom's stats, but actually win by 14 points, the performance for that game is +4 points. Instead of printing another table, here I'll display the results as a category plot:

What performance gives you is context - it lets you know whether a 32 point win at home against Jacksonville is impressive (it isn't), and even allows you to rank each game by how well the Hoyas played. From this plot, you can see that the season-opening William & Mary win at home by 15 points (Perf. = -12 pts.) was more of a disappointment than yesterday's loss at Memphis by 14 points (Perf. = -10 pts.).

Of course, these evaluations are exceptionally hazardous to do early in the season, since there will likely be a lot of movement by all teams in both quality of play, and the statistics ability to judge this. But, as far as crude tools go, it's not bad.


You can take this a step further, and break out performance into its two components, offense and defense. Again, I can work through the math and plot how well G'town's offense and defense performed in each game, accounting for the quality of the opposing defense or offense (respectively) and the actual game pace. That is to say, if the Hoyas are expected to score 70 points against Team B in a 63 possession game, but actually score 66 points, the offense performance for the game is -4 points; same method for defense performance. Note that offense and defense performance summed should equal overall performance, unless I've buggered up the math.

First, offense performance so far this year:

It turns out that against the vaunted Memphis defense, currently ranked #11 by KenPom, scoring 71 points in a 70 possession game was not a bad performance at all, but actually +5 points above expected.

The other, more general note, is that there appears to be a trend of improving offense as the season has progressed, although I'd be a bit hesitant to draw this conclusion until another few games have been played.


On to defense performance:

Yes, it really was that bad.

After playing the first 8 games with a defense performance in the range of -4 to +6 points, the Hoyas' defense dropped a -15 pt. performance yesterday (or, equally as valid, Memphis had a +15 point offense performance against Georgetown).

I'll leave it up to those who know more about basketball to figure out what went wrong on defense (cough, cough, rebounding, cough), and come up with suggestions on how to fix it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've updated the Georgetown Season Statistics - Team and Individual Splits page through the Memphis game. There are big differences now in home/road splits, thanks to the Memphis game.


On another note, I've read many posts on HoyaTalk complaining about the perceived and/or real lack of production from this blog's favorite underdog Hoya, namely Vernon Macklin. While defensive stats are hard to come by and even harder to evaluate, right now we can see that Big Ticket has an Offensive Rating of 105, ranking near the bottom of the 9 regular players (and Chris Wright is making up ground in a hurry). We also are all painfully aware of his free-throw shooting woes (3-18 [17%] after Memphis).

Out of curiosity, I changed his free-throws made to 11-18 [61%], a pedestrian rate by any scale other than the current Hoyas, and his ORating moves to 132, which would lead the team. Quite simply, other than the execrable free throw shooting, Macklin is playing as well as we could have expected. Of course, you can't ignore FT shooting.


Finally, I'm just now getting to a brief story that Ray Floriani sent in earlier this week, summarizing the UNC/Rutgers clash.

What a difference a game makes.

On Thursday, Rutgers defeated winless NJIT at the Prudential Center in Newark.

On Sunday it was a meeting with top ranked North Carolina at the RAC. A breakdown of both games follows.

	Rutgers	NJIT
Score	65	55
Possessions	69	69
Off. Eff.	94.1	79.6
Four factors
eFG %	37	39.8
TO %	18.8	21.7
OR %	34.9	25
FT Rate	63	38.9

The game was as close as the score indicated; Rutgers led by 6 with 8 minutes remaining. The Scarlet Knights went on a tear to increase the lead to 16 before NJIT made a few late baskets for the final margin. NJIT stayed around a good part of the contest before Rutgers used their three guard set to spread the floor and take the Highlanders off the dribble. Notice the free throw rate as indicating Rutgers ability to get in the lane and ultimately get to the charity stripe.

	UNC	Rutgers
Score	93	71
Possessions	80	80
Off. Eff.	116	88.6
Four factors
eFG %	46.3	41.5
TO %	15	24.9
OR %	49	35.2
FT Rate	26.3	40

It was a faster tempo game with UNC putting the pedal to the medal. Rutgers paid dearly for their 20 turnovers, as UNC outscored the Scarlet Knights 30-10 off those miscues. The OR Rate attests to fact that Rutgers not only saw guard pressure (Ty Lawson 26 points 4 steals and several deflections ) but a formidable frontcourt (Tyler Hansbrough 20 pts 11 boards and Deon Thompson 9 boards).

'Bama highlights, and Hoya slow starts

I finally got around to putting together some highlights from the Alabama game (link). Enjoy.


I also noticed a couple of threads on HoyaTalk discussing KenPom's schedule prediction page and game plan page for Georgetown, and so I'll take this opportunity to make a few of points:

• Sample size! The season is only 6 games in, so worrying that Pomeroy projects an 11-7 record in the Big East is a bit premature. His predictions are updated almost every night, based upon games played that day, and expect a lot of movement through January before the predictions stabilize.

• Schedule strength! Frankly, outside of the game at Memphis, this year's OOC for the Hoyas is going to be much weaker than last year. In fact, Memphis may be the only NCAA tournament team Georgetown will play before the BE schedule kicks in; last season, the Hoyas played 5 NCAA-bound teams by December 9th. Of course, Georgetown was 6-3 at that point last year, while they sit 6-0 so far this season.

• As of this writing, Georgetown is ranked 80th in RPI and 41st by Pomeroy's ratings, which is causing a bit of consternation to some on Hoyatalk. While certainly no guarantee of future success, last year's slow start offers some solace that the Hoyas will improve upon those ranks as the season progresses. But, can we compare the two starts quantitatively? Sure, so long as you recognize a couple of caveats:
• Sample size! I know, I already said that, but remember that analysis for this season is a bit premature.
• Context! I've got numbers for last season, but they are weighted by how the teams finished the season. Using the full season data for just early season games may be a bit misleading, especially if a team lost or got back an important player after playing Georgetown.

So how do you compare the two starts? As I discussed several times last year, you can simply compare the predicted score to the actual score for each game to determine performance. One way to do this is to use the Vegas point spread for each game, versus the final score. I'd think this would work very well, but I don't actually keep track of the Vegas line, so I'll use KenPom's data instead. Here, you use each team's offensive and defensive efficiencies, adjusted for competition, to determine expected point totals for each team.

Here are the expected point spreads and actual outcomes for last season and this season, through Dec 8th:


2006-7 Season

		Final Rank		Site	Predict. Margin		Result	GU	Opp		Diff. from predict.
11-Nov-06	Hartford	253		H	34		W	69	59		-24
15-Nov-06	Vanderbilt	35		A	5		W	86	70		11
19-Nov-06	Old Dominion	73		H	16		L	62	75		-29
22-Nov-06	Fairfield	198		A	21		W	73	60		-8
27-Nov-06	Ball St.	195		H	27		W	69	54		-12
29-Nov-06	Oregon	18		H	10		L	50	57		-17
2-Dec-06	Duke	11		A	0		L	52	61		-9
5-Dec-06	James Madison	263		H	34		W	89	53		2

2007-8 Season

		Current Rank		Site	Predict. Margin		Result	GU	Opp		Diff. from predict.
10-Nov-07	William & Mary	248		H	26		W	68	53		-11
15-Nov-07	Michigan	129		H	15		W	74	52		7
21-Nov-07	Ball St.	191		A	12		W	57	48		-3
28-Nov-07	Old Dominion	100		A	5		W	66	48		13
1-Dec-07	Fairfield	219		H	19		W	61	49		-7
5-Dec-07	Alabama	138		A	9		W	70	60		1

In Georgetown's first 8 games last season, the team played up to or above expectations only twice (and the James Madison game was essentially a wash). The team had two horrible games: ODU, as everyone knows, but also the season opener against Hartford.

Now keeping in mind that this season's number will change as we learn more about all the teams, Georgetown's worst game is the season opener against William & Mary. The ODU and Michigan games both ended up well above the spread.

In essence, while the season is young and there's a lot of basketball yet to be played, there's no reason to think that the Hoyas' slow start is any different than last year.