A little food for thought (and optimism?) - take note of how the freshman year stats of Stoglin and Howard stack up against the freshman stats put up by 10 of the top ACC upperclassman guards of the last few years.  Every one of the 10 made at least one All-ACC team, and all but Hammonds made first or second team.  The top three in each category are bolded (the tops in the non-percentage categories are per 40 minutes, given the minutes/game variation).

                                      M/G       FG%    3p%    FT%    A/G     TO/G    A:TO    S/G     P/G
Jon Scheyer (06-07)         34        .398     .365    .846      1.8       1.6      1.13    1.2     12.2
Jack McClinton (04-05)     32        .423     .357    .815      2.7       2.6      1.04    1.1     13.6
Cliff Hammonds (04-05)    30       .432     .361    .646      2.8       2.0      1.38    1.3     10.6
Sean Singletary (04-05)    30        .385     .321    .775      3.9       2.4      1.61    1.7     10.5
Greivis Vasquez (06-07)   29        .444     .316    .798      4.6       2.7      1.70    1.1       9.8
Malcolm Delaney (07-08)  27        .420     .402    .787      3.1       2.2      1.41    0.8       9.6
Wayne Ellington (06-07)    24        .433     .371    .836      2.1      1.2      1.75     0.8     11.7
Tyrese Rice (05-06)          21         .432     .391    .773      2.5       2.1      1.19    0.7       9.2
Terrell Stoglin (10-11)       20         .458     .347    .833      3.2       2.1     1.55     0.8     10.6
Pe’Shon Howard (10-11)  19         .437     .364    .567      3.3       1.7     1.98     0.9       5.2
DeMarcus Nelson (04-05) 19        .400     .319    .532      0.8       1.4      0.57    0.8       6.2
Nolan Smith (07-08)          15        .467     .386    .769      1.3       1.4      0.93    0.5       5.9

My thoughts: Stoglin compares nicely to some very accomplished guards, including Tyrese Rice, who seems to be the closest past approximation of Stoglin based on style, size, and underrecruitment.  Also, Pe'Shon's assist to turnover ratio, especially in ACC play, is stunningly good for a freshman.

While these numbers and comparisons don't guarantee anything, they do give lots of room for positive speculation.  Very few freshmen come into the ACC and play at a dominant level right away.  Guys like Chris Paul and Kyrie Irving (pre-injury) are exceedingly rare.

No lofty introductions this time, though I've left my explanation of the methodology below.  This update includes the final non-conference numbers, the ACC numbers through 8 games, and the total numbers so far:

Name               OFF/DEF/TOT (non-conf) OFF/DEF/TOT (ACC 8 gm) OFF/DEF/TOT (overall)

Bowie              -8.24/ 0.66/ -7.58                    -0.03/ 2.98/ 2.95                      -5.25/ 1.50/ -3.75

Gregory            -8.13/ 3.92/ -4.20                    4.71/ -0.33/ 4.38                      -0.79/ 1.49/ 0.70

Hayes               3.84/ 0.75/ 4.59                       0.46/ 3.00/ 3.46                       2.61/ 1.57/ 4.18

Milbourne         4.91/ -0.11/ 4.79                      0.80/ 1.29/ 2.09                       3.42/ 1.21/ 4.63

Mosley              4.74/ 2.22/ 6.96                       -0.50/ -0.81/ -1.31                   2.74/ 1.07/ 3.81

Padgett             -9.21/ 0.44/ -8.77                    -23.35/ -20.36/ -43.71             -14.16/ -6.84/ -21.00

Vasquez           2.85/ -2.27/ 0.58                      1.68/ -1.50/ 0.17                      2.42/ -1.99/ 0.43

Williams           3.88/ -2.45/ 1.43                      3.45/ -0.80/ 2.66                      3.72/ -1.85/ 1.88

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Just some food for thought...I've been pondering the debates that seem to recycle themselves in slightly different formats year after year for as long as GW has been here.  We all know GW can coach with the best of them, and he has a track record of doing (relatively speaking) more with less.  But the question is always asked, why can't he be a good coach and ALSO grab the occasional blue chipper?  Wouldn't that put MD on the elite level with the Dukes and UNCs and Kentuckys of the world?  Well, that's a good question and I won't answer it now.  What I will do is throw together two hypothetical squads - one squad with the most highly touted recruits Gary has hauled in over the last 15 years, and the other with some notable guys who weren't ranked so high. Which team would you take?

Continue reading this post »

As a basketball stat junkie and someone who has often felt short-changed by the "traditional" in-game stats, I have greatly appreciated the emergence of tempo-free stats, Ken Pomeroy, Basketball Prospectus, and the like in  recent years.  And a poster on insidemdsports, UMTerp, has come up with a pretty impressive formula that condenses various stats to provide an overall picture of an individual player's value (unfortunately only available to insiders on that site).  For my part, I have dabbled in tracking various iterations of +/- stats, and this year I have finally kept with it enough to have a pretty decent sample size, now through 13 games and all but one of the Terps' nonconference games.  After playing with different combinations of the teams' performance with a given player on court v off-court, the one I've settled on is the below (in alphabetical order...more discussion after the numbers):

                                           OFF          DEF          TOT

Bowie (13 gms)               -7.55          1.03          -6.51

Gregory (5 gms)              -5.55          3.71          -1.84

Hayes (13 gms)                2.62          0.83           3.45

Milbourne (13 gms)          3.90         -0.20          3.70

Mosley (12 gms)              3.13          2.16           5.29

Padgett (12 gms)             -7.98          1.23         -6.75

Tucker (12 gms)               2.01         -2.64         -0.63

Vasquez (13 gms)             2.34         -2.29          0.05

Williams (13 gms)             1.26         -2.97         -1.72

These numbers are essentially the cumulative value of the team's offensive and defensive performance with a player on the court, as a mean of the differences between on-court efficiency/40 minutes and the team's actual performance over 40 minutes.  So,

• OFF=avg MD offensive efficiency per 40 minutes above or below the overall performance with player x on the court
• DEF= the same for defensive efficiency, except that the values are reversed to limit confusion (so a positive number is good).
  
• TOT= OFF+DEF

Some random thoughts on what the numbers show (and don't show):

• This is definitely not a be-all, end-all stat to measure a player's value...no such number exists, although UMTerps on insidemdsports gets pretty close.  Instead, this provides another statistical angle that can be useful for comparing players against each other.  A margin of error (I would go with about +/- 2) can be assumed.
  
• Mosley is the only player who has relatively consistent correlation with the team performing well overall.  Milbourne had a few stinkers in Maui that showed up in these numbers as well, but since then his offensive and defensive numbers have improved dramatically.  Gregory's last few games have brought his numbers up from appalling to just mediocre.
  
• Looking deeper into the numbers, the team has struggled against its strongest competition (Top 150 in the kenpom.com rankings) when Bowie and Williams are in the game -- both are close to -10 overall -- while, rather surprisingly, performing better with Padgett in those games (+4.6).  I do think we should brace ourselves for JWill's trial by fire against the numerous talented bigs in the ACC, but Bowie needs to build on his apparent epiphany against UNC-G and start playing better against the big boys.  We've seen him do it in spurts before.

Please discuss, and I welcome any questions or feedback on methodology or what the numbers show.

As requested by Ben...scattered thoughts from someone who watched the game:

• As you can tell from the stats, GV played another great game.  We all know about his streakiness, but the last 2 games he has played arguably the smartest ball of his time here.  I don't think he's taken a truly bad shot in the last two games, and he just has that innate sense of how to exploit the defense.  Defensively he's been better as well.  His play was definitely the highlight of the game and a very encouraging sign as we near conference play.
• Out of the other Terps, no one played particularly well or poorly.  Tucker was a little over-eager in the first half and took a bad shot or two, but overall I was pleased with his aggressiveness and he showed signs of life playing in the halfcourt offense.  Milbourne made his usual mid-range jumpers, but had some bad TOs and really stunk on the defensive boards.  Hayes played well and really ran the offense, but missed several wide-open jumpers he usually hits.  JWill was fine, but it looked like he got worn down by being essentially the only Terp fighting for rebounds at times.  Dino was better but still subpar overall.
• We missed Mosley, no doubt, probably most of all in the first half, when FAU's guards were getting to the basket off penetration.  Mosley is very good at harassing opposing guards, and he's also our best rebounding guard, so his absence surely had something to do with our rebounding issues.
• Ah yes, the rebounding issues.  The middle portion of this game (~middle 20 minutes) might be the most pathetic stretch of defensive rebounding effort (or lack thereof) that I've seen from a GW team, and there's plenty of competition on that front.  It wasn't really poor positioning or not boxing out, it was a lack of effort.  On one play Milbourne had position and an athletic advantage over the FAU player on a board, but literally just stood there while the guy pulled the ball away and scored an easy layup.  GW said after the game, “It’s pretty obvious that [rebounding] is a problem right now.  We have to do something. I think that’s critical to our success this year. We’ll address it. Hopefully we can fix it."  I'm pleasantly surprised that he would be that blunt, but that doesn't guarantee that it will be fixed.  Also, Gary was quite unhappy with the team's overall performance (reading between the lines) and said something to the effect of, "If we play don't play better against William & Mary, we will lose."
• FAU didn't exactly put on a clinic on either end.  They took a lot of bad shots, missed some open ones, ran a lot of moving picks (most of which didn't get called), and even when they got the margin to single digits they never had the look of a team that believed it could pull off the upset.  Jarvis never had them apply a press, never had them foul down the stretch, and never sped up the pace (which FAU seemed to intentionally slow down in the second half).  It was almost like they were trying to keep us from covering the 21-point spread instead of trying to win.
• The best way I can describe the game overall is that we just didn't have a team intensity out there.  I couldn't really pin it on any one or two players, it just wasn't there overall.  There was a little more fire in the first half, but after building a comfortable 12-point lead at the half, it seemed like they just went into autopilot the rest of the game.  They obviously can't continue to do this to win against W&M, let alone in ACC play, but I'll chalk it up to a post-Christmas lull.  William & Mary should be a good barometer for this, because as Gary said, we'll need to play better to win that game.
  

Now that the Terps are in that December lull following our run of big OOC games, I thought I would point out that the remaining five games of our pre-ACC schedule hold a few surprises and tests. 

Most notably, you could argue that we will be facing the two best three-point shooting teams in the country in Eastern Kentucky and William & Mary.  Both teams are shooting better than 40% from three-point range while attempting more than 45% of their shots from downtown.

Eastern Kentucky is the more daunting opponent, in my opinion, because they performed similarly all of last year, and besides beating a pretty good Akron team at a neutral site, they took Cincinnati to OT on the road.  So far this year, their only big game was a competitive road loss to Pitt.  The scary thing about EK is that they are incredibly efficient offensively.  So far this season, they are shooting 41% on 3s and 55% on 2s.  Their middling 75 PPG average is very misleading, because they slow the pace down more than just about anyone else.  I have a feeling we'll need to use that extended zone like we did against 'Nova.  Fortunately, EK is a poor rebounding team, so I have a feeling we'll win comfortably.  But if they get on a roll offensively, watch out.  They have six different guys hitting more than 40% on 3s.

William & Mary has been even better at shooting the three.  They have used Ken Pomeroy's seemingly impossible magic formula - hitting more than 40% of your 3s while attempting more than half your shots from outside.  The strange thing with W & M is that they were a terrible offensive team last year, and return many of the same guys who launched 3 after 3 but hit just 31% from there.  They've been mediocre defensively, but played well enough in that department to hold Wake Forest under 40% shooting and beat them by 10 on the road.  W & M does EK one better, with seven legit three-point shooting threats (38.5% and up). 

Both of these teams tend to play zone defenses, though not very good ones, so that gives us something else to work on.  I certainly hope and expect that none of these next five games will be nail-biters, but they should at least give us a good warm-up for the conference season.