Posts
Wow, what a game that was last night huh? Two great teams going head to head with a classic end to regulation and Kansas comes out in OT as the champion as I predicted from the get go:
So my Final 4 is Kansas, Louisville, Memphis, and UCLA. My championship game is Kansas defeating Memphis.
So as you can see, along with my correct prediction of Kansas over Memphis, I also had 3 of 4 in the Final 4 correct. In the Elite 8 I was able to correctly pick 7 out of 8 teams. However, I picked so poorly in the beginning rounds that I only finished 4th in my pool at work and I managed to come in 2nd in another pool only to lose to a 4 year old girl!
Yup, that's right, you heard me...a FOUR YEAR OLD GIRL who's father let her pick a bracket beat me out even though I had the Champion, the Final Game, 3 out 4 in the Final 4, and 7 out of 8 in the Elite 8 correct. Definitely a low point in my NCAA Pool history but it does make for entertaining blogging.
Now back to the game last night, Memphis should have won this game but their one weakness, free throw shooting, came back to haunt them in the end, as they missed 4 out of their last 5 free throws in regulation. If they had hit just one of those, they would be champions right now. I actually wanted Memphis to win even though I picked Kansas and you have to feel bad for these guys after they were so close to victory.
At the same time, Kansas made some HUGE plays down the stretch of this game. Mario Chalmers 3-Point shot with 2 seconds left was as clutch as it gets in a pressure situation. However, that shot would not have meant much if it wasn't for Sherron Collins' steal of an inbounds pass 2 minutes earlier. After the steal, he knocked down a 3-pointer that cut a 7 point lead down to 4 and put Kansas in position down the stretch to be able to tie the game. This play along with Chalmers clutch 3-pointer are equally important in my mind.
I felt that there were three keys to this game going in: Kansas had to contain Rose & Douglas-Roberts(they combined for 40 points), Rebounding(Kansas outrebounded Memphis 37-27), and 3-Point Shooting(neither team shot well but Memphis was 6 of 22 compared to Kansas which did not hurt themselves as much shooting 3 of 12).
Kansas didn't completely stop Rose and Douglas-Roberts but they did make them work for all their points and only sent them to the free throw line a combined 13 times. They had gone to the line much more frequently in their previous games.
Kansas won the battle of the boards and was dominant in the scoring in the paint. Darrell Arthur had a monster game scoring 20 points on 9 of 13 shooting and pulling down 10 rebounds.
As for the 3-Point shooting, my main concern here was that one team would shoot itself out of the game by forcing up 3-Point shots that weren't open looks. Well, Kansas only took 12 3's and scored most of their points down low, so they avoided taking bad 3 point shots. Memphis did take 22 3-Point shots and hit only 6 but alot of the misses were in OT when they had no choice but to fire up 3's. So I think both teams did a good job at not taking 3-point shots that weren't open.
It is no surpise that this game went to OT because both teams played great and avoided mistakes and the only real difference in the game was that Kansas made the plays when they needed to(Collins' steal & 3-Point shot, Chalmers 3-Point shot) and Memphis did not(Rose and Douglas-Roberts missed free throws down the stretch in regulation).
Here are the highlights of the game below:
If you have been reading this blog since the start of the tournament, you would know that I have been using what I call Overall Efficiency as a tool to help make my picks for the games. This stat along with Offensive & Defensive Effective FG% were the main stats I looked at to determine who was going to win. So now I will look back and see how the results of this analysis came out.
Overall, the analysis allowed me to get 7 out 8 Elite 8, 3 of 4 Final 4, and the National Championship game and winner correct. The only teams I missed were Davidson who knocked off my pick for the Elite 8(Georgetown) and UNC who beat Louisville to go to the Final 4. The creator of these stats believes that Davidson in fact is rated too low by his system, since they are a mid-major team and believes they could have been up to 10 spots higher in the rankings. This may help explain why it did not seem likely that they would make the Elite 8.
This season, Kansas had the highest Overall Efficiency rating of any team over the last 5 years. In fact, there was no team that was even close to their rating, which is why I picked them to win it all despite not even really being a fan of them.
However, it is not always the case that the team with the highest Overall Efficiency rating wins it all. There are other factors such as Effective FG%, Turnover Rate, Rebounding Rate, and Free Throw Ratethat play a factor in this as well. Historically, the most important of these factors is Effective FG% and the least important is Free Throw Rate.
Kansas was strong in Overall Efficiency and the other 4 factors, which is why I picked them to win it all. Meanwhile, Memphis was better in these factors than most other teams including UCLA, UNC, and Texas. This is why I selected them as the second best team even though they were 3rd in Overall Efficiency. Since Free Throw Rate is the least important factor of all these, I felt that it would not be a factor for Memphis until they played a team that was superior in all areas to them, which is Kansas.
The data also strongly suggested that UNC and UCLA really had no chance to win the national championship aslong as Kansas and Memphis were in the way. Both teams had lower Effective FG% on both offense and defense than any team that had won the championship in the past 4 years.
In fact, their Effective FG% ratings were actually some of the worst in the past 4 years to even make the Final 4, which suggests they were lucky to make it as far as they did. This is why I thought Louisville would be able to take out UNC in my original predictions because their defensive ratings were much better than UNC's across the board. Unfortunately, Louisville's turnovers cost them valuable offensive possessions which you can not afford to lose against UNC.
Overall, I feel that the analysis was very effective, at least at picking from the Elite 8 on. It was not as helpful when picking some of the tougher first round matchups but I am going to try and analyze the ratings better next year when it comes to the earlier round matchups.
Check out the links below for each analysis I did using Overall Efficiency and Effective FG%, Turnover Rate, Rebounding Rate, and Free Throw Rate from Ken Pomeroy's site, and they also have an analysis of the keys to the Kansas-Memphis game that touches on many of the same points as I did over at Basketball Prospectus.
It is interesting to see that I would have many of the same views as the experts over at Basketball Prospectus . This leads me to believe that I am analyzing the data correctly and making good observations about the college basketball game. Hopefully this will lead to me winning some NCAA Pools next year!
Here are the links to my analysis as promised:
Efficiency Ratings-Who's The Best Team?
Historical Analysis of Top Seeds
Historical Analysis of 5 vs 12 and 6 vs 11 Games
NCAA Tournament Final Picks & Analysis
Sweet 16 Analysis
Elite 8 Analysis
Final 4 Analysis
National Championship Analysis - Kansas vs Memphis
No comments:
Post a Comment