Wednesday, March 16, 2005 10:17 AM CST
For your approval: Hoops Logic 101
By RICK DAWSON, Staff writer
I had originally planned for this column to be a diatribe about sports writers and frivolous thinking.
Then I got to thinking. Why waste my time blasting my own profession when I could have much more fun doing a column on Illinois' basketball team?
Better yet, why not do both?
In a perfect world, you would hope that every day you scanned a sports editorial you'd find a carefully constructed, peer-reviewed, fallacy-free gem. But this is far from a perfect world. Sports columns are fraught with speculation.
And this is the time of year when speculation is as fraught as it gets.
Apparently we forget too easily that sports facts can't easily be reduced to formulaic commandments.
For the stat-crazed fiend out there n you know who you are n consider this:
You'll hear that Illinois won't win a national championship if it runs into a team too big to handle, North Carolina or Kansas, presumably. Then you realize that since 1987, the advent of the 3-point shot, only a handful of teams won national titles predominantly because of post play: Kansas with Danny Manning in 1988, Duke with Christian Laettner in 1992 and Connecticut with Emeka Okafor in 2004.
Furthermore, compare how the starting guards have fared against one another in the past 18 title games and you'll discover the scoring margin is 544 (30.2 ppg) to 420 (23.3 ppg) in favor of championship teams. That's a snapshot of a single tournament game, but don't take my word for it. Do the figures through every game in every tourney since ‘87 and you'll see this trend develop.
Do the same analysis with interior scoring and you'll uncover the opposite: teams that have won championships have actually had fewer points inside on average than the runner-up. Offensively, then, one could argue that post scoring is negligible.
The only factor left out is the value of having a small forward like a Carmelo Anthony, Glen Rice or Grant Hill. But even in these instances n I'll hedge by saying do the research yourself — the stats overall are inconclusive.
You'll hear that mediocre free-throw shooting teams are unlikely to win national titles (Illinois shot 72.4 percent from the line, bad enough to make some tend to think its foul shooting is suspect). Arizona (77.8) and Oklahoma State (77.4) are two of the top four free-throw shooting teams in the country and both are in the same Chicago regional.
Although it is true that championship teams tend to shoot better than the runner-up (.710 to .638 in the time frame I am considering), nine of the 18 losers actually hit more free throws. And last year's champion, UConn, shot .623 from the foul line for the season, a full five percentage points worse than opponents.
You'll hear that "they can't shoot the rock the way they did against the Buckeyes," as Dick Vitale so humbly noted after the Illini's only loss. Of course, they might shoot the rock even worse than they did against Ohio State (38.3 percent), like they did against Wisconsin Sunday (35.8), and still escape with a double-digit win.
Then you'll hear the mundane hodgepodge about how top-ranked, undefeated or teams bearing one loss probably won't make it standing up. Here are three facts to make your head spin:
n At 32-1, Illinois has the best win-loss percentage in the country (.970). Of the 57 teams finishing the regular season with the best win-loss percentage since 1948, 25 of them have gone on to win NCAA titles, and the last one to do so was UCLA in 1995.
n Of the 32 that didn't win, 22 of them didn't advance to the Final Four, either, although a small portion consisted of mid-majors or less-than-serious contenders.
n Illinois finished No. 1 in the final regular-season Associated Press poll. Four of the schools finishing No. 1 since 1976 have won national titles.
So what do all of these statistics mean?
Absolutely nothing. Superstition is all about finding meaning in random sequences. The less information you use, the more random it gets.
If basketball was strictly deductive mathematics -- something I'm glad to say I know little about — we might be able to engage in less petty discussions.
I bring all of this up because speaking in conditionals is about as meaningful as trying to draw the champion from a hat. You don't win titles by conjuring what you'll do against phantom opponents.
You do so by winning six games against six specific opponents in six specific environments.
My guess is if the Illini get beat it'll happen the old-fashioned way, with someone scoring more points than they do. That's a likelier scenario than the one that states they'll get beat because they're outcoached, they choke or they're simply overrated.
Usually the truth tends to be pretty boring.
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