Forever Faithful (to maroon and gold) | A Calvin Knights Fan Blog

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:56:00 +0000

Old theologian types of which I was probably supposed to learn

Calvin at St. Thomas

Huddle up everyone, because we’re about to engage in what is colloquially known as “real talk”.

Here goes.

St. Thomas is good. Very good. Very, very good, in fact. Not “oh my gosh a win here would be impossible” good, but certainly “they look like the best team in Division III and it’s not even really close” good.

That’s not to undersell Calvin – they’re playing like a top-five team themselves lately (Massey has them fourth right now) – but the gap between the team that might be second best in the division (let’s say it’s North Central (Ill.)) and St. Thomas appears rather large.

Here are the numbers:

Raw Offensive Efficiency:

Average Sweet Sixteen team: 110.0

Calvin: 111.6

St. Thomas: 124.4

Let me put this gently: St. Thomas’ offense is more than two standard deviations above the mean EVEN WHEN ONLY CONSIDERING SWEET SIXTEEN TEAMS. Wow. They easily look like the best offensive team Calvin has seen this year.

Raw Defensive Efficiency:

Average Sweet Sixteen team: 92.8
St. Thomas: 91.4
Calvin: 85.4

Calvin’s defensive efficiency is second best among remaining teams (an inconsequential 0.003 points per possession behind Randolph-Macon). St. Thomas is still good themselves – above average even for a Sweet Sixteen team – but they don’t appear to be much different than what Calvin has already seen with Rose-Hulman and UW-Stevens Point. A bit worse than the former, and a bit better than the latter.

Both teams play at a normal, though slightly below average, pace. St. Thomas usually gets about 66 possessions, and Calvin’s been playing at about 67 possessions/game pace this year. Average is usually 67-69 possessions so this game will feel neither fast nor slow*.

*St. Thomas appears to play a pressure defense (including what might be iterations of both a full-court and half-court press), so it might feel more frantic than a typical 66 possession game.

Numbers that might include actual things you’ve seen in a box score.

The Tommies are a really good three point shooting team. On the year they’re 200-472 which equals out to an outstanding .424 percentage. The good news is, that for all their success in making three point shots, they don’t shoot them all that often.

Calvin average three point attempts per game: 16.0
MIAA average three point attempts per game: 16.2
St. Thomas average three point attempts per game: 16.3

The strength of the Knights’ defense is in the interior with all their size and length, so the ability to shoot over that could eat into their defensive advantage. If St. Thomas can continually get off good looks from range, it could be a bad night for Calvin.

Rebounding, as always, is going to be key as well. You simply can’t allow a team that shoots this well to receive second (and third) looks when they happen to miss. That’s a big part of what shut down UWSP last weekend. Calvin didn’t give up offensive rebounds to them until the game was pretty much out of reach.

Another interesting dynamic is going to be each team’s interior defense. On two point shots this season, St. Thomas has shot .569. Calvin’s defense has allowed opponents to shoot only .390.

Calvin’s offense has shot .508 on two-pointers, and St. Thomas’ defense has allowed opponents to shoot .501.

It doesn’t necessarily look like it at first glance, but this comes out to a huge advantage for Calvin. The average MIAA team shot .474 on two point attempts this season (let’s use that as a proxy for a D3-wide average), so we see that St. Thomas doesn’t look very good at defending the two point shot. The strength of their defense appears to rest on rebounding and forcing turnovers, so if Calvin can take care of the ball, they may be able to feast on the inside with guys like Tyler Kruis and Tom Snikkers.

Just for fun, Calvin’s offensive numbers vs. St. Thomas’ defensive numbers with respect to league average on the two-point shot suggest an expected two-point shooting percentage for Calvin in this game of .561.

St. Thomas’ offense versus Calvin’s defense would be expected to shoot .511 on two-point shots.

In conclusion

We could probably delve into a myriad of other numbers or scenarios, but we’re ultimately going to have to see what transpires on the floor.

The good news: Get past St. Thomas and you won’t see an opponent this tough again the rest of the tournament. Get past St. Thomas and you’re also probably the favorite to win it all.

My raw efficiency number suggest something like a 72-65 St. Thomas victory, and give Calvin a 37% chance to win.

The Massey ratings predict a 71-63 St. Thomas victory, giving Calvin a 22% chance to win.

Those wouldn’t be bad results, but there is reason to hope for better. This is a game Calvin can win – which would have been incredible to think about a year ago, that they could be on the road against the #1 team and have a real shot – but they really, truly can win.

They’ve been playing fantastic ball for several weeks now. St. Thomas better be as scared about Calvin as I am about them because if, they’re not, they’re looking past a really darn good Calvin team.

The Boss Back

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 03:38:00 +0000

"Somebody call the Brink(s) truck"
-Rick Ross

I'm unsure whether it was (occasional FFTMAG author) Zac or me that quoted the above rap lyric after Jordan Brink hit his fifth three pointer of the ballgame on Saturday night, but it seemed apropos at the time. I might have even embeded video of the song -- had a family-friendly version existed -- and gone on to laud the incredible game that Mr. Brink had in Calvin's not-as-close-as-the-final-score-indicates 67-58 win over UW-Stevens Point.

But I'm not going to go on-and-on about how clutch Jordan was in scoring 21 points and hitting on all five of his three point attempts because that's not what this team is about. It's not about individual scoring efforts or any particular player carrying the team.

On Saturday it was Brink with the game-high 21 points, but last week against Rose-Hulman it was Tom Snikkers with 20. Against Hope in the MIAA Championship, Bryan Powell led the way with 18 and Tyler Kruis had a game-high 15 against Adrian.

So, in the last four games -- all with Calvin having their backs against the proverbial wall -- a different member of the team has come out on top in scoring. And it's been like that all year. If one guy has a good matchup, they all look to feed him. This team doesn't play selfishly, they're not out there looking to pad a stat line, and they quite clearly share a common goal.

In both rounds of NCAA Tournament play, the opposing team's broadcasters have commented on how impressed they were with Calvin's balanced box scores. The Knights have four guys averaging between 10.5 and 13.5 points, but rarely, it seems, do games play out that way. The four top scorers don't necessarily hit double figures each game, content to play a role when it's not working for them, but they're each capable of making plays and taking over a game if it fits inside the team flow.

And it's not even about the top scorers. Calvin is where they are for multiple reasons. They're one of the (if not the, singular) best rebounding teams in the country, and guys like Mickey DeVries and Dan Stout play big roles in that department. Stevens Point didn't get their first "real" offensive rebound until there were about five minutes left to play (the first credited offensive rebound came at about 10 minutes in the second half on a Tyler Dykstra block that ended up out of bounds). When teams don't get second chances, they don't score very much.

It's a team game and Calvin's playing it that way. I should be writing about every single guy wearing the maroon and gold, but I can't because my mind is really just "WE ON! WE ON! WE ON! WE ON!" right now. I'm just, wow, I love this.

Efficiency Numbers

Estimated possessions: 59.4
Offensive Efficiency: 112.8
Defensive Efficiency: 97.7

That's actually Calvin getting things done more on the offensive side than on the defensive side -- which is a little bit unusual -- but UW-Stevens Point is as good of an offensive team as they've seen all season, so that defensive number is still pretty darn good.

The Knights were up 14 with darn near 0:30 to play, but a late three pointer and a layup cut the game to single digits by the final buzzer. They have more or less clowned two opponents on their home court in the NCAA Tournament.

Calvin's last three games -- vs. Hope, at Rose-Hulman, at UW-Stevens Point -- have probably been their best three games of the year. This is the right time of year to peak.

In which the author quotes himself

This came all the way back on October 25:

19 to 21 wins heading into the MIAA tournament with a 12-2 or 11-3 conference record and a league championship. They’ll grab an NCAA tournament berth and make a Sweet 16 appearance.

It was 22 wins heading into the MIAA Tournament with a 13-1 conference record, a league championship, an NCAA Tournament berth, and a Sweet Sixteen appearance. I was way off.

Looking ahead

St. Thomas is up next. They're good, and that's an understatement. Perhaps I'll have numbers and other nerdy things to come.

On Tempo, Reality, and On To The Next One

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:43:00 +0000

This will be a slightly scattered post, so for that I apologize, but I figured I wanted to write something rather than nothing, so this qualifies.

Calvin did something that no one predicted they’d do which was beat Rose-Hulman by 20 points. On the road. In the NCAA Tournament.

This was billed as a defensive battle. According to Massey, Rose-Hulman was the #1 defense in the country and Calvin was #12. The predicted score was something in the 50’s for both teams. Rose-Hulman hit their mark by scoring 52 points, but Calvin exploded for 72.

72 isn’t usually an “explosion”, but this was against THE NUMBER ONE DEFENSE IN THE COUNTRY. Except, not realy.

The Engineers were the top team in terms of points allowed per game, but that doesn’t necessarily qualify them as the best defense. You see, RHIT typically plays at a slower than average pace and therefore gives the opponent fewer opportunities to score. They averaged about 58 possessions per game in the regular season compared to the typical average of about 68. Considering an average team maybe scores a point per possession, that’s 10 points per game of “defensive quality” that’s really just a result of them playing slower games. That still leaves them with a very good defense, but probably not #1, and probably no better than Calvin’s.

Tempo, Tempo, Tempo

Tempo

Rose-Hulman was dubbed the better defensive team, but Calvin actually had better numbers on a per-possession basis. Calvin’s defensive efficiency rating (points allowed per 100 defensive possessions) was 85.2 heading into the game and Rose-Hulman’s was 86.6. When it came to actually stopping the opponent on any given possession, the two were virtually identical. (It should also be noted that these two numbers are very, very good).

In order to do a more rigorous analysis, one would need to consider the strength of each team’s opponents, but both played Top-100 (ish) schedules (Calvin’s is #68 and RHIT’s #101 according to Massey), so it’s probably pretty close. If anything it would under-value Calvin relative to Rose-Hulman.

This is an example of why per-possession metrics (otherwise known as tempo-free metrics) give us a more accurate picture of team quality than per-game metrics.

Reality

Calvin is a good offensive team. Not spectacular when it comes to NCAA Tournament teams, but probably still at least average for a Round-of-32 team. So how then did they score 72 points against the not-#1-but-still-very-good Rose-Hulman defense?

They probably got a bit lucky.

Calvin doesn’t typically shoot at eye-popping percentages – they’re at .471 for the season – but on Saturday night they shot 82% in the second half to run away with it (61% for the game). It’s true that they got a few easy buckets in transition as they broke RHIT’s press a few times, but 82% is ridiculous and won’t happen again. I don’t mean to rain on the parade at all, but you’re not going to see Tom Snikkers, Tyler Kruis, Mickey DeVries, and Dan Stout combine to go 10-11 on jump shots very often. They all can knock down those shots, but they can’t knock down those shots at a 90%+ clip.

A little bit of positive randodm variation never hurt anybody (well, except for Rose-Hulman in this case), but if Calvin shot a more “normal” percentage then they might have 10-14 of those points off the board. That would have made the game a little bit more interesting at the end.

This isn't to devalue what Calvin did one bit -- I think they're the better team between the two, even on the road -- but if they were to re-play the game I'd pick the Knights by about five, not twenty.

On To The Next One

It's really unfortunate that Calvin is going to have to hit the road for this one rather than meeting UW-Stevens Point at a neutral site or at home. Traveling by bus nearly seven hours is rarely a recipe for success -- especially against a team like Stevens Point -- but the Pointers can be beaten.

UWSP has been without one of their better players, Tyler Tillema, for the second half of the season. That has hurt them quite a bit, but they were still strong enough to claim the regular season WIAC title. And teh WIAC champion is usually one of the best three or four teams in the country. I'm not sure the Pointers are playing quite at that level right now, but they sure are good and could beat anyone in the country on any given night.

Like Rose-Hulman, they play at a little big slower pace (though not as slow as the Engineers), but they (i.e. UW-Stevens Point) are more of an offensive team than a defensive one. Their defense is likely better than their raw numbers suggest -- given the fact that they play in arguably the best league in Division III -- as is probably their offense.

UWSP

Pace: 61 possessions per game

Offensive efficiency rating: 113.2

Defensive efficiency rating: 96.2

Massey strength of schedule: #2

Calvin

Pace: 67 possessions per game

Offensive efficiency rating: 111.5

Defensive efficiency rating: 85.3

Massey strength of schedule: #68

Calvin has the edge from a raw-numbers standpoint, but we would really want to adjust Stevens Point's numbers up to account for their schedule.

These raw numbers -- including for a simple home court advantage multiplier in favor of the Pointers -- suggest a three-point Calvin win. It would take something like a five point adjustment (in any combination of OEff or DEff) in favor of Stevens Point for the numbers to predict an even score. I have no idea what a reasonable strength of schedule factor should be, but let's just say this game looks like it should be quite close.

Massey is predicting a five point Calvin loss, for whatever that's worth.

The good news is that Calvin has been playing just about their best basketball of the season the last two weeks. They needed to win the MIAA Tournament to get into the NCAA Tournament so they've been in win-or-go-home mode for three games. These are their numbers:

	OEff	DEff	Margin
Adrian	121.9	71.5	50.4
Hope	110.9	82.1	28.8
Rose-Hulman	121.7	87.9	33.8

As a simple rule-of-thumb, efficiency margins of 28.0 and above mean "there's no way this team could beat you". That's not really true, of course, in a one-game setting but if a team could put an efficiency margin of 28 or better for a season, they'd be darn near undefeated.

As you can see, Calvin has treated Adrian, Hope, and Rose-Hulman* -- all teams who have spent time in the d3hoops.com Top 25 this year -- as a bunch of ragamuffin cupcakes.

*Caveats that Adrian wasn't the same team on March 1 that they were on January 1 and that Hope was more or less a Preseason Top-25 team.

We shouldn't expect Stevens Point to go down that easily, but whatever sort of thing Calvin has found recently, let's keep going with that.

Our Bracket of Death is Deathier Than Your Bracket of Death

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:38:00 +0000

I am, at the same time, both (1) thrilled about Calvin’s inclusion in the field of 62 for the NCAA Tournament and (2) not thrilled about their draw. It wasn’t completely unexpected that Calvin would have to start on the road – the writing was on the wall when they were regularly ranked fifth and sixth in the region by the Great Lakes committee – but there was a chance that they’d get a home game, and that, obviously, would have been more pleasant. But even after we look past the home/road decision, we see that Calvin has a tough road ahead.

First of all, let’s reiterate that the tournament timeline is different this year. We typically have Friday-Saturday pods of four teams on the first weekend that get us down to the Sweet Sixteen and then Friday-Saturday sectionals the following week that whittle the field down to the Final Four. This year, however, the tournament is being stretched so that the D-III (and D-II) championship games line up with the D-I Final Four weekend. So here’s our new one-year schedule:

Saturday, March 2: Round of 62 @ campus sites

Saturday, March 9: Round of 32 @campus sites

Saturday, March 16: Sweet Sixteen @campus sites

Friday, March 22: Elite Eight @ Salem, VA

Saturday, March 23: Final Four @ Salem, VA

Sunday, April 7: Championship Game @ Atlanta, GA – (Monday, April 8 should a “we don’t play on Sunday” team such as Calvin make it there)

So we’re usually looking at the four regions of 16 teams each as groups that will have to meet on campus sites until the neutral floor of Salem, VA (the traditional Final Four site), but this year we’re (I’m) more focused on the sub-regions of eight teams that will eventually meet for the Elite Eight round in Salem. This year’s committee was probably more hamstrung with the first three rounds – having to make sure most/all were within 500 miles to avoid the cost of flights – but were more free to move these groups of eight around to balance the bracket. Whatever, I can tell you’re bored.

Anyway, here’s Calvin’s sub-region with Massey Rank noted parenthetically:

Calvin (#8) at Rose-Hulman (#23)

Northwestern (Minn.) (#82) at UW-Stevens Point (#4)

Aurora (#72) at St. Thomas (#1)

St. Norbert (#28) at Wheaton (#10)

That’s four top-10 teams and six top-30 teams. When it comes to the tournament, everyone’s good, but this is a meat grinder. Obviously the national committee isn’t setting out to balance the bracket according to Massey Rating – they’re using the handbook criteria – but it sucks all the same. From the way the criteria looks, the seeding/hosting priority order in this group/region/sectional looks like (in order): St. Thomas, UW-Stevens Point, Wheaton, Rose-Hulman, St. Norbert, Calvin, Northwestern (Minn.), Aurora. So Calvin will likely be needing a major upset or two if they hope to host a future round. Potentially Calvin and St. Norbert could be flipped in the above order.

Just for fun, here’s the sub-region just below Calvin’s (the one that they’ll meet up with in the Elite Eight) looks like this:

Delaware Valley (#120) at Virginia Wesleyan (#16)

Rutgers-Newark (#67) at Christopher Newport (#37)

Wesley (#47) at Williams (#17)

Staten Island (#121) at Catholic (#24)

No top-10 teams and only three top-30 teams. I want to go to there.

The term “bracket of death” has been floated out with respect to the region that includes:

Spalding (#68) at Washington U (#12)

Transylvania (#39) at Illinois Wesleyan (#6)

Dubuque (#36) at UW-Whitewater (#2)

Centre (#61) at North Central (Ill.) (#3)

So yeah, sucks that there’s a possibility for a would-be, could-be Final Four matchup in the second round, but overall this isn’t really any more “bracket of death” than the one Calvin’s in. The two regions look equally difficult – save for the higher Massey-ranked teams all having home games in this second one. We’re talking about seven of Massey’s top-ten teams existing in these two sub-regions (plus the #12). That leaves only three top-tens to be spread across the other six sub-regions. Cool.

So it is, of course, true that “you’ll have to beat these teams sooner or later”, but knowing that Calvin is going to (likely) have to play all road games in perhaps the toughest section of the bracket is not an encouraging thought.

But one can’t think of it like that. We have a full week in between games, so it’s full focus on Rose-Hulman and then we can worry about Stevens Point when we get to that. I’ll break out some numbers on RHIT a bit later.

All The Marbles

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:26:00 +0000

David Rietema has been really good and I haven't given him enough ink.

I'm sitting here eating my lunch and waiting for the selections/pairings to be announced and trying to figure out why I haven't written on here following the MIAA Championship. I guess I'm just too pumped up about it to sit down and put together any thoughts. I don't even remember details of the game except Calvin was trailing early, then took the lead, then took a big lead, then the buzzer. I guess that's good enough.

All the credit and a hearty "well done" go out to Coach Vande Streek, the seniors, and the whole team for what they've done this year -- right up to the latest performance. The regional rankings last Wednesday were pretty clear: win the MIAA automatic bid or you're probably not getting in the NCAA Tournament. So, with their backs against the wall, Calvin goes and beats Adrian by 27 and then Hope by 20. Yawn, end of story moving on.

Outside of a rough weekend in Wheaton ALL THE WAY BACK IN EARLY DECEMBER, they pretty much dominated their schedule. Sure, there was the close three point loss to Hope on the road, but that's not a big deal. They surely weren't playing their best that afternoon, but the result wasn't unexpected or out of the ordinary.

They've given us every reason to believe that they can compete on the national stage, and now they'll get their chance.

Efficiency Numbers for the MIAA Championship Game

Estimated number of possessions: 69
Offensive efficiency rating: 110.9
Defensive efficiency rating: 82.1

Hope isn't at maybe the traditional level that we've been accustomed to seeing the last seven years or so, but they're still pretty good. If the NCAA Tournament was the top 62 teams in terms of how good they really are, Hope would be in. And yet Calvin utterly dominated them here. That's not meant to be a knock on Hope, just a comment on how good Calvin actually is. The Knights proved without a doubt that they were the class of the MIAA this year.

Anyway, the selection show is about to start...

Do. Or Do Not. There Is No Try.

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 04:39:00 +0000

This is basically Calvin's entire team resting because they thought there was a game but there wasn't.

We're all going to watch on Matchup Monday but, should Calvin fail to win the MIAA's automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament, they're not going to hear their name called. I mean, we're going to want it, and hope for it, and strain to hear it, but once we've exhausted all 19 fingers and toes (that's normal, right?) ticking off Pool C candidates we're going to come to terms with the hard truth.

Calvin is locked into an in-region winning percentage greater than .900, but they're not going to get an at-large big. We've seen the regional rankings and we know this is the case -- we don't believe it -- but we know it.

So heading into this MIAA Tournament Calvin needed to heed the advice of Master Yoda. You either DO win the AQ or you DO NOT. There's really no room for TRY.

I was nervous as heck heading into Thursday's semifinal with Adrian. They've given Calvin everything they had (and more) over the last three years and it's never been easy. It's true that they're a shell of the team that came into MIAA play undefeated and ranked #7 in the nation, but that defense has been there all season, and it's that defense that's given Calvin fits.

But the Knights didn't mess around with an overmatched Bulldog team. They pretty much took it right to them on both ends of the floor and, though they didn't put the game away in the first half, quickly stretch the lead to a comfortable number.

Adrian never really made a run at Calvin in the second half and it was clear with 10 minutes to play that Calvin was going to coast to a relatively easy victory. They were efficient, tough on defense, took care of the ball, rebounded well, didn't foul, and shared the ball. It was, quite frankly, a better played game than we could have asked for.

But that's not enough. It doesn't really matter that Calvin won by 27 and not three the result is the same. It only counts for one win which is one short of two, and two's the number of wins they need in this conference tournament in order to make the big dance. There's no time to rest or get cocky because it's still win-or-go-home and you-know-who is coming to town on Saturday.

Efficiency Numbers

They were good.

Estimated possessions: 58
Offensive Efficiency: 121.9 (points per 100 possessions)
Defensive Efficiency: 75.5 (points per 100 possessions)

100 is roughly average on the efficiency scale, and Calvin has performed around 110 on the offensive end and 85 on the defensive end for the season. Needless to say beating those numbers by 10 on each end is a very good thing.

Definitive Proof That The NCAA's "New" SOS Calculation Method Is Wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 03:52:00 +0000

We had a revelation this week courtesy of Dave McHugh of D3hoops.com (and Hoopsville). The NCAA Championships Committee has changed the way they're computing the strength of schedule component that is a part of the primary selection criteria for the NCAA Tournament.

Strength of schedule (SOS) is made up of two components: opponents' winning percentage (OWP) and opponents' opponents' winning percentage (OOWP). They're calculated in a similar manner, but the concept of OWP is easier to grasp and "see" so I'll focus on that one component for the purpose of this blog post (but you can apply the same principles to OOWP).

The NCAA realizes that home games and road games differ in difficulty, so they've decided to add in a multiplier (to both OWP and OOWP) of 0.75 for home games, 1.25 for road games, and 1.00 for neutral site games. This isn't a change from last year.

Anyway, the old way to compute OWP and OOWP (I'll also call it the correct way) was computed using the average of the opponents' W/L percentage. For example, if a team played two teams with records of:

at home vs. 3-1 (.750)
on the road vs. 4-2 (.667)

Their OWP was calculated to be [ (.750 x .75) + (.667 x 1.25) ] / 2 = .698.

The new way (I'll also call it the incorrect way) is computed using the sum of the opponents' wins and losses to come up with an overall percentage. So for the same two teams above it would be [(3 x .75) + (4 x 1.25)] / [(4 x .75) + (6 x 1.25)] = .690.

This small example is only to show that there is a difference between the two calculation methods. It's only a two-game portion of a schedule, and a .008 difference isn't huge, but let's consider another example.

Opponent	W	L	PCT	Location	MULT	Old OWP	New W	New L	New OWP
Team A	19	1	0.950	Away	1.25	1.1875	23.8	1.3	-
Team B	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team C	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team D	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team E	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team F	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team G	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team H	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team I	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team J	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team K	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team L	2	10	0.167	Away	1.25	0.208	2.5	12.5	-
TOTAL						0.429	86.3	73.8	0.539

So it's a road game against a really good 19-1 team, a bunch of home games against 8-8 teams, and a road game against a bad 2-10 team. The old method gives an OWP of .429 and the new method gives an OWP of .539. Which is right? It's hard to say, but all those home games against .500 teams makes it seem like it should be a below .500 OWP. I like the first method. But that's really not my point. The real point I'm going to make comes when we flip all those home games to road games.

Opponent	W	L	PCT	Location	MULT	Old OWP	New W	New L	New OWP
Team A	19	1	0.950	Away	1.25	1.188	23.8	1.3	-
Team B	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team C	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team D	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team E	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team F	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team G	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team H	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team I	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team J	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team K	8	8	0.500	Away	1.25	0.625	10.0	10.0	-
Team L	2	10	0.167	Away	1.25	0.208	2.5	12.5	-
TOTAL						0.637	126.3	113.8	0.526

It's an all-road schedule against nine teams that are at least .500 and one team below .500. The old method says this is a decently tough schedule and gives it a .637 OWP. The new method says it's only a decently tough schedule and gives it a .526 OWP.

BUT WAIT! The new method gives a lower OWP value for the all-road schedule (.526) than it did when eight of the games were at home (.539)!

We we simply sum the games up like this (instead of taking the average of the percentage), we're not giving each game (opponent) equal weight in our OWP calculation. This is especially true in conjunction with the home/away multiplier (sometimes known as HAM). In the "new" method, the HAM doesn't make it so road games are "tougher" than home games, it just makes it so road games weigh more heavily than home games. This is probably the opposite of what should be true.

Want even more fun? Let's make all those games in the above example home games.

Opponent	W	L	PCT	Location	MULT	Old OWP	New W	New L	New OWP
Team A	19	1	0.950	Home	0.75	0.7125	14.3	0.8	-
Team B	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team C	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team D	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team E	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team F	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team G	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team H	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team I	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team J	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team K	8	8	0.500	Home	0.75	0.375	6.0	6.0	-
Team L	2	10	0.167	Home	0.75	0.125	1.5	7.5	-
TOTAL						0.382	75.8	68.3	0.526

Yeah, so the "new" method gives an all-home schedule the exact same OWP as when they were all road games. That's because the HAM is only scaling the number of games in the new method, it's not actually changing the perceived difficulty of the game (the percentage).

This isn't just my opinion, this isn't just a different way to do things, this is simply wrong.

Totally Unaltered Photo: What We're Up Against

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:45:00 +0000

I was perusing some MIAA websites the other day when I came across this (totally unaltered) picture on Hope's basketball page.

This should serve as a reminder that they DO have banners hanging in the DeVos Fieldhouse but none of them really come from their men's basketball team actually, you know, winning.

Trine Not To Think Too Far Ahead

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:40:00 +0000

Calvin 56, Trine 43 (box score)

This was really the first game Calvin had won this year purely with defense. You could also throw in the Adrian game perhaps, and maybe Aquinas and Cornerstone, but none of those three games were as extreme as this one.

Calvin couldn’t score, plain and simple, but the defense allowed them to hang in there and make a game of it until the baskets started falling. Remember this?

There are good days and bad days. There are games where shots don’t fall. There are games where the ball seems to take weird bounces. This happens – and will happen again at some point down the stretch – but this isn’t what WANT is about. It’s a decision – a repeated decision that’s made every moment – to stay calm, stay focused, stay controlled, stay team-oriented, and stay dominant.

I had very literally written that two days before this game, and that’s pretty much what happened. Calvin didn’t score a point for nearly seven minutes (a Dan Stout free throw), and didn’t make a field goal for the first ten minutes -- nine minutes and fifty nine seconds, actually, if you want to be literal about it. But even then, one-quarter of the way through the game, with one field goal in and three points on the board, the Knights found themselves down only six points.

Trine jumped out to the quick 9-0 lead inside the first five or six minutes, but the Calvin defense clamped down then and there, and only allowed 34 more points the rest of the game. It was the best defensive output of the season, holding Trine to a 68.1 efficiency rating – the first time they’d held an opponent under 70 all year.

Opponent	OEff	DEff	Margin	Result
at Trine	88.7	68.1	20.6	W
Grace Bible	115.1	72.6	42.5	W
Anderson	129.1	73.7	55.4	W
Hope	113.0	73.8	39.2	W
at Kalamazoo	113.9	76.4	37.5	W
North Park	117.8	76.6	41.2	W
Wabash	117.5	79.3	38.2	W
Adrian	92.4	82.5	9.9	W
Finlandia	139.6	84.0	55.6	W
Alma	116.4	85.2	31.2	W
Aquinas	93.3	88.5	4.8	W
Wheaton	61.4	89.6	-28.2	L
Ripon	126.0	89.8	36.2	W
Cornerstone	97.2	90.2	7.0	W
Manchester	127.3	92.2	35.1	W
at Albion	103.8	99.1	4.7	W
Carthage	91.4	107.4	-16.0	L

(Conference games in bold, sorted by defensive efficiency rating which is the same as the opponents’ offensive efficiency rating.)

The defense is clicking to the point where they’re making some decent offensive teams (Hope, Trine) look like Anderson, North Park, and Grace Bible. The Massey Ratings now say Calvin’s defense is the tenth best in Division III, a rating that’s been trending upward. Zac commented to me that this Calvin teams reminds him of the 2005 team – not in overall construction, but the way they came together about this time that year as a relentless defensive unit. This team may be even more defense heavy (and less on offense) than that team, but he’s not wrong. Calvin hasn’t seen this type of team defense since that Final Four team.

I don’t know that you could pick out too many guys on this team (or the ’05 team, for that matter) who are excellent one-on-one defenders, but they play the Vande Streek system to near perfection together as a team. It’s been a treat to watch.

The offense wasn’t strong on Saturday versus Trine – the first time they were held to an efficiency rating under 90 since the Wheaton debacle – a concerning fact, but it’s encouraging to know, to be assured, that they’re able to keep up the defensive intensity when things aren’t falling their way. As I said in the opening, they can win games on defense, and did just that this past weekend.

Up next is Olivet – AT Olivet – which is not a game Calvin should look past. The Comets have played extremely well at home and just knocked off Hope there on Saturday by hitting a three pointer in the final second. Hope isn’t “HOPE” to the degree they’ve been “HOPE” for the last six years or so, but they’re still the second best team in the league, and they still should have beaten Olivet rather handily.

Calvin’s defense will be put to the test on Wednesday in a much different way than it was on Saturday. Olivet, unlike Trine, loves to shoot the three – they’ve fired up 76 more attempts than any other MIAA team this year – and they make them at a good clip – 38.7% for the season. Calvin has been as good as anyone in the league at defending the three this year, but this one could be a different animal. Lackadaisical defensive play will be rewarded with made threes in this one. Calvin is going to have to use their length out on the perimeter if they’re to be effective defensively.

Massey’s prediction says Calvin over Olivet by 11 (72-61) and my efficiency calculations say Calvin by 14 (70-56), but Olivet is capable of pouring in more if they’re allowed to loose more than a few open three point shots. They’re one of the poorer two-point shooting teams in the league (and, as I’ve said, one of the best three-point shooting teams), so it will be interesting to see if Coach Vande Streek adjusts the game plan to focus on the long-range attempts.

How Much More Do You WANT?

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Calvin 75, Hope 49 (box score)

The thing about “The Rivalry” is that games don’t go like this. Calvin and Hope are – with a few exceptions – both very good teams every single year. They know each other; they see each other in the GRSHOF Classic and MIAA-CCIW Classic; they rarely surprise each other.

But then this game happened and the Calvin Knights surprised the pants off the Flying Dutchmen who were apparently not prepared to play a basketball game. Calvin was a heavyweight boxer who nearly knocked out the opponent in the first round, sending them to the corner on wobbly legs. When the second round began, they (the metaphorical Calvin boxer) stood in the middle of the ring with gloves at the side, accepted a small flurry of uncontested body blows, laughed, and then delivered the right-hook that would end the fight.

Fun Fact: Hope finally tied Calvin’s halftime score with 1:43 left to play in the game.

And I guess that’s where the ill-conceived boxing metaphor fails. Calvin didn’t win this game so much with an offensive barrage – though they put up a quite good 113.0 offensive efficiency rating – it was more the fact that their defense suffocated the Dutchmen from the get-go. From a raw defensive efficiency standpoint, it was their third best game of the season:

Opponent	DEff
Grace Bible	72.6
Anderson	73.7
Hope	73.8
at Kalamazoo	76.4
North Park	76.6
Wabash	79.3
Adrian	82.5
Finlandia	84.0
Alma	85.2
Aquinas	88.5
Wheaton	89.6
Ripon	89.8
Cornerstone	90.2
Manchester	92.2
at Albion	99.1
Carthage	107.4

Note the surrounding teams being Grace, Anderson, Kalamazoo, and North Park. This was easily the best defensive game if we account for the relative quality of Hope’s offense. It didn’t look like it last night, but Hope’s one of the best offensive teams in Division III. According to the Massey Ratings’ breakdown, they’ve performed as the 29th best offense in the country. Calvin did that – 49 points in a game played at a reasonable pace – against what is possibly one of the Top-30 offenses in the entirety of NCAA Division III. I also want to note that Massey’s data set – the data set that rates Hope’s offense at #29 – already includes last night’s futility.

I don’t think Calvin’s defense can get enough credit for what they’ve done as a team this season. Massey rates them as the 15th best defense in the country and according to my raw efficiency numbers (raw meaning not adjusted for strength of opponent), Calvin rates as the MIAA’s best defense since at least 2002 (as far back as I can easily get league data).

There’s still a lot of basketball to be played – including a tough one at Trine this Saturday – and I don’t want to make any claims that I’ll later regret, but this Calvin team has the makings of a very special team. Their scoring efficiency margin of roughly 25 points per 100 possessions (110 on offense, 85 on defense) is the best the league has seen since 2002. Here are some teams of note that are included in that list of teams since 2002:

2005 Calvin – they made it to the Final Four

2008 Hope – they made it to the Final Four

2005 Albion – they made it to the Elite Eight

2007 Hope – they made it to the Elite Eight

2006 Hope – they made it to the Sweet Sixteen

Again, a lot of basketball left including three very losable road games (at Trine, at Adrian, and at Hope) – so there’s room for the numbers to get worse – but Calvin has thus far shown the ability to be as good as they want to be.

I would never say that Calvin is as good as any of the above teams, but I’m not going to say they’re not as good as any of those teams.

What happened in Wheaton against the Thunder and Red Men is still frightening, that’s all too true, but that’s now eight games in the past. Calvin still is going to have to prove that they can win on the road in a hostile environment, but I they’ve solidified themselves as the best team in the league.

It’s about #WANT now. I’m typically too much into the numbers to talk about hunger, or hustle, or desire, but that’s exactly where the Knights are right currently. Does every member of this team have enough WANT to not allow a wasted possession or missed assignment?

We don’t want to make too much of one game because that’s all this was: one win. You’re always concerned about the very next game after an emotional high such as this one. Calvin now hits the road for three very losable games: they’re at Trine, at Olivet, then at Adrian. These three games will potentially tell us an awful lot about how the rest of the season goes and how much WANT this team truly has.

Calvin Is Better Than Michigan State. Probably.

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:07:00 +0000

Mickey DeVries is from Lansing, a city to which MSU is near.

I rather enjoy Kenneth Massey’s sports rating site. He goes into great depth in the college basketball realm, ranking everyone from Duke to Luzerne County Community College (and presumably other worse teams that the author was unwilling to try to find). Included in the middle is the most comprehensive Division III basketball rankings available.

I had not – for reasons unknown – previously explored some of the more advanced features of the website. For example, we can see that these ratings predict Calvin to finish the regular season with eight or nine more wins, and gives them roughly an 80% chance of hitting the 20 win mark (prior to the MIAA Tournament). We can also see that the teams Calvin plays this year look awfully regional even if three didn’t count as such.

But, perhaps most importantly, we find definitive proof that Calvin is better than the Michigan State Spartans. Or, perhaps more appropriately styled, the twenty second ranked in Division I Michigan State Spartans.

Calvin, as we all know, defeated Cornerstone in the GRSHOF Classic earlier this year. But what you may not know is that Cornerstone had previously defeated Indiana Wesleyan. But here’s the shocking fact that will shock you: Indiana Wesleyan went on to beat Shawnee St who had previously beaten Rio Grande who later beat Campbell. Division I Cambell. The very same Division I Campbell that just last week topped Gardner Webb by a full 12 points.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

As we all know, Gardner Webb shellacked Tennessee Tech a month ago even though Tennessee Tech had defeated a much better Wisconsin-Green Bay squad two days prior. That win didn’t turn heads at the time, but it gained significance after UW-Green Bay topped Marquette two weeks later. The same Marquette, believe it or not, that topped UConn on New Year’s day. And we all know who UConn beat to tip off the season: Little Brother himself.

We might have expected Calvin to be slightly better than Michigan State – given their respective 12-2 and 13-3 records – but we now have the pudding that contains some very persuasive proof. And it’s not even really close. By adding up all of the point differentials, we could easily expect Calvin to beat Michigan State by a full 88 points.

It’s science.

Calvin Knights Topple #7 Adrian Bulldogs

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:37:00 +0000

First off, should Adrian have been ranked in the Top-10? Probably not, but they have represented themselves to-date as a solid Top-25 team and a ranking in the teens wouldn’t have been underserved. They’re certainly still a Top-25 team even with the loss. I’m probably splitting hairs here, I know that, but this wasn’t so much number seven versus unranked as it was more like, say, number 14 versus 28. I mean, it was exactly number seven versus unranked, but that billing doesn’t do justice to the relative quality of the teams.

What I mean to say is that although Adrian was highly ranked and Calvin not ranked, this was going to be a close game, and one that Calvin would likely win. Massey had Calvin as a 62% favorite and predicted a three-point win. My unadjusted efficiency numbers predicted a 60-54 Calvin win. I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say here other than that Calvin and Adrian are both very good teams, and that this particular game went pretty much according to form.

It’s tough to immediately recall a game that was more tightly contested from start to finish. Calvin never trailed by more than two, and never took a lead larger than six until the final five minutes when they stretched it to seven on two occasions. But even with the score close – seemed like it was Calvin by four for the entire second half – it didn’t necessarily feel like it was “only” a two-possession game. The game was a defensive battle and I’m sure (though I haven’t done it) one might be able to count the number of times either team scored in back-to-back possessions on one hand.

The win got Calvin on the D3hoops front page:

It was a great game to watch – if you don’t mind the absence of pretty offense – and a great win for the Knights.

The win puts Calvin in the driver’s seat for the league title – though one game in isn’t much – but getting that first win over a contending team will do that. An 11-3 league record now seems very possible – or even likely – at this moment. That would put Calvin at 20-5 heading into the MIAA Tournament. Massey’s “simulate season” function has Calvin winning 10.6 games the rest of the way which would mean an 11-3 or even 12-2 (depending on how you want to round) league record.

Efficiency Numbers

Possessions: 61

Offensive Efficiency: 92.4 (points per 100 possessions)

Defensive Efficiency: 82.5 (points per 100 possessions)

A little bit of a slower pace than Calvin typical plays – they’re usually up around 70 possessions – but not that big of a deal. It happens when two teams play good defense and easy shots are difficult to come by.

92.4 isn’t a great number by any stretch – average for the league is usually right around 100 – but it could be considered a good number when considering that Adrian was the opponent, and that Adrian had previously held their opponents to a 79.4 efficiency rating. That difference represents eight points in this 61 possession game. They’re a defensive killer, that’s what they do.

Calvin holding Adrian to an 82.5 is just about right. Calvin came in holding opponents to an 85.5 efficiency mark, and Adrian’s been average-to-slightly-below on the offensive end this year.

The game’s efficiency margin of 9.9 (points per 100 possessions, that is) – if it truly represents the relative abilities of these two teams – would suggest a 68% chance that Calvin wins a rematch. And as I said, the Massey Ratings said 62% coming in, so this game probably does little to move the needle.

Stats of the (K)night

14 assists for Calvin. That was 70% of their made field goals.

A combined five assists and zero turnovers for Bryan Powell and Tom Snikkers. They also chipped in 26 of Calvin’s 56 points.

Looking ahead

The attention now turns to Albion – Calvin will head there on Saturday – but the Britons look like they could be headed for last place. They were just pounded 81-54 by Olivet, who may themselves only finish in sixth place. Injuries and dismissals have cost Albion much of their depth and experience; it may not be pretty.

A win on Saturday (combined with yesterday’s win) could get Calvin ranked in next week’s D3hoops.com poll. It would surely put them in the “receiving votes” conversation.

Official regional rankings won’t come out for another month or so, but I’d guess the Great Lakes would look like this at the moment (regional records noted):

1. Ohio Wesleyan (10-0)

2. Calvin (6-0)

3. Adrian (6-1)

4. Wooster (10-2)

5. Wittenberg (5-2)

6. Capital (8-2)

Calvin’s in-region strength of schedule numbers won’t be pretty – they way the home/away multipliers work and all – so they’ll need to keep up a sterling in-region record to stay in Pool C contention. Probably just want to win the AQ.

Regional Rankings and RPI Numbers Are Go

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:10:00 +0000

Not the actual calculator I use.

Now back for the third season are my in-region RPI-based regional rankings. I scrapped all the extra adjustments this year (they didn't seem to help much) and am back to a strict RPI ranking (with SOS weights). It's a good starting point if you're looking at the rankings.

Find it here (or in the "Regional Rankings" tab in the upper link bar).

Also, for the first time this year, I'm running D3-wide RPI numbers. These include all Division III games (and only Division III games) and don't include any SOS weighting. Also included in the list are non-conference RPI numbers for each team.

Find it here (or in the "D3 RPI" tab in the upper link bar).

Both sections will be updated periodically (as I have time), but the frequency usually increases as we get later into the season (or if Calvin is nearer the top).

Anderson Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 03:41:00 +0000

A raven

	Game Preview
Who	Anderson Ravens
What	Hopefully a beat down
Where	Van Noord Arena
When	Tuesdya, Nov 20 - 7:30 PM
Audio	Calvin Stretch Internet
Video	Calvin Live Stream
Live Stats	Calvin Live Stats

When we last met

True story: my wife, our (then) two-year old daughter and I went on a family “vacation” to Indianapolis* last year for really the sole purpose of attending the Calvin at Anderson game on the return trip. Also a true story: the game sucked.

*Priceline’s Name Your Price or Negotiator (or whatever it is exactly that William Shatner advertises) is really the way to go for every hotel stay. We ended up with a very nice room in the downtown Indy Hilton for under $50. This is not a paid advertisement.

The final margin was only 13 and, though the deficit was greater for much of the game, there was a perpetual feeling that Calvin was one run away from making the game interesting. But no such sustained run came, and the Knights trailed by double figures for the final 29:32 of the game (that's most of it). Watching it was sort of like banging your head against the wall, but not so fast that you're knocked out quickly. More like a slow, relentless thud. But I'm probably over exaggerating things somewhat.

I don't like myself when I get worked up about sports (because it's, like, sports), but there's nothing more frustrating than not being able to hang with these guys when it's like "you can/should be able to hang with these guys".

Also, their student section was fairly good (ahem).

About Anderson

Thankfully, I do not expect a repeat performance! Anderson's coach, Tom Slyder, resigned in the summer to take the North Park job (he was the guy coaching from ten steps onto the court all game on Saturday -- great job keeping him in line, refs). Anderson hired Wheaton (IL) assistant Owen Handy to fill the role, but the program appears to have suffered a high rate of attrition.

I haven't been intimate with their roster situation -- and I do know that they had a few pretty good seniors last year -- but this year's team consists of only one senior and two juniors. The rest are freshmen and sophomores (mostly sophomores) with relatively little experience at this level. Only three players that recorded time in last year's meeting are still on the roster, and those players combined for only 29 minutes.

It could be that the youngsters are really good, but the HCAC coaches voted Anderson #8 (out of 10) in the preseason poll, so I'm doubting that's the case. Their potential experience issues will be exacerbated by the fact that this will be their season opener.

I wouldn't feel bad if Calvin beat them to a bloody pulp so long as the bloody pulp in question was purely figurative.

Anderson doesn't have any players that are both (1) taller than 6-6 and (2) heavier than 190 lbs so Calvin should (again) have a distinct size advantage. They have one player on the roster listed as a center: Levi Gleason (6-6, 215). From his player bio (emphasis mine):

Levi played in 12 games in 2011-12, finishing with six points, six rebounds and a blocked shot ... majors in Criminal Justice.

Tyler Kruis will eat that for lunch and then demand seconds. I'm not sure that Gleason is the guy that starts in the middle for Anderson, but he had the most impressive season last year of any returning player that's taller than 6-3. I typed that correctly.

Anderson's lone senior is Phil Hogan who averaged 19.5 points per game en route to a First Team All-HCAC selection. He's legit, but I'm not sure there are many other threats on the team.

Prediction, keys, and general whathaveyou

Key to the game: win

Prediction: I'll say Calvin by 13. A win indeed would be a win, but this smells like a game that should be won by double figures. The Anderson program has been non-terrible to pretty good over the past several years, but this does not appear to be that type of team. Massey predicts Calvin by eight based on pretty much no information at all.

Importance: This is a regional game, so it is of utmost importance. You can't lose winnable (home) games and expect to have your name called on Selection Monday.

I'm giving the students a pass because there was significant volleyball action taking place (though Saturday should have been better attended). I will not give the students a pass if they continually don't show up and/or make a sound. I saw them bring it down the stretch for the volleyball team; they need to bring same now.

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Champs.

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:19:00 +0000

I'm hoping these students (not pictured) were at the volleyball match.

Calvin 84, Grace Bible 53 (box score)

Calvin 83, North Park 54 (box score)

Not the sports apparel retailer, that’s Champs Sports, and not the sports bar and grill chain, that’s Champps Americana Restaurant (notice the extra ‘P’, someone over there is too clever); I’m talking about the Calvin Tip-off Tournament Champs.

It’s kind of a big deal. People know it.

I find it hard to write words after horrible, horrible losses and blowout victories, but at least I can justify typing random words after the latter (I think that means the second one), because no one’s reading this anyway. They’re all out celebrating the championship. Still.

The results of the two games this past weekend were nice – it’s rarely a bad thing to win by 30 – and we don’t know how the respective seasons for Grace and North Park will shake out, but winning both of these games by 30 (or 31 and 29, if you’re a stickler for details) should put Calvin right where they want to be. In order to be a good team one must beat these two soundly, and Calvin did just that.

It was good that Cairn was at this competition because it provides us some sort of benchmark. North Park and Grace aren’t good, but Cairn is plain bad (bad, bad, bad). We know that Cairn is horrible (about as bad as you can be in D3), and we know that they lost to North Park and Grace Bible by 24and 48respectively. So we learn something about Calvin’s two opponents: that they are both markedly better than a bottom feeder. And then Calvin proceeded to destroy the two teams that are “markedly better than a bottom feeder” making them markedly better than teams that are markedly better than the teams on the bottom. I have no idea what I just said, but I think I’m meaning to say that Calvin beat two teams they were supposed to beat by scores in which they were supposed to beat them.

I think the biggest thing that stood out to me, both while watching the actual games and while taking a brief stroll through the stat sheets, was that Calvin played two pretty complete team games. The Knights made 66 field goals across the two games, and recorded an assist on 49 of them (that’s 74%). Last year’s team was actually quite good with assist rate (59%), but that could be a partial function of the team’s poor-ish scoring ability. Whereas last year’s team needed assists to lead to easy baskets (otherwise they weren’t scoring), this year’s team seems to be constantly creating such opportunities. The result has been very few forced shots and many, many good looks at the basket.

Fun fact: everyone that’s played at least ten full minutes has at least two assists.

One of the more impressive stat lines probably belongs to Tom Snikkers. Tyler Kruis has the impressive 20+ point average (and I’m going to take him for granted for a moment here), but Snikkers has dialed down his shot attempts and has become the team’s assist leader. Not that he wasn’t scoring – he has the third highest scoring average at 8.5 – but he’s doing that while also leading in assists and trailing only Mickey DeVries in total rebounds. That’s a versatile player.

Defensively Calvin was no less impressive. I’m sure coach Vande Streek will find things to break down and stomp about, but they appeared to be as active – or proactive, perhaps – as a Calvin team has been in a number of years. Like they’re past the point of learningthe system and to the point of getting goodat the system. Active hands, active feet, cutting off driving lanes, closing out on three point attempts, getting in the passing lanes. All things that frustrate the opponents and lead to high (25%) turnover rates.

My biggest complaint about the man-to-man help side defensive system that coach Vande Streek likes to employ is that it can’t be a passive system. No defensive system can be (and still be effective). When Calvin has a young team (like last year) or a team filled with new people, the defense feels that way. When the defense is passive, the offense dictates the play. I’m sure the Grace Bible and North Park players will tell you they didn’t feel comfortable on the offensive end.

All of this, of course, receives the all-encompassing quality-of-opponent caveat, but it’s not like we’re trying to justify an eight point win over Finlandia or anything. All signs point to good.

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Calvin Tip-Off Tournament Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 14:30:00 +0000

	Game Preview
Who	Grace Bible Tigers (NCCAA-II)
	North Park Vikings
	Cairn Highlanders
What	Calvin Tip-off Tournament
Where	Van Noord Arena
When	Friday 5:30 PM, 7:30 PM Saturday 1 PM, 3 PM
Audio	Calvin Stretch Internet
Video	Calvin Live Stream
Live Stats	Live Stats
Tickets	$5 at the door or online

When We Last Met
Last year's Tip-Off Tournament marked the first time in three years that Calvin had won the title. Having lost to the Grace Bible Tigers the two years previous, Calvin eked out a double-over time win against a Grace team that probably "should have won" in regulation and in the first overtime. No one on the current Calvin team has beaten Grace in regulation. We're all getting itchy.

It's been a number of years since Calvin has played North Park. More than 15, and perhaps many more than that. They're in-region, so it would be a good game for Calvin to play (and win).

Cairn (known alias: Philadelphia Bible) came to the Calvin Tip-off Tournament in 2004-05, but they lost their opening game versus Eastern (PA) and didn't meet up with Calvin.

North Park vs. Cairn -- 5:30 PM
North Park wasn't very good last year. They finished with a 6-19 record and rated as basically Alma according to Massey.Cairn, however, was worse. They won only four games and Massey had them as the 15th worst team in Division III. I expect North Park to win rather comfortably, setting up the potential for an all-important regional game in the championship round.

Calvin vs. Grace -- 7:30 PM
These two teams earned nearly identical rankings on the Massey scale in 2012, but Calvin probably got a lot better, and Grace appears to have gotten worse. The Bible Tigers are 1-4 on the season with their only win coming (in overtime, at home) to a probably-not-very-good Crossroads team. I don't think this means Grace will be a pushover, but the "yeah, but they're a really strong team" excuse is now out the window. Grace returns one starter -- and only three players -- that participated in last year's game. Nothing about Grace's to-date results says "should be able to beat Calvin", but we really don't know what Calvin is this year.

I'm confident that Calvin will win -- and win comfortably -- but it's more of a "still terrified inside about what would happen if they don't" kind of confidence. Grace now has five regular season games under their belts, so they'll have "gelled" more than the Knights, so this isn't a game in which to lay an egg. Play needs to be tight, crisp, and under control.

Calvin should have a size advantage (as they will in most games), so they'll need to control the glass. They can't afford to give Grace second looks, especially since the Tigers are likely the better shooting team. If Calvin takes care of the ball and rebounds well on both ends, they'll be just fine. Rebounding will probably be the key to this team this year, unless they show that they can shoot with a high degree of efficiency.

In the end, this game won't count for much of anything if Calvin's in a position for NCAA Tournament selection/seeding, but they do need to make a statement to show what type of a team they'll be this year. I really miss those 30 point wins to start the season.

Final Score Bench Marks
Efficiency is the name of the game. Assuming a 70 possession game -- the typical pace in the last two Calvin-Grace meetings -- a 10 point win (+14.3 in efficiency margin) would put Calvin right above their target season margin that would yield and expected 20 wins on the year. I would be very happy with that. If we want to get really greedy, then we'd be hoping for an 18 point win here, which would put their efficiency margin right at the "gimmie win" average. (Read the linked post at the start of this paragraph if you don't understand what I'm talking about here).

Anything less than 10 and I'll outwardly say that "a win is a win", but I'll be nervous. A loss would mean... I don't even want to consider that.

The Big Picture
The most important result of the weekend would be a Calvin win over North Park. That would be a D3 in-region game which is the #1 criterion for NCAA Tournament purposes. It would be at home versus a rather weak team (when all is said and down) so it will bring down Calvin's final strength of schedule rating, but it's typically better to play and win (even "easy" games) than not play at all.

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Previewing The MIAA For Opening Weekend

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:55:00 +0000

Thursday, November 15 marks the official start for Division III basketball, but none of the MIAA teams will tip off their respective seasons until Friday. Everyone is in action on Friday except Kalamazoo who doesn’t begin their season until Friday the 24th for whatever reason.

Here’s a (brief) look at this weekend’s games:

Friday, November 16

Hope vs. College of Faith (at North Central (IL)), 3:30 PM

We (sports fans in general, not you, the reader, and me specifically) often make jokes with cupcake teams being referred to as “The Little Sisters of the Poor” (or whathaveyou), but this may really be one of those instances:

College of Faith is a Bible based, Christ-centered, online religious institution of higher education.

So, yeah, I guess it’s not a Catholic school for women, but it is an ONLINE Bible college that is, apparently, just beginning an athletics program. None of that sounds like “good at basketball” to me. They played a five-game football schedule this fall and were outscored 241-12 in four losses (I can’t find a score for their game against the Chattahoochee Tech club team, however).

Hope wins – the only question is by more or less than 100 – but I’m not sure the NCAA even “counts” this as a game because College of Faith will play most of their games against NJCAA teams (Junior College).

Adrian vs. Otterbein (at Wooster), 6:00 PM

THIS IS A REGIONAL GAME SO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

Otterbein wasn’t very good last year (9-17, 6-12 in the OAC), and I would like to call this game for Adrian, but after seeing their attrition-riddled roster that was posted this week, I’m not so sure. The MIAA coaches voted Adrian #2 in the preseason poll, but we’ve since found out their roster doesn’t include four would-be seniors, three would-be juniors (including All-MIAA Richaud Pack), and three would-be sophomores. They instead have 10 freshmen on their varsity roster which is a lot considering they had ZERO seniors a year ago and didn’t need to replace anyone (necessarily).

With Sean Gallant, Eric Lewis, Adam Meier, and Cody Barnes returning they can put together a pretty good starting lineup, but any sort of depth might not exist at this point. Everyone else on the roster is either (1) new or (2) was a non-scoring role player last seaon. They probably (hopefully) have one or two freshmen that can play pretty well, but not 10 of them.

Olivet at Central Michigan, 7:00 PM

LOL

Grace Bible at Calvin, 7:30 PM

The Bible Tigers have beaten Calvin twice in the last three years – with their only loss being last year’s double-overtime affair – so I don’t want to dismiss them in the least, but they haven’t started the year out particularly well. They’re 1-4 with losses to Davenport (not a bad loss), UM-Dearborn (who was 3-27 a year ago), Ohio Christian (probably not bad for an NCCAA II team), and now Andrews. The lone win was (in overtime) against Crossroads who appears to have been a very poor team a year ago. Grace will have five games under their belt, which is to their advantage, but they might only be a shell of the team they’ve been the past few years.

I’ll preview this game further on Thursday or Friday.

Alma vs. Capital (at Wheaton (IL)), 7:30 PM

THIS IS A REGIONAL GAME SO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

Capital tied for the OAC regular season crown a year ago. Alma graduated their best player. I don’t think the Crusaders struggle to win this one.

Manchester at Albion, 7:30 PM

THIS IS A REGIONAL GAME SO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

This is a game that Albion should win more often than not (being at home in (historic) Kresge Gymnasium against a somewhat inferior opponent), but it sounds like they’ll be without All-MIAA Kolin Kazen for a little while (he’s not listed on their roster, but I’ve heard he’ll be there at some point). There have also been rumblings that Chris Hutton suffered a (minor) injury and won’t be available for a couple of weeks perhaps. A win would be great for the league, but it may not happen if they really are missing two of their better players.

Trine at Heidelberg, 7:30 PM

THIS IS A REGIONAL GAME SO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

This is the MIAA’s best chance for a Friday regional win and, quite frankly, should be an easy one for Trine. The Thunder won this exact matchup by 10 a year ago, and should win by at least that margin again if they’re the type of team that could challenge for a top-four spot in the MIAA again this year.

Saturday, November 17

North Park or Cairn at Calvin, 1:00 PM or 3:00 PM

THIS COULD BE A REGIONAL GAME SO IT COULD BE VERY IMPORTANT!

The game time is subject to championship game/consolation game, but the opponent should matter little. North Park would be a regional game – and likely the better team – so that’s the hopeful matchup. According to Massey, Cairn (Philadelphia Bible was the old name) was the 15th worst Division III team last year. North Park, who rated slightly worse than Alma a year ago, should coast past Cairn in game one, but should also be a fairly easy win for Calvin. Should be. Calvin would destroy Cairn.

Adrian at Wooster or vs. Carnegie Mellon (at Wooster), 6 PM

THIS IS A REGIONAL GAME SO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

Adrian is guaranteed two regional games this weekend as everyone at the Wooster Tournament is defined as a Great Lakes team. They would have no shot against host Wooster here on day two, but their likely second opponent is Carnegie Mellon. Mellon was 9-16 last season, but they play in the very tough UAA. Their roster doesn’t contain any seniors and has eight underclassmen, and it appears as though they graduated two very good starters, so they may also be dealing with rebuilding/depth issues. I’ll call this a toss-up, just because I’m really nervous about Adrian’s roster, but I’d love to see the Bulldogs win it.

Alma at Wheaton (IL), 7:30 PM

Wheaton won’t be as good as they were last year after graduating a couple of top players (Tim McCrary specifically), but they’ll still be better than Alma, especially on their home floor. The crazy regional rules will help the MIAA here as this one is considered out-of-region (but shouldn’t be).

Trine vs. Akron-Wayne or Miami-Middletown (at Heidelberg), 7:30 p.m.

University of Akron Wayne and Miami University Middletown are apparently affiliated with the Ohio Regional Campus Conference. That doesn’t sound all that impressive, but Middletown appears to have been a possibly good team last year. Mostly they just spent the year destroying bad teams though, so it’s hard to say.

Olivet at Mount St. Joseph, 8:00 PM

THIS IS A REGIONAL GAME SO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

These were two pretty bad teams a year ago, and I figure them to be pretty bad this year as well. It would be a good win for the league (because it’s regional and on the road), but I wouldn’t pick Olivet to go out there and do it necessarily. Should be a good game though.

Hope at North Central (IL), 8:30 PM

THIS IS A REGIONAL GAME SO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

North Central was a Sweet Sixteen team last year, and was voted #6 in the D3hoops pre-season poll. Hope was voted #7, so this game looks good on paper, but I think the Dutchmen lost too much to justify that ranking. And now there’s also word that breakout candidate (and likely starter) Stephen Wittenbach will miss a few weeks with a foot injury. I don’t see Hope winning this game (or keeping it close, quite frankly), though it would be a signature win for them and the league.

Sunday, November 18

Wabash at Albion, TBA

THIS IS A REGIONAL GAME SO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

Wabash looks like they’ll take a step back after fading down the stretch and just missing out on an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament last season. Still, they should be considered favorites against the Britons, especially if the previously mentioned players are missing for the game.

Olivet vs. Thomas More (at Mount St. Joseph), 4:00 PM

THIS IS A REGIONAL GAME SO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

Thomas More was fairly good last year (Massey rated them just above Calvin), so Olivet probably loses this game. Olivet probably loses a lot of games.

The Tally

If I give-and-take the toss-up games, it looks like I’m predicting something like an 8-9 overall record for the league over this first weekend. Unfortunately, it looks like it could be a 3-7 or 4-6 weekend for the all-important regional games. That wouldn’t be a great way to start off the year. The swing teams are probably Albion and Adrian as both play two regional games, and I’m not sure what to make of either of them right now. Adrian’s probably 1-1 either way (though 0-2 is possible), but I could see Albion going either 2-0 or 0-2.

Expectations, And How To Get There

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:32:00 +0000

The season starts on Friday(!). This much we know because it says so on the schedule, but we don’t know how the actual win and loss things will go. We also know that the last time that Calvin made the NCAA Tournament was in 2007 (!!!!1!!?) which is far too long ago. Five full seasons have come and gone, and Calvin hasn’t played into March*. Sure, they probably should have received an at-large bid in 2009, and they could have received one in 2010, but they didn’t, which means two graduating classes have come and gone without witnessing Mad Marchness up close and in person. No wonder student participation had suffered in recent years.

*Except that one time in 2008 when the MIAA Championship game was played on March 1.

There have been excuses – some good, most bad – young rosters, injuries, Kevin Kooiker, that darn non-transparent selection process, and whatever else, but the fact remains that it’s high time – well past high time, in fact – to re-emerge as a national power and not simply a “pretty good team”. Calvin has won two of the last four MIAA regular season titles, a fact that shouldn’t be dismissed, but that’s only one out of four benchmarks (20 wins, MIAA Championship, MIAA Tournament Championship, NCAA Tournament berth).

There’s a great deal of overlap between those benchmarks, an MIAA Tournament win means an automatic NCAA Tournament bid and 20 wins (through the MIAA Tournament) likely means three out of four (if not all four), but the point stands. These are four achievements that represent what Calvin basketball should be (or, at least, what we thinkCalvin basketball should be), but the attainment level hasn’t been there in recent years. Now would be a good time to start attaining, and it would appear that Calvin has the roster to do it.

Unfortunately, it’s easier to predict 20 wins than actually win 20 games (in a 27 game schedule). I mean, we could play the schedule game:

Calvin Tip-off Tournament – 2 out of 2 (likely Grace Bible and North Park)

Anderson – Win

GRSHOF Tournament – 1 out of 2 (Cornerstone and Aquinas)

at Manchester – Win

MIAA-CCIW Classic – 1 out of 2

at Finlandia – Win

Elmhurst Bluejay Classic – 2 out of 2 (Wabash then either Elmhurst or Ripon)

MIAA Regular Season – 11-3

MIAA Tournament – 2 out of 2

Those are very aggressive predictions which would total 22 wins. You could maybe squeeze out win number 23 with a 12-2 conference record, but that’s best case scenario. Calvin could realistically drop both GRSHOF games over Thanksgiving, a second MIAA-CCIW game (MIAA teams never play well across the dreaded pond), and/or an MIAA Tournament final. That would make for 19 or 20 wins without really suffering a bad loss. And that’s assuming the Knights can top HCAC foes Anderson (iffy) and Manchester (more likely) without much of a problem and then waltz into Elmhurst after Christmas and sweep the Tournament.

We could (almost) just as easily see this:

Calvin Tip-off Tournament – 2 out of 2 (likely Grace Bible and North Park)

Anderson – Loss

GRSHOF Tournament – 0 out of 2 (Cornerstone and Aquinas)

at Manchester – Win

MIAA-CCIW Classic – 0 out of 2

at Finlandia – Win

Elmhurst Bluejay Classic – 1 out of 2 (Wabash then either Elmhurst or Ripon)

MIAA Regular Season – 10-4

MIAA Tournament – 1 out of 2

That’s 16 wins, which is better than last season, but not where anyone wants the program to be. Would it be a bad season? That’s up for debate, but I think everyone sees that the potential for greatness (or really goodness, maybe) exists with the current roster. I’ve been beating the “this can be a Sweet Sixteen” team drum since last season ended, and being such would involve 20-22 wins which, by definition, must include winning a goodly number of the tough games.

So how does the team make sure they reach closer to the 22 win ceiling than the 16 win floor? Score more points than the opponents. It’s cliché and simplistic, and there’s more too it than that, but that’s pretty much the whole story. I like to talk about offensive and defensive efficiencies (points scored and allowed per 100 possessions) and efficiency margins (offensive efficiency minus defensive efficiency) because that sums up the entirety of the team. How good have they been (against their schedule) at scoring points and preventing points? That’s all there is to the game of basketball.

The MIAA has complete season statistics available on the league website going back through the 2002 season. I compiled all the numbers, calculated each team’s efficiency numbers, and compared their efficiency margin to their winning percentage. The correlation is quite strong:

This makes sense intuitively. If a team can consistently score more points than they allow, they can consistently win games. This chart would be even better if I excluded post-season tournament play because everyone (except the national champion) ends their year with a loss (artificially lowering winning percentage), but I think the trend is apparent nonetheless. The “real” fit here likely isn’t a straight line, but the linear model is easy and probably works just as well.

What we can determine from this chart is the general efficiency margin Calvin would need to have in order to expect 20 out of 27 games to end in a win (using the linear fit equation). The answer is 13.4. That is to say, Calvin needs to outscore their opponents by an average of 13.4 points per 100 possessions – or about 9.4 points in a typical 70 possession Calvin game – if they hope to achieve the requisite .741 winning percentage (20-7). One could construct a very similar chart based on scoring margin instead of efficiency margin, but normalizing to per possession rates (the efficiency method) takes tempo out of the equation (a ten point game might be quite close versus a Grinnell-style team, but not very close against a team running a four-corners offense).

One could create a list of possible win totals, and the efficiency margin that would be required to reach each expected total.

Wins	PCT	Margin
27	1.000	27.9
26	0.963	25.9
25	0.926	23.8
24	0.889	21.7
23	0.852	19.7
22	0.815	17.6
21	0.778	15.5
20	0.741	13.4
19	0.704	11.4
18	0.667	9.3
17	0.630	7.2
16	0.593	5.2
15	0.556	3.1
14	0.519	1.0

Of course, teams don’t often hit their exact expected win total given their season’s efficiency margin (due to random factors), but over the last 11 years, just over 50% have been within +/- one win from the predicted mark and 80% have been within two wins (and again, it likely would have been even more accurate had I removed MIAA and NCAA tournament games).

So here’s the situation: Calvin was +0.0 in efficiency margin last year, and wants to be roughly +13.4 this season. That’s a big jump, but it’s not impossibly large. I have 10 years of data and found five teams that made such a jump. Included in that group was the 2006 Hope squad who gained 17.5 points of efficiency margin after struggling through a mediocre 2005 campaign in which they had lost a few players for one reason or another. A comparison between Hope then and Calvin now appears to be quite apt.

Of course, efficiency margin isn’t anything in itself – a team could possibly win every game by one point and be 27-0 with an efficiency margin of about 1.4 – but it is an indicator of the overall strength of a team versus their schedule. It’s unlikely that a team could consistently win games versus bad teams by only one point and also consistently win games versus good teams by only one point. It doesn’t usually work that way.

To get to the 20-22 win mark, you really need to have your toughest games be no worse than a coin flip. Maybe that’s three games against Hope, the CCIW opponents, the NAIA opponents, and another tough MIAA road game or two. If you win half of those games with a combined 0.0 efficiency margin, then you’re still not too far off. But then you also need to beat the teams you need to beat the teams you need to beat.

Calvin couldn’t hope for 20 wins and then slip up against the likes of Grace Bible (who’s 1-3 to start the year), North Park, Manchester, Finlandia, Alma, Olivet, and Kalamazoo. They need to win those games without a let down, and the best way to do that is to win by sizeable margins. Teams can’t sneak up and beat you when you’re pounding them by 15-20 (or so) points (+26 in efficiency margin).

And then perhaps they play reasonably well against the reasonably talented teams on their schedule and play 75% ball (+13 in efficiency margin or 9 points per game) against Anderson, Wabash, Elmhurst, Albion, Adrian, and Trine. This would be the formula to get them to 20 wins.

That’s really how Calvin’s schedule should stack up. A third of the games should be gimmies (90-100% win), a third should be winnable (75% win), and a third should be toss-ups (50% win). The problem over the last few years has been that gimmies became winnable, winnable became toss-ups, and toss-ups became losable. If I had to list out the games (by strictly forcing them into these categories), (pretty much the above in list form), I’d say:

Gimmies: 8 or 9 wins with a 26.0+ combined efficiency margin.

Grace Bible

North Park* (or Cairn)

Finlandia*

Kalamazoo* (x2)

Olivet* (x2)

Alma* (x2)

Winnable: 6 or 7 wins with a 13.0+ combined efficiency margin.

Anderson*

Manchester*

Wabash*

Ripon (or Elmhurst)

Albion* (x2)

Adrian* (x2)

Trine* (home)

Toss-up: 4 or 5 wins with a 0.0+ combined efficiency margin.

Aquinas

Cornerstone

Carthage

Wheaton

Trine* (road)

Hope* (x2)

MIAA Tournament* (x2)

They games don’t fit precisely into these neat categories – you could move them around quite a bit and maybe it’s not really 9/9/9 – but this is more or less what we want to see when all is said and done. The games with the asterisk are regional games, and are infinitely more important when it comes to NCAA Tournament selection and seeding.

That’s the road map. The expectation and hope is for 20ish wins, an MIAA or MIAA Tournament title, an NCAA Tournament berth, and a possible Sweet Sixteen run. That’s where I’m setting the bar, anyway. And now we know the results we need to see in order for the team to get there.

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The Creatively Named Calvin-Ferris Recap

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 21:58:00 +0000

The inflatable bulldog thing is very intimidating.

Ferris State 63, Calvin 62 (box score)

This is going to be a decidedly more fun (funner?) recap to write than I thought it would be at halftime. When the teams were going through the layup lines prior to the second half, I declared: “Calvin’s going to make a run, and it will begin right now.” I actually did declare that, with the score 43-23 in favor of the Bulldogs, but I didn’t declare it because I believed it, I was intentionally lying to myself. I needed something that would get me through the remainder of the game and to my post-game Taco Bell. My thinking was that if Calvin could get the deficit down to single digits by the end of the game, then there would be enough positives to take away to keep myself from jumping off the proverbial bridge.

But Calvin didn’t just whittle it down to single digits, the whittled it down to a single point – and had a couple of chances to win it at the end. At that point basket in or basket out didn’t really matter to me. The win/loss wasn’t all that importing seeing as this was an exhibition game, but what was important was the fact that the Knights ended up going toe-to-toe with an average-or-better Division II team for 40 minutes.

Aside: before I left to travel the Rapids from Grand to Big, I had a conversation with my wife that went something like this:

Wife: Do you think [Calvin] will win?

Me: I’m expecting a competitive loss.

Wife: But you want them to win because Ferris is D2 and it would mean Calvin’s pretty good.

Me: *blank stare*

Wife: But it doesn’t really mean anything because it’s just one game.

Me: You’d be smarter than 99% of sports commentators if that’s all you said after a game.

Wife: Because there are a lot of random variables that can affect a game.

SHE SAID THAT! I could have married her all over again. One game doesn’t tell much at all. Last year, Calvin beat Ferris in their one-off exhibition matchup, but, even though Ferris ended up being as good as a Top-10 Division 3 team, Calvin was only an average Division 3 team. At the end of the season, Massey said that Calvin would have a 13% chance to beat Ferris at home. We tend to think of these events as binary win/lose, better/worse, but that’s not really how game outcomes fall. Last year’s Ferris State team would have been strong favorites in a re-match with the Knights, but Calvin would still be expected to win 13% of the time. That’s like flipping three heads in a row. It’s not extremely likely, but it happens all the time.

And that’s what we don’t know right now. We observed Calvin playing evenly with Ferris State – a team likely as good as, or better than, anyone on the schedule – but that’s just one data point. The game’s efficiency margin (-1.5 for Calvin) suggests a 53%-47% advantage for the Bulldogs in a rematch (probably closer to 50-50 if you adjust for home court), but the error bars are large here. Calvin needs to be this good in order to be a strong NCAA tournament team, but we don’t know they are this good any more than we knew last year’s team was this good (they weren’t). Of course, they also could be better than we observed on Tuesday night.

The starters were again David Rietema, Jordan Brink, Tom Snikkers, Tyler Dykstra, and Tyler Kruis, but Mickey DeVries actually received more minutes (24) off the bench than Dykstra got out of the starting lineup (18). After watching the scrimmage against GRCC and now this exhibition game, it appears that Mickey should be the starter – he’s Calvin’s best offensive rebounder, has developed quite a nice scoring tough, and is active on defense – but if he’s to receive starter’s minutes off the bench the distinction may not matter. He was incredibly effective on the offensive glass and received six of his points courtesy of an offensive rebound – four via put-back and two via foul shots (he was fouled while nearly slamming home a Jordan Brink miss).

I posted these words in the preview:

Be nervous if: Calvin loses the rebound battle.

Laugh with glee if: Calvin turns the ball over fewer than 12 times.

Calvin was successful on both fronts – winning the rebounding battle and limiting turnovers to 11 – and that kept them in the game at the end.

Overall efficiency was an issue. Calvin effectively shot only 37.9% which resulted in a poor 91.5 offensive efficiency rating (average being about 100), but there was a big turnaround from the first half (62.5) to the second half (126.0). I’m not even sure how that big of a turnaround is possible, but that’s what you get in small sample size sports.

Along the same lines, Calvin’s defensive efficiency in the first half was 116.9 (really bad), but they turned it around big time in the second half to hold the Bulldogs to 64.6. For the game Calvin posted a 93.0 defensive efficiency rating which is very good (especially considering the opposition).

In order to win 20 games (in a 27 game schedule, so through the MIAA tournament), Calvin will need to post an efficiency margin (offensive efficiency minus defensive efficiency) of (approximately) 13.2. Now that mark would come against the entire schedule, so being nearly even with a quality team bodes well for being able to pull something like that off.

After all was said and done last night, the biggest weakness for the Knights was shot selection. They were too quick to settle for jump shots – the type that could be had at almost any point in the shot clock – instead of working the ball around to find a better look.

Shot Chart

	Close			Mid-range			Three
Player	FG	FGA	eFG%	FG	FGA	eFG%	FG	FGA	eFG%
Brink	0	1	0.000	2	4	0.500	2	7	0.429
Snikkers	0	3	0.000	1	6	0.167	1	3	0.500
Powell	2	6	0.333	1	4	0.250	0	1	0.000
Kruis	4	5	0.800	1	2	0.500	0	0	0.000
DeVries	3	4	0.750	0	1	0.000	1	1	1.500
DeBoer	0	2	0.000	1	3	0.333	0	0	0.000
Dykstra	0	0	0.000	1	1	1.000	0	1	0.000
Vallie	0	0	0.000	0	0	0.000	0	2	0.000
Stout	0	1	0.000	0	0	0.000	0	0	0.000
Rietema	0	0	0.000	0	0	0.000	0	0	0.000
Totals	9	22	0.409	7	21	0.333	4	15	0.400

Not terribly effective as a team from anywhere on the floor but, as is always the case with every team everywhere, the mid-range numbers are poor. An early-shot clock pull-up jumper from a step or two inside the three point line should (almost) never happen.

Game Chart

Player	%Min	%Shots	eFG%	PPWS	FTr	Ar	TOr	ORb%	DRb%	Eff
Rietema	0.65	0.00	0.000	0.00	0.00	0.23	0.37	0.00	0.10	-
Brink	0.58	0.36	0.417	0.83	0.00	0.27	0.17	0.04	0.04	-
Snikkers	0.60	0.34	0.208	0.63	0.67	0.30	0.09	0.08	0.22	-
Dykstra	0.45	0.08	0.500	1.00	0.00	0.13	0.25	0.00	0.05	-
Kruis	0.53	0.23	0.714	1.45	1.00	0.00	0.00	0.05	0.17	-
Vallie	0.28	0.13	0.000	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.33	0.00	0.24	-
Powell	0.53	0.36	0.273	0.78	0.36	0.13	0.06	0.05	0.21	-
DeVries	0.60	0.17	0.750	1.48	0.50	0.00	0.00	0.12	0.19	-
Stout	0.45	0.04	0.000	0.69	4.00	0.00	0.17	0.11	0.15	-
DeBoer	0.35	0.25	0.200	0.40	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.07	0.13	-
Calvin	1.00	1.00	0.379	0.88	0.47	0.50	0.16	0.32	0.76	91.5
Ferris State	1.00	1.00	0.422	0.89	0.22	0.42	0.10	0.24	0.68	93.0

Calvin clearly didn’t shoot well, but they got to the free throw line an excellent rate (FTr), took care of the ball quite well (a TOr of 0.20 is about average), and cleaned up on the defensive glass (DRb%).

Offensive rebounding was solid, though a few percentage points lower than one would like, and, again, shooting/scoring efficiency was not good at all, but both of these concerns (along with a boost across the board) were fixed in the second half.

Player	eFG%	PPWS	FTr	Ar	TOr	ORb%	DRb%	eff
1st Half	0.283	0.65	0.37	0.50	0.19	0.25	0.78	62.5
2nd Half	0.482	1.10	0.57	0.50	0.13	0.41	0.74	126.0

If the second half team is the real team, then hang the banner now because all of our wildest dreams will come true. If the first half team is the real team, then we’re in for a repeat of last year. If it’s somewhere in between, then we’re at least in for a solid an entertaining season.

The second half was evidence that Calvin can be a good quality offense even if they’re not a great shooting team. Strong offensive rebounding extends possessions, defensive rebounding ends your opponents’ possessions, and limiting turnovers keeps the ball in your possession. This is all quite obvious, but “little things” like this increase efficiency, and efficiency is the key to winning games. Calvin was incredibly efficient in the second half while still shooting rather poorly.

Calvin Box Score

##	Name	FG	FGA	3FG	FGA	FT	FTA	OF	DE	TOT	PF	TP	A	TO	BLK	S	MIN
10	Rietema	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	3	3	2	0	3	2	0	1	26
12	Brink	4	12	2	7	0	0	1	1	2	0	10	2	3	0	0	23
30	Snikkers	2	12	1	3	5	8	2	6	8	1	10	3	2	0	1	24
32	Dykstra	1	2	0	1	0	0	0	1	1	3	2	1	1	3	0	18
42	Kruis	5	7	0	0	5	7	1	4	5	2	15	0	0	0	0	21
14	Vallie	0	2	0	2	0	0	0	3	3	0	0	0	1	1	0	11
20	Powell	3	11	0	1	4	4	1	5	6	1	10	1	1	0	1	21
24	DeVries	4	6	1	1	2	3	3	5	8	3	11	0	0	0	0	24
40	Stout	0	1	0	0	2	4	2	3	5	1	2	0	1	1	0	18
44	DeBoer	1	5	0	0	0	0	1	2	3	3	2	0	0	0	0	14

	Totals	20	58	4	15	18	27	13	34	47	16	62	10	11	5	3	200

Tyler Kruis only played in 53% of the available minutes (21 minutes in this regulation 40-minute game). That’s not enough for him. He’s probably the single most important player to Calvin’s success this year, and should be playing 28+ minutes. He got into foul trouble in the first half and sat the bench for the final 9:45 of the half. This is something pretty much all coaches do – sitting a player after picking up their second personal foul in the first half – but it’s a horribly destructive move. Because what purpose did it serve? Kruis played 14 second half minutes and didn’t pick up another foul, so the only thing that resulted was Kruis playing 21 total minutes instead of a possible 27 or 28 (or whatever was initially planned by the coaching staff).

Yeah, but he couldhave fouled out.

Sure, it would have sucked to not have him available in the late stages of the game, but the only way to maximize a player’s minutes is to allow him to foul out. By sitting him, you're enforcing the foul-out penalty upon yourself prematurely. That was 6-7 minutes of Kruis (clearly Calvin's most important player) lost for no reason. Would those extra minutes have turned the loss into a win? It’s hard to say, but a strong case could be made. Perhaps you take a “foul troubled” player out of the game for a minute or two to allow him to catch his breath and re-focus, but there’s absolutely nothing to be gained by extended trips to the bench – especially since this strategy often leads to leaving fouls on the table at the end of the game.

What would you rather have: 28 minutes of Tyler Kruis (but possibly not have him for the final two), or 21 minutes of Tyler Kruis with him on the floor when the final buzzer sounds? The final two minutes often feel like the most important, but you’d be much better off risking a sub-optimal lineup in that situation to gain even a few more minutes total from one of your star players.

Removing the final 9:45 of the second half (when Kruis was on the bench with two fouls), Calvin finished the game with a 114.5 offensive efficiency rating and an 87.2 defensive efficiency rating. Those are insane numbers. For the 31:15 that Calvin employed their standard rotation, the Knights outscored Ferris by 18. For the 9:45 in which they were self-limited, they were outscored by 19. Small sample size caveat for sure, but wow.

Bullets

It’s nice to have Jordan Brink back in the lineup. He appeared out of sync in the first half, but had a nice second half including a couple of good looks from long range that simply didn’t fall. He’ll need to play better than he did on this night, but it’s easy to see what he can contribute, and what was missed last year.
I’ve already pretty much said this, but Mickey DeVries is going to have an outstanding year. He’s much grittier and more athletic than he probably appears, is excellent on the glass, takes charges, and can score in a variety of ways – even knocking down an open three.
I would like to see Tom Snikkers turn more of his focus toward distributing the ball and setting up his teammates and away from trying to score on every possession. He’s an incredibly gifted passer – he assisted on 30% of his teammate’s baskets on Tuesday – and focusing more on this aspect would likely serve to open up higher percentage scoring opportunities for his teammates and himself. Calvin needs Snikkers to score 10+ points per game, but they need him to do it on seven or eight shots, not twelve.
Pretty much the same thing goes for Bryan Powell.
The Ferris State players ran onto the floor (through the inflatable Bulldog) to the musical stylings of Justin Bieber. This needed to be mentioned.
This post is already way too long.

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Ferris State Exhibition Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 06:00:00 +0000

	Game Preview
Who	Ferris State Bulldogs (NCAA Div. II)
What	Exhibition Game
Where	Jim Wink Arena -- Ferris State
When	Tuesday Nov. 6, 7:30 PM
Audio	Calvin Stretch Internet
Video	Ferris Stretch Internet ($7.95)
Live Stats	Ferris Stretch Internet
Tickets	$7 at the door or online
Last Year	Calvin 79, Ferris 72

When We Last Met
The Knights hosted the Bulldogs for last year’s exhibition game (I’m glad they’re now both agreeing to play this game during the exhibition season), and promptly won (for the first time in some time) by a 79-72 score.

The Bulldogs were a young bunch last year, but they finished their season above the .500 mark and tied for the GLIAC North Division crown. Massey rated them as the third best team Calvin saw all season (Hope and Wheaton both rated just a bit better). Exhibition caveats aside, this was – by far – the best offensive game Calvin played all year, posting an offensive efficiency rating of 108.9 (a mark they only bested versus the likes of Finlandia, Trinity, Olivet, and Kalamazoo). Ferris State traveled to Ann Arbor three days later to take on Michigan at Crisler Arena, and there they held the Wolverines to an offensive efficiency rating a shade above 95.

These two data points, unfortunately, meant nothing to the Knights going forward. They stumbled through their least efficient offensive season in well over a decade, and we learned that one game – no matter how good or bad it appears – is still just one game. And an exhibition is just an exhibition. Sometimes shots just go in, and sometimes they just don’t.

This Season
Ferris usually has more/better athletes than Calvin does, but this year the Knights appear to have a distinct size advantage. In an exhibition game with D1 Loyola (Chicago) on Saturday (a 61-46 loss), the Bulldogs used a starting lineup that ran 6-5, 6-4, 6-2, 5-11, and 5-10 (three of five starters return). Size isn’t everything (not even most things), and athleticism can make up for a lot, but Calvin will likely be going 6-9, 6-7, 6-4, 6-3, and 6-1 in their starting lineup with Kruis, Dykstra, Snikkers, Brink, and Rietema (the lineup they employed versus GRCC). Ferris has a bit of size on the bench, but they only used two players taller than 6-6 in their exhibition game, and neither played more than 15 minutes.

Calvin, of course, only loses one player from a season ago, Brian Haverdink, and, although he was a starter, he was more of a role player than a key cog (offensively at least, he was often lauded for his defense). I think last year’s game was a fluke, and Ferris seems to play Calvin much better at their place, but I think the Knights will be competitive here.

I think the Knights need to be competitive here. Ferris will likely again compete with the teams in the top half of the GLIAC, but Calvin has their sights on an MIAA title and an NCAA tournament run, and to do that, they’ll need to compete with – and beat – teams of Ferris’ ilk. To do that, though, Calvin will need to tighten up the screws a bit, and they can’t allow Ferris’ probable speed and athleticism advantage force them into sloppy and careless play. Turnovers, quite obviously, kill offensive efficiency.

Calvin still doesn't have an established three point threat, but they’ll need to make a conscious effort of stretching the floor to allow more space in the middle for guys like Kruis, Snikkers, and Dykstra to work. The name of the game this season is going to be control and efficiency. They probably don't have the shooters to extend, or cut into, large leads quickly, so they'll have to make every possession count. That doesn't mean Calvin has to play slowly, they have the athletes to run when they need to, but they won't be able to afford wasted possessions with turnovers.

Sure-to-be Wrong Prediction
Both teams are likely to use the opportunity to experiment some with lineups. Coach Vande Streek usually likes to trim his rotation down to nine or ten guys, but I would be surprised if 11 or 12 see the floor in this game to see how they react and perform against quality competition. I think Calvin stays in the game to the end, but I don’t think they win it.

Ferris 74, Calvin 70

Be nervous if: Calvin loses the rebound battle.
Laugh with glee if: Calvin turns the ball over fewer than 12 times.

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Thoughts From Calvin’s Scrimmage With GRCC

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 00:35:00 +0000

This is a photo from the scrimmage in question (click to biggify)

Thoughts From Calvin’s Scrimmage With GRCC The Calvin men’s basketball team participated in a scrimmage against the members of the Grand Rapids Community College men’s basketball team on Wednesday, October 31. That was the night of Halloween, which was not tonight, and was not last night, so I am indeed brining you these thoughts well after the fact.

Included in the scrimmage were, in fact, three 20-minute segments. Three faux “halves” of basketball, if you will. The scores of which were 48-33, 33-33, and 35-31 (Calvin did not “lose” any of them). The scores are not the important factor in a scrimmage, not even remotely, however they do reflect, one supposes, the degree of quality with which each team played. But the only comment I will make on the scores is that the second two are concerning, but the second two “halves” were not “halves” in which the Calvin starters started (or even played the majority of minutes in.

On we go.

The aspect of the scrimmage I was most interested in seeing was the sort of starting lineup and/or playing rotation that coach Kevin Vande Streek would implement. The starting lineup – for this particular game – was as follows:

C – Tyler Kruis
F – Tyler Dykstra
F – Tom Snikkers
G – Jordan Brink
G – David Rietema

The only real surprise here was Tyler Dykstra. Not that he isn’t a good player, or that his prospect status didn’t profile as being capable of making this sort of jump, it’s just that he was mostly an 8th- 9th-10th type off the bench last year. Mitch Vallie, Mickey DeVries, and Matt DeBoer each made multiple appearances in the starting lineup a season ago, and all three are on the team, but none made such an appearance on Wednesday as I thought they might.

This may or may not represent a (or THE) “real” staring lineup, but it is obviously one about which coach Vande Streek has thought. And it’s the one he wrote down on Wednesday, as I’ve very clearly just stated.

One could understand why this would be an intriguing lineup after watching them in this scrimmage. They appeared to be the group that was most comfortable together. The first five to ten minutes of the first “half” of the scrimmage were easily Calvin’s most dominant. They scored the first eight points of the “game” and looked solid on both sides of the ball. They had some struggles – as did every rotation group – at points, but they played very well together for the most part.

The subsequent substitution pattern was:

Bryan Powell in for Rietema
Mickey DeVries in for Dykstra
Matt DeBoer in for Snikkers
David Rietema in for Brink
Dan Stout in for Kruis
Jordan Mast in for Powell (a bit later – 8:53 mark)

Of note might be the fact that Jordan Brink played strictly in the off-guard role, and Bryan Powell maintaining his spot as the reserve point guard (but also moving off the ball when both he and Rietema were on the floor). I argued against this previously, but I think I like it upon further reflection. Powell isn’t really a shooter (from distance), and he’s best when he can more wizard-y things with the ball. Brink, on the other hand, can handle the ball, but he is also a very good spot-up shooter from range, so he might be better served by handling the ball less frequently, and simply waiting for it to come to him (so to speak).

If one was to name a scrimmage MVP, an occurrence of which I’ve never hear, Mickey DeVries would be named as such. He was all over the glass – on both ends – took about a hundred charges (probably only three or four), and showed a nice scoring touch around the hoop (including, I believe, a nice one-handed flush). He’s Calvin’s scrappiest player, but not scrappy in a David Eckstein or Nick Punto sense (of which it’s spell sCRAPPY), but in more of an “but he’s actually also quite good” sense.

Matt DeBoer continued to show his excellent in-the-lane jump hook, and his enthusiasm for the game made me smile.

Dan Stout looks to be improved. He’s probably shouldn’t be a 15+ minute guy yet, but he should be effective for 10 or so minutes a game. He maintains very good potential, in my mind, down the road this year, and also the next couple years.

The second “half” saw the reserves act as the starters, and the starters act as reserves, with the only exception being Mitch Vallie also getting into the action for the first time at the 11:53 mark. The second “half” was the sloppiest half, and it discouraged me a bit, but I believe this was the first time this team played against someone in different colored shirts this season. That’s how I’m justifying it anyway.

Their biggest downfall, probably, was the propensity to dribble out of trouble and attempt to thread the needle with too many passes. It was like they were more interested in making the pretty play than the sound play. Coach was visibly peeved by this, but I’m willing to chalk it up to the players trying to get out of summer league mode and back into “real” basketball mode.

The third period was started by Ryan Nadeau, TJ Huizenga, Matt DeBoer, Jordan Daley, and Dan Stout (with the second stringers, as I’ll call them, coming off the bench – starters didn’t play). Calvin cleaned up their play for the most part in this "half" which was good to see, although GRCC threw out many of their reserves here as well. Overall it was good to see the type of depth that this Calvin team will be able to throw out.

It was my first look at freshman Jordan Daley, and he impressed me in his limited action. He appears stronger in the upper body than most first year players, and displayed good poise and court vision in helping to handle GRCC's full court(ish) pressure. He didn't really shoot the ball much, so I didn't see his scoring touch, but he could be an exciting player down the road.

If 10 is where Calvin needs to be in order to make a deep tournament run, then I'd say they were only a three or a four, so there's still a lot of work to do, but they were definitely no worse than last year, and they showed flashes of what they can become.

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Who’s Shooting The Ball, And From Where?

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:59:00 +0000

I had a bit of free time this offseason, so I spent a portion of it combing through box score play-by-play data (I can tell you’re interested already) to see if I could compartmentalize shot selection. The traditional box score has “buckets” for three pointers and total field goals, so it’s easy to separate out into two-point shots and three-point shots, but I wanted to try to unearth another bucket or two, because an 18 foot two-point jump shot is different than a layup in terms of makeability (spell check is telling me this isn’t a word, but I just typed it, and you understood it, so it must be).

I noticed in Calvin’s play-by-play data that there are four types of shot labels: three-pointer, jumper, layup, and dunk. So, I thought the easiest thing to do was to load each game’s play-by-play section into Excel and have it count made and missed “jumpers” for each player for me. This effectively separated mid-range shots from close to the basket attempts and, along with the readily available three-point numbers, gave me three total shot-type buckets to work with. I would have liked to separate out jump shot range further – perhaps something as simple as in the paint and out of the paint – but the data only labeled as shot as in the paint ([PNT]) if it was a made basket, so that idea didn’t work.

Of course, the data is not perfect (technically I’m supposed to write the data are not perfect, but I find that to result in an unnecessarily snooty tone) because it’s entered manually by humans at the scorer’s table who are trying to watch and do about seven hundred things at once, so some of the labels aren’t perfect. For example:

00:04 63-64 V 1 GOOD! LAYUP by Ryan Krombeen [PNT]

Sorry to dig up the bad memory (sad face), but it served a purpose.

I’m not sure I would have necessarily called that a layup myself, but that’s how it was recorded, and we’ll live with it. It’s not really the type of mid-range jumper I was looking to separate out either, so it’s probably not a big issue. I can imagine that a type of observational bias may exists here whereby made shots of this type are more likely to be dubbed “layups” and missed shots are more likely to be “jumpers” (because a made shot looks easier). That’s not a knock against the folks that enter the data, these plays have to be made with real-time split second decisions, but it should be noted that the play-by-play data isn’t gospel. (One often sees this phrase with gospel meaning something like “divine truth”, as I just used it, but the word literally means something like “good news”, so these statements never really make any sense.)

Anyway, I should probably present some numbers before this post reaches the 500 word mark and you, the reader, go all close window, delete bookmark on me. Here are the combined team numbers for the 2012 season:

Shot Type	FGA	eFG%
All Shots	1592	0.474
Close	587	0.538
Mid-range	685	0.406
Three pointer	320	0.502

I use effective field goal percentage instead of standard field goal percentage to put three-point shots on equal footing with non-three point shots (you get 50% more points for making one!).

Obvious conclusion: mid-range jump shots suck. They’re high-risk, low reward shots, and really should only exist as a very minor part of the game plan. They’re necessary on occasion as end of shot clock options and as a way to stretch the defense and keep them honest, but it’s not an efficient way to score points. A three-pointer nets 50% more points than a mid-range jump shot, but it’s less than 50% tougher to make.

Calvin took 685 shots that were labeled in the play-by-play data as “jumpers”. Well more than any other shot type. I don’t really have a point of reference to compare that to, but it seems like way too many. You obviously can’t count on easy layups all game long, but, to some extent, the payoff is far greater on forced up three pointers than even decent mid-range looks. There are, of course, limits to this statement, but the team shot just under 41% from mid range – to gain that same eFG% on three pointers, one would only need to make only 27.3% of their attempts. And you’d never consider a 27% shooter a three-point threat.

Part of the three point struggles probably had to do with the makeup of the team. A consistent “I’m going to shoot it here” three-point threat didn’t exist on the roster (the team was really limited to opportunistic attempts by Matt DeBoer, Jordan Mast, and Brian Haverdink), so defenses were afforded the luxury of cheating toward the inside to take away Calvin’s mismatch advantages that guys like Tyler Kruis (size) and Tom Snikkers (strength) usually held in one-on-one situations. The result was that many players were probably forced a bit further outside than they would typically like, and jump shots were settled for.

According to the data that I’ve compiled covering all years going back to 1998, Calvin’s historical average effective field goal percentage is .510. It’s probably darn near impossible to shoot that percentage (or better) on jump shots, so it’s imperative that the mid-range look gets minimized. Its only use should be in a game theory sense, to set up the defense for “better” looks on the inside and behind the arc. You have to throw scissors out there every so often, otherwise the defense knows you’re strictly selecting paper and rock, but you only need to employ scissors as much as is necessary to keep the other guessing. It seems clear from the stark eFG% imbalance that Calvin selected the mid-range jumper (scissors, if we extend the metaphor) far too often.

Here are the individualized numbers (sorted by total FGA):

	Close			Mid-Range			3-Point				Total
Player	FG	FGA	PCT	FG	FGA	PCT	FG	FGA	PCT	eFG%	FGA	eFG%
Tom Snikkers	71	143	0.497	58	153	0.379	10	50	0.200	0.300	346	0.416
Bryan Powell	52	81	0.642	58	148	0.392	11	41	0.268	0.402	270	0.469
Matt DeBoer	44	70	0.629	74	160	0.463	11	26	0.423	0.635	256	0.525
Tyler Kruis	66	108	0.611	27	74	0.365	0	0	0.000	0.000	182	0.511
Brian Haverdink	8	19	0.421	8	30	0.267	26	80	0.325	0.488	129	0.426
Jordan Mast	11	20	0.550	13	26	0.500	24	52	0.462	0.692	98	0.612
David Rietema	16	38	0.421	7	15	0.467	6	19	0.316	0.474	72	0.444
Mickey DeVries	15	28	0.536	12	25	0.480	3	12	0.250	0.375	65	0.485
Tyler Dykstra	16	26	0.615	8	24	0.333	3	10	0.300	0.450	60	0.475
Mitch Vallie	2	7	0.286	8	14	0.571	11	26	0.423	0.635	47	0.564
Nate Van Eck	14	41	0.341	0	0	0.000	0	0	0.000	0.000	41	0.341
Daniel Stout	0	1	0.000	1	6	0.167	0	0	0.000	0.000	7	0.143
Ryan Nadeau	0	1	0.000	1	1	1.000	2	4	0.500	0.750	6	0.667
Adam DeYoung	0	2	0.000	2	4	0.500	0	0	0.000	0.000	6	0.333
Brent Henry	0	0	0.000	0	4	0.000	0	0	0.000	0.000	4	0.000
T.J. Huizenga	1	2	0.500	1	1	1.000	0	0	0.000	0.000	3	0.667
TOTAL	316	587	0.538	278	685	0.406	107	320	0.334	0.502	1592	0.474

Bullets gleaned from the above data:

Tom Snikkers needs to exist close to the block. I know Coach Vande Streek likes his players to move around and dip in and out of the post area, but Snikkers needs to make his living with his inside game. He’s much stronger than most similarly sized players, and that should be the advantage he attacks. He can make the occasional outside shot, but not better than many other guys on the team, and every “settle for” shot he takes is one opportunity where he’s not powering through a weaker defender to get a hoop and/or a foul. I think defenses played off the inexperienced/injured roster and keyed in on Snikkers – clearly Calvin’s go-to guy – and that limited his efficiency across the board. Hopefully things will open up a bit more this year, and hopefully he doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to do too much.
Bryan Powell had the best close-range numbers of any player on the team (64%). He ditched the three point shot halfway through the year, which was a good decision, but he replaced it somewhat with a sort-of effective mid-range jump shot. He doesn’t need to ditch that altogether, but his focus on offense should probably be the drive-and-dish and the drive-and-score. Also, the dunk shot should be incorporated more.
Matt DeBoer is allowed to shoot from anywhere. When he was open, he was pretty much the best scorer on the floor last year.
Tyler Kruis is a monster on the block (61%). He completely eliminated the three pointer from his repertoire this year, but he still took 74 mid-range shots, and made fewer than 37% of them. He needs to stick to the post where he’s an effective scorer and where he’ll draw fouls.
Jordan Mast is another guy who’s allowed to shoot from anywhere.
David Rietema apparently knows his limitations as a shooter/scorer (he took just about three shots a game as a 22+ minute starter. His shots should come only when open, and only when necessary, though he wasn’t completely horrible on his mid-range and three point attempts.
Mickey DeVries probably needs to abandon the three point shot, but showed nice touch on his shot otherwise. He can shoot the ball from some range, but probably shouldn’t be looking to shoot much outside of the painted area.
Tyler Dykstra only had limited attempts, but he’s another big, athletic body that will need to get to the basket.
Mitch Vallie needs to not get hurt. But he’s another potential “shoot from anywhere” guy. Opportunistically, at least.
Same for Jordan Brink.

Of course, it’s far too simplistic to say that everyone should “shoot closer to the basket”, the defense is there to prevent that, but it is important for each player to know their strengths and limitations and realize that sometime even a relatively open shot might not be a good shot.

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Roster Over-analysis: Height, Weight, and Number Changes for 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 19:08:00 +0000

The following table shows the change in each player’s listed height and weight from this year to last year (or two years ago, in the case of Jordan Brink).

New #	Old #	Name	Year	Ht.	Ht.	Wt.	Wt.
10	-	David Rietema	Senior	6-1	-	190	+5 lbs
20	-	Bryan Powell	Senior	6-1	-	190	+10 lbs
30	-	Tom Snikkers	Senior	6-4	-	215	-
44	-	Matt DeBoer	Senior	6-4	-1"	210	+15 lbs
12	-	Jordan Brink	Junior	6-3	-	190	+5 lbs
14	24	Mitch Vallie	Junior	6-5	-	220	+5 lbs
24	14	Mickey DeVries	Junior	6-7	-	215	-
42	-	Tyler Kruis	Junior	6-9	-	230	-10 lbs
50	52	Jordan Mast	Junior	6-4	-1"	190	-5 lbs
4	-	Ryan Nadeau	Soph.	5-10	-	165	-
22	24	T.J. Huizenga	Soph.	6-4	-	195	+5 lbs
32	-	Tyler Dykstra	Soph.	6-8	-	190	-10 lbs
40	34	Daniel Stout	Soph.	6-9	-	220	+15 lbs
-	-	Bryce Lutke	Soph.	6-9	-1"	215	+15 lbs

There’s nothing new on the height front, but that’s to be expected really. Growth spurts are rare among college students (with the famous exception of Mike Dunleavy Jr. growing three or four inches in his first couple of years at Duke). DeBoer, Mast, and Lutke (the only sophomore on the JV team) all are listed an inch shorter than they were a year ago, but I’m going to guess these 19-21 year-olds aren’t actually shrinking. Must be a new yard stick they’re using this year.

There’s probably nothing to be made out of a plus or minus five pound change. They’re all rounded to the nearest five pounds, so a gain of five pounds is really a gain of more than zero but less than ten pounds. David Rietema was listed at 185 pounds last year and 190 this year. Maybe he really checked in at 187.4 last year, but upped that to 187.6 this year. Or maybe he was really 182.6 last year and 192.4 this year. We don’t know. Five pound gainers include Rietema, Jordan Brink, Mitch Vallie, and TJ Huizenga.

Matt DeBoer was listed at 180 pounds just two seasons ago, but he’s added 15 each of the last two years and is now listed to be playing at 210 pounds. That could be cheeseburgers, but it wasn’t last year, and is likely a testament to his work in the weight room. Matt added quite a bit of inside play to his game last year, and the added strength would aid him further in that department this season.

Dan Stout and Bryce Lutke each added 15 pounds to their frames (up to 220 and 215 respectively). Stout is now listed with the same dimensions as a freshman Tyler Kruis, and Lutke is listed five pounds heavier than Brent Schuster ever was. Extra girth for wiry big men is always a good thing.

The other notable weight gainer is Bryan Powell who added ten pounds. He is at his best when getting to the rack; extra strength always plays well inside the painted area.

Jordan Mast is listed five pounds lighter, and Tyler Dykstra is listed ten pounds lighter than last year. Both players could have used extra muscle – especially Dykstra who’s now listed at a very lean 6-8, 190. That’s kind of disappointing to me.

Tyler Kruis is also listed ten pounds lighter, which isn’t necessarily a good thing either, but he’s still listed at 230 which still seems like a decent size, especially if it allows him more endurance. Still, more muscle wouldn’t be bad, especially when squaring off with Hope and Nate VanArendonk.

Also, there are a few uniform number changes. They are in the table.

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Calvin Releases 2012-2013 Men’s Basketball Roster

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:02:00 +0000

Back in March I took a guess at what the roster would look like at the start of the upcoming season. It was a pretty simple process really: take the 15 men on last year’s final roster (including the injured Mitch Vallie), subtract senior Brian Haverdink, add in Jordan Brink to the mix (who, as you most likely recall, missed last season due to injury), and end back up with 15 players. Then remove Adam DeYoung and Nate Van Eck – two would-be-seniors who, although valuable in their size, played only sparingly last season – because keeping two seniors on the end of the bench didn’t seem like the best way to develop the future of the program.

That left us with 13 “locks” to make the roster, and one opening (seeing as Coach Vande Streek typically elects to go with 14 players to start the year). Vande Streek had particularly expressed interest in the development of 6-10 forward Bryce Lutke (that’s a Schuster-like 6-10, mind you), who had an impressive nose for the basket as a freshman last season on the JV squad. Lutke appeared to be a candidate to make the team along with any number of freshmen who showed up on campus.

Calvin’s roster contains a number of versatile players, so there wasn’t a great need (or much playing time available) at any of the five positions, but, outside of probably point guard, there was probably enough wiggle room with how you could rotate players that any deserving candidate could find his way on to the team.

Anyway, since you’ve probably skipped all this rambling and simply scrolled to find a link to the roster page or see list of names, here it is:

Seniors (4)

Matt DeBoer (6-4) F

Bryan Powell (6-1) G

David Rietema (6-1) G

Tom Snikkers (6-4) F

Juniors (5)

Jordan Brink* (6-3) G

Mickey DeVries (6-7) F

Tyler Kruis (6-9) C

Jordan Mast (6-4) F

Mitch Vallie* (6-5) F

Sophomores (4)

Tyler Dykstra (6-8) F

T.J. Huizenga (6-4) G

Ryan Nadeau (5-10) G

Dan Stout (6-9) C

Freshmen (4)

Jordan Daley (6-3) G

Austin Parks (6-0) G

Nathan Landsgaard (6-0) G

Eric Brower (6-8) C

*Jordan Brink and Mitch Vallie will both be in their third year on campus, but aren’t necessarily Juniors in terms of eligibility. Brink, who didn’t play at all last year, still has three more seasons left should he elect to take a fifth year, and there were strong rumors that Vallie, who was injured for much of the year, would be granted a “medical redshirt”.

So, yeah, 17 guys. Didn’t see that one coming. Freshmen Landsgaard, Brower, and Parks aren’t listed with uniform numbers, so it appears that they might be on the squad for seasoning but are unlikely to actually see much (if any) time on the floor (including mop-up duties).

Starters and Rotation

I would have to believe that Jordan Brink, Matt DeBoer, Tom Snikkers, and Tyler Kruis are all locks to start, with any of Mickey DeVries, Mitch Vallie, or David Rietema filling in the fifth and final starting spot.

Bryan Powell, who had been a regular starter in the past, will likely come off the bench. Jordan Mast and Tyler Dykstra both averaged double-digit minutes a season ago, so both figure to be features in the playing rotation as well.

Fun fact: Calvin has nine guys on the roster that have started four or more games in their college career. That sounds like nice depth.

So that’s ten guys (nine of which have some degree of starting experience) that could easily gobble up 98% of the minutes without even factoring in the possibility that Dan Stout, TJ Huizenga, Ryan Nadeau, or either of the freshmen could play their way into minutes. Sophomores Stout, Huizenga, and Nadeau each acquitted themselves fairly well in limited action a year ago, but none of them screamed “breakout star of 2013” with their play on the court. I’ve heard very good things about Daley, but any speculation at how he’d perform as freshmen in the MIAA on my part would be wild guess work. He’s obviously good enough to make the squad.

Really, as I see it, there are three ~~possible~~probable starting lineups.

G – Rietema

G – Brink

F – DeBoer

F – Snikkers

C – Kruis

This lineup would be very good at handling the ball, but may be weak on the boards and has only four scoring options instead of five as Rietema was not really any sort of scoring threat last year. My hope here would be that Brink doesn’t get labeled as purely a “two guard” because having his scoring ability from the point position would be incredibly valuable (especially in the next year or two). But even if Brink isn’t the nominal starter at the point position, I expect that he and Rietema share the duties there, with Brink moving over when they’re on the floor together.

G – Brink

G – DeBoer

F – Vallie

F – Snikkers

C – Kruis

Matt DeBoer was listed on the roster as a “G/F” last year, but he’s strictly listed as a forward this year (same for Jordan Mast and opposite for TJ Huizenga). I’m thinking that distinction means very little in practice, so DeBoer might see some time as a “guard” this season, especially in a lineup like this where he and Vallie would really be “wing” type players. The two/three distinction is probably one that’s not worth making much of the time. Even Snikkers isn’t really a true “four” so they’d really be running with three “threes”.

G – Brink

G – DeBoer

F – Snikkers

F – DeVries

C – Kruis

This was the lineup that Coach Vande Streek employed from Thanksgiving through Christmas (with the noted swap of Brink for Rietema), so it’s one that could very well be used again. It’s a big lineup (6-3, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-9), and contains a more traditional frontcourt with Snikkers, DeVries, and Kruis. This lineup appears to be the best combination of scoring and rebounding (on paper, at least).

If I was to try to guess a depth chart, I might create this:

	1	2	3	4
G	David Rietema		Ryan Nadeau	Austin Parks
G	Jordan Brink	Bryan Powell	Jordan Daley	Nathan Landsgaard
F	Matt DeBoer	Mitch Vallie	Jordan Mast
F	Tom Snikkers	Tyler Dykstra	TJ Huizenga
C	Tyler Kruis	Mickey DeVries	Daniel Stout	Eric Brower

But I think trying to force it into a chart of this type is overly simplistic. Players’ positions will probably be fairly fluid, and it’s going to be a chore to find playing time for everyone. There are players that figure to “take the next step” in their development (which would be a welcome sight), but to do so they’d have to displace a more “proven” player.

I can really see Coach Vande Streek going 12 deep in the early going of the season, and then reigning in his rotation to 9 or 10 guys once he’s sorted everything out. This will likely mean that 1-3 pretty good players aren’t really getting minutes, but that would be a good thing because it would mean that they guys in the regular rotation beat out said good players.

Way too early and ill-informed prediction for the regular season

19 to 21 wins heading into the MIAA tournament with a 12-2 or 11-3 conference record and a league championship. They’ll grab an NCAA tournament berth and make a Sweet 16 appearance.

That seems like a huge jump “for a team that went 13-13” a season ago, but this roster is really not that much like that .500 team. I mean, it is, but with a year of experience, Jordan Brink back in the mix, and full seasons from Mickey DeVries and Mitch Vallie. So, yeah, big jump, but you could make a fairly compelling case for five or six losses turning into wins had these players been available the whole season, and this upcoming season appears to have a softer schedule.

That’s enough for now.

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2012 First Half/Second Half: Brian Haverdink

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Snyder) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:05:00 +0000

Previously: Tyler Dykstra

When I first decided to check out first half/second half splits for certain players Haverdink didn’t come to mind. My initial focus was going to be on a few of the less experienced guys. So I fired off the first post on Tyler Dykstra* and was going to follow up with Jordan Mast, but one fact kept gnawing at me while looking through Mast’s numbers: despite better offensive numbers during the second half of the year, he saw a playing time reduction.

*The author is keenly aware that it has been well over two months since that post. Don’t judge him.

This fact didn’t make sense for two reasons. (1) As I stated above (and will show in a future post), Jordan’s offensive numbers took a big jump in the second half of the year, and (2) Mitch Vallie and Mickey DeVries each missed the entire second half of the year and David Rietema missed a few games as well. These three players don’t fit the exact Jordan Mast archetype, but you’d think that there would have been some position shifting involved that would force Mast (who even started four games) into more playing time. But that didn’t happen; Mast’s per-game average fell from 18 minutes to 14.8 minutes between the first 13 games and the second 13 games. So, yeah. I didn’t get it right away.

I didn’t really have a feel for this at the time, but Brian Haverdink’s minutes soared in the second half of the year. I mean, I knew he was re-inserted into the starting lineup just a few games into conference play, but I don’t know that it really struck me that he was getting so many more minutes than he received during most of the non-conference season. But he certainly was.

Some Numbers

22 -- Haverdink	G	GS	Min	MPG
1st Half	13	5	249	19.2
2nd Half	13	11	341	26.2
Total	26	16	590	22.7

Haverdink, who began the year in the starting lineup (and averaged more than 26 minutes for the first five games), was a victim of the Thanksgiving weekend rotation shakeup. He was sent to the bench in favor or Matt DeBoer (among other lineup/rotation moves) and received fewer than 13 minutes per game over the next six games (through the nightmare trip to the Pacific Northwest).

I can only imagine that this must have been a dark spot for Haverdink (in his senior year) on a personal level (though this would be pure speculation on my part), but it was a huge blow to the team as well. I’m not necessarily talking in the sense that Haverdink was a disappointment to the team (he was never going to be confused for a scoring champion), but the (somewhat illogical) hope from many fans (me) was that he was going to morph into a real three point threat for a team that otherwise had no strong three point options.

Then injury issues happened and eligibility issues happened, and Haverdink saw his playing time ratchet back up. And he took advantage.

Other Numbers

22 -- Haverdink	FG	FGA	Pct	2FG	2FGA	2 Pct	3FG	3FGA	3 Pct	FT	FTA	FT Pct
1st Half	16	61	0.262	8	27	0.296	8	34	0.235	6	6	1.000
2nd Half	26	68	0.382	8	22	0.364	18	46	0.391	12	18	0.667
Total	42	129	0.326	16	49	0.327	26	80	0.325	18	24	0.750

It’s not even the same player. One might turn their nose up at his .382 field goal percentage (and he still wasn’t all that effective inside the arc), but key to his second-half success was his stout .391 three point percentage. His second-half line was good for a .515 effective field goal percentage and 1.07 points per weighted shot. Both of which were above average for the team last season.

The difference in his offensive numbers from the first half of the year to the second half equated to nearly three points per game and two fewer shot attempts; so, since the team scored about one point per shot attempt, you could figure Haverdink added five points per game to the team with his elevated play down the stretch.

This is something I completely missed by focusing primarily on the season stats. Haverdink had dug himself an early hole, so his bottom line never looked great, but I never stopped to realize that he was a completely different player in January and February than he was in November and December.

Brian obviously won’t be suiting up for the Knights in 2012-13 so we really can’t take much of this information forward, but I thought it was important to highlight a senior who elevated his game to help will his team to a respectable second half finish.

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