I’ve added a glossary of basketball stats as a sub-page under the “basketball” main page. This has been a long time coming, I know. My goal was to be comprehensive for terms and acronyms that I use on the site, so if I left something out, don’t hesitate to let me know about it. If something is confusing, I can re-word it.
I’ve also updated the “Team” and “Individual” stat pages under the “06-07 HU Stats” subpage through Saturday’s games. Matt Hall keeps climbing the leaderboards on the individual side, while the Bisons sit in decent position on the team side.
On the team stats page, I tried to organize everything a bit more logically than they appear on my spreadsheets. I put each team’s record in GSC play with their records overall and in D-II South games (the record that matters for getting in the NCAA tourney). I stuck all the efficiency numbers together and threw in a table that lists pace and team performance in my modified version of Oliver’s key areas (true shooting, rebounding, turnovers).
I think this alignment makes it easier to see important stats while filtering out some of the noise. For example, it’s easy to see why Henderson State has been so dominant: they’ve been almost 20% better than their opponents in shooting (mainly because of their defense), and they’ve been the best rebounding team in the conference (24% better than opponents). It hasn’t mattered that they’ve been the worst team in the turnover battle, since they excel in other areas, but that’s one way a team like Christian Brothers (the best team in turnovers) could exploit them.
Take a look now at the efficiency numbers. Arkansas Tech has been beyond awful, and SAU is looking pretty bad, too, but Christian Brothers, OBU, and UAM are pretty close together. OBU looks like the wild card here, sitting at 4-3 despite a negative net efficiency rating in division games. On the other hand, the 4-3 Bisons have been solidly in the positive numbers, which hopefully means that they will take out the Tigers in the Searcy rematch on 2/10.
Looking at the standings in general, the Reddies sit alone at the top and will be in the driver’s seat for the division championship. Delta State has the best efficiency rating in conference games, so it seems reasonable to suggest that they will remain #2. Then, things get interesting.
It’s early to talk tiebreakers, but my understanding is that head-to-head record vs. tied teams prevails, and after that, you use head-to-head record starting from the top of the standings. I assume that GSC East, D-II South, and overall records follow next, with point differentials and coin flips somewhere behind that. Right now, CBU, OBU, and Harding are all 1-1 against one another, so that doesn’t break the tie. Then, OBU beat Henderson State, so they get third place. Christian Brothers beat Delta State, so they would be fourth.
This is my long-winded way of saying that the Bisons could use a win against a top team, preferably Henderson State. At the very least, they need to make sure they hold off OBU at home, and they’ll probably be okay (barring a slip-up against a lower team). Harding probably needs to run the table in order not to have to worry about the conference tournament for an NCAA bid, but more realistically, I think a top-3 seed (and thus a GSC tourney first-round bye) is still perfectly reasonable. I’m sure I’ll get into this more over the next month.
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