Since I’ve Been Gone

I’ve been super quiet since I suggested that the Hoosiers would lose to the Pittsburgh Panthers. I haven’t even been kicking out HD Box Scores. The reason is that I’ve been transitioning to a new computer, and I’ve been procrastinating moving my database and HD Box Score engine to the new machine. A lot has happened since then. IU proved me wrong, and played excellently in beating Pittsburgh. But they got thumped by the bully-sized Kentucky Wildcats. Then, they played pretty well in beating NC Central. But then they played terribly in the first half in a loss to Loyola (MD). But they played brilliantly in an absolute destruction of relative D-I noob Bryant. But they lost super frosh Mo Creek for the season. And then they surprised many by beating Michigan at home. Finally, they just hardly even got off the bus for the game in Columbus against Ohio State. That’s a lot of ups and downs, which is unfortunately what we probably ought to expect this season.

Anyway, I’m going to be cranking out some HD Box Scores here soon, trying to catch up. I’m sure you can’t wait.

Getting Back Into It

I've been heinously weak to the point of non-existence on my hoops blogging this season. I haven't even been putting together the HD Box scores. However, with a new year and the Big Ten season upon us, I'll be getting back on it. I might also have a glut of historical HD Box Scores to put up in the next week or so. But for today, I'll be putting up the HD Box for last night's Michigan at IU tilt.

Tortoise vs. Hare

This is a bit more background on the way we look at basketball. Last year, we stumbled across the stylings of Ken Pomeroy and the Big Ten Wonk (a.k.a. John Gasaway) out there on the Internets, and they opened our eyes to a new way of thinking about basketball: a tempo-free way. The wonk does a much better job of explaining it than we can hope to, but the idea is to look at basketball stats without an eye to how fast the teams play, to normalize the numbers per possession (or, more commonly, per 100 possessions). So whether you play as fast as North Carolina last year (the proverbial hare) or at a more tortoise-like, Georgetown-oriented pace (at least last year), we can compare the efficiency of your offense and defense on equal footing (recognizing that both were outstanding O's last year, and UNC's D was excellent), despite the number of points scored or allowed per game.

One upshot of viewing things through a tempo-free lens is that numbers we've known for a long time, things like points per game, rebounds per game, and the dreaded rebound margin are, if not tossed out the window, then at least put in a trunk at the foot of the bed, to be brought out only rarely. Instead, we'll talk of things like offensive and defensive efficiency, effective field goal percentage, and rebound percentages.

Much of this talk is inspired by Dean Oliver's book Basketball on Paper, which suggests there are four main factors used to evaluate team play. Pomeroy's site allows us all to jump into those numbers for all Division 1 NCAA men's basketball teams, and we love it. So we will frequently refer to that site.

There's more we could write, but we think kenpom and Gasaway really do an excellent job of providing background on this stuff. If you like what they have to say, you can find them at their new home over at Basketball Prospectus.

About SaWA

We're not really Statler and Waldorf, we're Abs and Lawton. Why did we name this blog like we did, you ask? Well, coming up with a name is tough. But we liked the muppet reference because we often have conversations with lots of sentences that start with, "Well, gahdam," and we also often aspire to becoming septa- or octogenarians who heckle people in the park, perhaps while playing checkers. But we're not playing checkers here. The "Arena" part of the blog's name is supposed to indicate that we're talking about sports. Like our curmudgeonly title inspirations, we watch, criticize, and comment. We considered a few other things (like "Vicariously Active"), but SaWA is what we ended up with.

We're hoping we have enough to say to make it worthwhile, although we may tend to be a bit quiet during the Sports Doldrums, which runs from the end of March Madness to the start of the NFL season. We tend to love college hoop and the NFL and have a passing interest in some college football. We are otherwise only casually aware of other sports, and, while we may comment on them, we probably don't have a clue what we're talking about. We may jolly well not know what we're talking about when it comes to the stuff we're more actively interested in like, either, but we don't want to admit it.

Bias-wise, we should tell you up front that we are Indiana Hoosier basketball fans, and we both root for the Colts (one of us not caring enough to be a real fan). One of us is also a University of Virginia football and basketball fan, and that same one has found himself rooting for Georgetown since the arrival of JT3 and his mellifluous offense. There are probably other things worth mentioning, but I think most of our biases will be pretty obvious from the things we write and focus on.

We hope you find the stuff we put up here entertaining or at least mildly interesting. We also hope you'll join in discussions with us via the comments if you have something to say about what we put up here.