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2022-23 CBB Season

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EightiesCane said:
Kenprom doesn't work like that.


Adjusted Efficiency Margin (AdjEM): This is how KenPom determines the overall ranking of teams. This takes the offensive efficiency minus the defensive efficiency to determine how much X team would outscore the average Division I program by. We will define those two terms below.

Adjusted offensive efficiency (AdjO): This is the amount of points a team scores per 100 possessions, or trips down the floor with the basketball. Last season, Michigan finished 24th in the country in AdjO by averaging 114.5 points per 100 possessions. KenPom ranks the Wolverines at 54th heading into this upcoming season at a projected 108 points per 100 possessions.

Adjusted defensive efficiency (AdjD): This is the amount of points a team allows per 100 possessions. Last season, Michigan was the second-best team in AdjD in college basketball with 86.2 points surrendered per 100 possessions. The only team that was higher was Texas Tech, who handled Michigan in the Sweet Sixteen and rode their defense to an appearance in the National Title game against Virginia, who was fifth in this category.

Adjusted tempo (AdjT): We’re going to spend a little bit of extra time on this one.

It’s not enough to just take offensive and defensive efficiency metrics and spit out the numbers from there. KenPom also accounts for tempo, which is the amount of possessions that a team has per 40 minutes (over the course of one game).

This is how KenPom says possessions in a game can be estimated using a box score:

Field goals attempted - offensive rebounds + turnovers + 0.475 x free throws attempted

Possessions are counted for both teams and then averaged out to give us the AdjT metric.

Luck rating (Luck): This isn’t as complicated as some people think it is because luck and intangible things cannot be quantified. All this does is measure a team’s actual record with the projected record that KenPom spits out for them.

Darn! Such underachievers!

There’s obviously no preseason metric for this seeing as there’s no data and numbers to crunch just yet.

Strength of Schedule: This measures the total efficiency of the opponents that a team has faced during the year. Again, there is no preseason data seeing as it is dependent on games being played.

  • AdjEM: Once again, as it was defined above, this measures the point differential by which the teams a school has played would defeat the average Division I school by.
  • OppO: The amount of points your opponents score per 100 possessions.
  • OppD: The amount of points your opponents surrender per 100 possessions.
Non-conference strength of schedule (NCSOS): KenPom attempts to paint a picture here of the portion of the schedule that a team’s athletic department can control, which obviously rewards a team that schedules tougher opponents as opposed to cupcakes in non-conference play.

AdjEM: Third time’s a charm. This measures the point differential by which your opponents would defeat the average Division I school by

Again, this doesn’t take into consideration the caliber of teams. Most non-conference schedules for Power 5 schools are fairly light with some bigger matchups. This is more a measure of how bad the worst teams you play are. They really should rename this part of it the cupcake metric.
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I appreciate the time you took to write all of that, but the actual reality is that kenpom doesn’t work.

It is a predictive ranking system that uses specific statistical metrics (combined offensive and defensive efficiencies) to determine how “good” a team is and then discounts (via “luck”) when a team actually performs - in wins and losses - better than predicted by the efficiency metrics.

Which is really unimaginably arrogant… and - in my opinion - pretty stupid. Last year’s squad demonstrated the giant gaping hole in pure efficiency metric based ranking systems.

And the trend continues because Rutgers is substantially higher ranked than us despite us beating them and having a better record than them because we didn’t sufficiently woodshed the lesser teams we played (to create better offensive and defensive efficiency numbers).
 
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AmherstCane said:
I appreciate the time you took to write all of that, but the actual reality is that kenpom doesn’t work.

It is a predictive ranking system that uses specific statistical metrics (combined offensive and defensive efficiencies) to determine how “good” a team is and then discounts (via “luck”) when a team actually performs - in wins and losses - better than predicted by the efficiency metrics.

Which is really unimaginably arrogant… and - in my opinion - pretty stupid. Last year’s squad demonstrated the giant gaping hole in pure efficiency metric based ranking systems.

And the trend continues because Rutgers is substantially higher ranked than us despite us beating them and having a better record than them because we didn’t sufficiently woodshed the lesser teams we played (to create better offensive and defensive efficiency numbers).
Click to expand...

As a follow to this we jumped 12 spots in KenPom by beating the brakes off a terrible UL team. And we would have jumped some degree more if we kept our starters in and beat them by 40.

Which is exactly what is so dumb about that ranking system. It’s like the old BCS that kept us out of the title game in 2000.

Football figured out margin of victory is a bad metric - and while efficiency metrics absolutely have tremendous value in basketball analytics they are a BAD basis for a ranking system because there are too many confounding factors that are NOT properly accounted for by efficiency metrics adjusted for strength of opponent.

And KenPom’s luck metric is the ABSOLUTE peak of arrogant absurdity… “my rating system is perfect so if they win more than I predict than they are penalized for being lucky” because the rating system does not meaningfully account for who actually wins and loses games.

So so so stupid.
 
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Crazy last 3 games for Northwestern. Lost by 1 to Auburn at home, get beat by 29 at home by Pitt, then turn around and beat MSU at MSU. Year going to be insane, love it.

Edit--I guess Auburn was a tournament actually, wasn't at home.
 
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