Good Morning

Excited for another Saturday of action? Me too. We are really getting pretty far into the schedule, with some smaller conferences actually nearing the end of their in-conference slates. A couple notes:

I forgot to link this article yesterday. A good analysis of offensive and defensive efficiency by the top seven teams in the country. There are too many statistics here to go through all of them right now, but I thought I'd focus on Duke/Carolina since I talked about it two days ago. First, this data backs up what I said about Carolina's defense being underrated. It has seemed to me that they have a few good individual defenders, who can each do a good job of shutting down their own man. If I recall, it was Marcus Ginyard who was Stephen Curry's shadow back in their season opener, for example. North Carolina gives up a lot of points, but they also score a lot of points. They simply have a lot of possessions, and that gets worked out of the process when you stop analyzing points per game, and start analyzing defensive efficiency. As for Duke, this analysis actually goes against my theory that Duke's offensive has a high variation. If you look at the variance of the offense, it's actually about average for the top seven teams, and essentially the same as Carolina's (variance is the square of the standard deviation, for those not statistically inclined). I'm not sure that this really changes my theory about their Championship chances, though, because the fact still stands about teams that depend on the three-pointer. So far this year, Duke hasn't had the shot fail them against a top team. But you can't assume that will always be true. This team hasn't had a whole lot of experience in important Tournament games (especially shocking for a Duke squad). When they get in unfamiliar circumstances against unfamiliar teams, it's possible that they'll just get cold. And Duke is not going to be able to beat a good team when the three-pointer isn't falling at a decent clip.

One last note from the Illinois/Indiana game. Good to see that Illinois has apologized to Eric Gordon for the performance of the student section. I talked about my disappointment regarding their abuse yesterday. What I also noted, which was ironic, was that the obsession with getting on Gordon actually hurt the Illini's chances of winning the game. In the first half, they really rattled Gordon, who only scored one point. And that's why Illinois led for most of the first thirty minutes of the game. But eventually, Gordon pushed the crowd out of his mind and played well. He ended up with a decent 19 points (although 3-for-13 shooting from the field still looks pretty bad). But the point is, while the crowd was so obsessed with Gordon, they forgot about the rest of the game. They were remarkably quiet when Indiana had the ball, wiping out the strong home-field advantage that the Illini generally enjoy. Especially on the final possessions of the second half, when I was shocked at how dead-looking the Illinois student section was. Except when Gordon touched the ball, of course. Regardless, it's good to see that Illinois apologized. It's been a tough season for that team, especially for its seniors. But one bright spot about that game was the coming-out performance by Demetri McCamey, the Illini's own super-frosh. He is going to be a star in the Big Ten at some point, and definitely is something for Illinois fans to look forward to.