Great post from ND McGraws Bench by BabaGhanouj | The Boneyard

Great post from ND McGraws Bench by BabaGhanouj

HuskylnSC

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None of this is mine. It is a Notre dame post an insightful WBB follower who goes by the handle BabaGhanouj:
Like most others, I was surprised by our dreadful season last year. My recognition of the importance of experience has grown over the years, mostly thanks to postings of others on the Bench. In fact, spurred by last year’s debacle, I’ve modified my average ratings collections to also account for experience. That’s a future subject, however.

I wanted to put together some stats to show why Notre Dame’s lack of experience played a major role in last season’s poor performance. But when I gathered the facts together, I was shocked.

I selected Notre Dame’s top six players in playing time last year, along with the top six from some other schools, and compared their previous minutes of playing time before the season began. I chose Connecticut, because that is typically the standard and a rival, and also South Carolina since they ended up ranked number 1. I also threw in Oregon’s experience for fun (Note, like the other schools, this is Oregon’s average of their top six players’ experience at the beginning of last season!). Here are the results:

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After the surprising results, I threw together the average ratings for those same players.

JjXeAXb.png


There is plenty of fodder here for discussion. I’ll let you handle that, but I was shocked at the relative lack of experience in both Connecticut and South Carolina. Numbers never tell the whole story (I’d start with our only 2 players with significant experience.), but they can lead us to find explanations.

A few notes:
• Column 3 is just the average of the minutes in column 2.
• Just from glancing at other teams, I’d guess that most teams’ top six average 1,200 to 2,000 average playing time minutes going into a season. The three teams selected for comparison just happened to have a number of freshman playing significant minutes. Oregon was special in the other way.
• The ratings for Mikayla Vaughn, Aubrey Griffin, and Mikiah Harrigan were inconsistent. In Vaughn’s case they ranged from 25 to 56 with 150 by Prospects and 107 by Sports Madness. For Mikiah Harrigan they were in the 64 to 74 range with a 151 by Blue Star. Aubrey Griffin’s ratings were 21 through 59 with a 90 by Prospects. (Dillon’s druthers to throw out the worst rating, at least, would have merit, though in Vaughn’s case it might be best to throw out the 2 worst.)
• UConn’s ratings were the average of only 5 since Anna Makurat is from Poland. Also, imagine UConn’s ratings if Griffin were thrown out since she only averaged 16 min/game.
 
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To me this doesn't show much. I guess that South Carolina was just as inexperienced as ND, but just had much better players and/or coaching.

(And that CT had much better rated players, and some experience - we just needed a BIG!!)
 
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Sorry I am not following what this is showing at all. People are not statistic... they are individuals. You are trying to make them into numbers and again my question would be, what is it you hope to show? To me it looks like you are trying to use stats to show why ND was horrible last year, but they had highly ranked talent.
 
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Two big benefits of returning a lot of players are the existing chemistry and system knowledge. In the case of ND, Sniezek and Walker both played at different schools, negating those benefits. They returned 2 players with experience in ND uniforms, who at most could have overlapped by 112 minutes of court time (less than 3 games!). That to me was their biggest Achilles heel.

Uconn and South Carolina were able to perform better because they had a handful of players familiar with each other, and far superior senior PGs.
 
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What is Olivia, a small? At 6'5" she is a big.
She's a "small" 6'5" and got pushed around and/or taken advantage of by the best teams' bigs (Cox, Boston, Sabally, Hebard) as has been endlessly described here. Of course many here expect her to come back this fall with an additional 35 lbs. of muscle. Not happening. She'll get stronger, and she'll get a lot better, and she'll rip through the Big East. But basically, size-wise, she is what she is - tall and thin, and doesn't match up with elite beef.
 
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Notre Dame plays a difficult schedule, They had, for the most part, an inexperienced team, and this led to a losing season. This is not rocket science. Perhaps the wild card may be that Muffet did not share the enthusiasm for coaching last year as she had in previous years. We will really never know the answer to that. I think that this does say one thing and that is that the talent they have recruited and the coaching that Uconn has had year after year is further proof that Uconn is truly a "notch above." When a team wins twenty nine or thirty games or just makes it to the semi-finals of a National Championship and the fans are a little disappointed that speaks volumes for the program.
 

eebmg

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She's a "small" 6'5" and got pushed around and/or taken advantage of by the best teams' bigs (Cox, Boston, Sabally, Hebard) as has been endlessly described here. Of course many here expect her to come back this fall with an additional 35 lbs. of muscle. Not happening. She'll get stronger, and she'll get a lot better, and she'll rip through the Big East. But basically, size-wise, she is what she is - tall and thin, and doesn't match up with elite beef.

IMO, part of the issue last year is she had no backup. Give her some backup minutes between Piath and Aliyah taking some of the pressure off and she can be more aggressive against the best and hold her own. And if her offensive game forces the opponents bigs to play defense and work and get some fouls on them, it will again be a different story.
 
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She's a "small" 6'5" and got pushed around and/or taken advantage of by the best teams' bigs (Cox, Boston, Sabally, Hebard) as has been endlessly described here. Of course many here expect her to come back this fall with an additional 35 lbs. of muscle. Not happening. She'll get stronger, and she'll get a lot better, and she'll rip through the Big East. But basically, size-wise, she is what she is - tall and thin, and doesn't match up with elite beef.
As I recall Breanna Stewart was "tall and thin" and she did ok for herself. And there was a gentleman named Bill Russell who was "tall and thin" but he managed to grab some rebounds against a couple of guys named Chamberlain and Reed. And believe me, in woman's basketball there is no such thing as a small 6'5".
 
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As I recall Breanna Stewart was "tall and thin" and she did ok for herself. And there was a gentleman named Bill Russell who was "tall and thin" but he managed to grab some rebounds against a couple of guys named Chamberlain and Reed. And believe me, in woman's basketball there is no such thing as a small 6'5".
Well, OK. Then Cox is a "big" 6'4".

I really like ONO and think she is a really talented player who will probably be a great player and AA by the time she's done at UConn. She just isn't very big for 6'5", and gets pushed around by elite "bigs" - she isn't going to be our banger in the middle except maybe in the BE.
 

Bigboote

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Nice post, HuskyinSC. I found it interesting. I had no idea that Herbert Harrigan was ranked so low.

I think I’ll get an eggplant tomorrow for some babaghannouj.

Back to our regular programming about bigs.
 
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The comment below in bold must've been a joke, right?

I was surprised by our dreadful season last year.
 

DefenseBB

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The comment below in bold must've been a joke, right?

I was surprised by our dreadful season last year.
He was quoting Babaghanouj who was referring to ND's season. @HuskeyinSC should have put quotes where the Baba's statement started so it would have been easier to decipher. He was not referring to the UConn season.
 
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He was quoting Babaghanouj who was referring to ND's season. @HuskeyinSC should have put quotes where the Baba's statement started so it would have been easier to decipher. He was not referring to the UConn season.

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!! Now it makes sense.
 

CocoHusky

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I'm not sure what this analysis is trying to tell me that I didn't already know or even what makes this a great post. ND's fall last season was steep, dreadful is putting it mildly. There was no one singular reason for the steep ND decline therefore I don't understand the comparison to UCONN or Oregon. How dreadful was ND last season? The bottom two teams in the ACC Pitt and Clemson combined for a total of 4 conference wins. Two of those 4 conference wins for Clemson & Pit were against ND. The Clemson win was at ND. Muffet bailed on her team & I just can't respect that! There I said it.
 
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She's a "small" 6'5" and got pushed around and/or taken advantage of by the best teams' bigs (Cox, Boston, Sabally, Hebard) as has been endlessly described here. Of course many here expect her to come back this fall with an additional 35 lbs. of muscle. Not happening. She'll get stronger, and she'll get a lot better, and she'll rip through the Big East. But basically, size-wise, she is what she is - tall and thin, and doesn't match up with elite beef.

She's also younger that most of them and quicker. UConn had 3 6'2" players the year they went undefeated: Swin Cash, Tameka Williams and Aisha Jones. They also had Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi. Did you see that type if talent around Olivia? Not even close. This year she will be better because the talent around her will be better. No one wins a title by themselves. Not Breanna, not Diana.
 

CocoHusky

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She's also younger that most of them and quicker. UConn had 3 6'2" players the year they went undefeated: Swin Cash, Tameka Williams and Aisha Jones. They also had Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi. Did you see that type if talent around Olivia? Not even close. This year she will be better because the talent around her will be better. No one wins a title by themselves. Not Breanna, not Diana.
The talent around her is not going to keep her from getting pushed around because her teammates are not the ones doing the pushing. Extra strength and conditioning will. Better talent will help the team but Liv must also improve individually. The need for both extra strength and individual improvement by Liv was evident in the first half of the TN game.
 

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