Massey

[FanFromMaine]

Today, UConn edged Stanford for the top spot, albeit by only a very little. It appears to me this is because, during the last few games, UConn easily exceeded the computer projected score both offensively and defensively.

I say this because, given her role for so much of this season, when Paige doesn’t come up with lots of points little alarms goes off, despite the fact that she contributes in so many other ways.

So I have to remind myself that the team now is playing more like the UConn teams that have been very successful, great D and distributed scoring. I hope we don’t need Paige to be Superballer every night to win and that the team continues on this recent path.

 

[Boreifs]

Massey has been counterintuitive this season. Oregon is still sixth despite six losses, while A&M is tenth with one loss. Also no love for NC State and Louisville. I am a firm believer in stats, but this year is pretty strange.

 

[DefenseBB]

Massey has been counterintuitive this season. Oregon is still sixth despite six losses, while A&M is tenth with one loss. Also no love for NC State and Louisville. I am a firm believer in stats, but this year is pretty strange.

Well, I agree the Massey and WarrenNolan stats seem a "bit off" I would say that A&M is overranked at #3 and the SEC sycophants publish the # of top 25 wins which really mean wins over teams ranked 10-25, not the top 10, nor do they state how many close games against supposed "lesser teams" that A&M had. Massey and WN take into account those types of games. Texas A&M best test will be against SC. At that point A&M could jump up or fall slightly in those rankings.

Oregon, has a high ranking (wrongly so) due to their dominance over anyone not named Stanford, UCLA or Arizona. They don't have an "ugly loss" like UCLA to Oregon State or Washington St. Same for Arizona, with a loss to WSU. Personally, I think head to head wins against like teams should count more and an unranked loss be less severe but that is not what Massey or WN code into their algorithms.

 

[oldude]

I watched a good deal of A&M’s win last night over a pretty good AL team. Gary Blair is one of the very best coaches in WBB. His team plays tough defense and they do a little bit of everything on offense. A&M doesn’t necessarily blow teams out, but they seem to beat just about everyone.

The Aggies are heading towards a big game against SC which they are capable of winning. If they beat the Gamecocks and somehow survive the SEC Tournament unscathed, they would be deserving of the #1 overall seeding imo.

 

[FanFromMaine]

I don’t know about Walter Nolan but Massey seems to restart each team each year with a ranking related to the previous year(s) performance. So if there are no “bad” losses or “great” wins, it appears that a team’s score can remain pretty much fixed with that initial number.

I think that’s what happened to Baylor, Oregon and the Aggies. The shortened season and that reduction in OOC games reduced the annual modifications for those teams more than others perhaps.

 

[King Kong]

Massey has been counterintuitive this season. Oregon is still sixth despite six losses, while A&M is tenth with one loss. Also no love for NC State and Louisville. I am a firm believer in stats, but this year is pretty strange.

One of the things I like best about Massey is their different approach to ratings than AP/UPI, Who inordinately value wins-over-cupcakes as a sign of their power. And when SC lost to UConn, SC simply dropped 1 spot, to #2, showing a belief in 'good' losses. Oregon, being in the pac12 this year, is being gifted a lofty position by being in the toughest conference, as most people acknowledge (A rising tide floats all boats) - & UConn has always had a lot to prove by being in a weak conference - but missing the Baylor & Louisville games shouldn't hurt at all as far as Massey is concerned, as the 2 schools schedules are full of cupcakes, bloating their ratings. The real competition this year is Stanford, South Carolina, & Baylor.
In the development of a great UConn team this season, especially of late, UConn has universally exceeded expectations in their margins of victory, & Massey has rewarded them for that - And as the playoffs come closer, no mercy is being shown to anyone; that's as it should be, for a great team.

 

[NormanDale]

Today, UConn edged Stanford for the top spot, albeit by only a very little. It appears to me this is because, during the last few games, UConn easily exceeded the computer projected score both offensively and defensively.

I say this because, given her role for so much of this season, when Paige doesn’t come up with lots of points little alarms goes off, despite the fact that she contributes in so many other ways.

So I have to remind myself that the team now is playing more like the UConn teams that have been very successful, great D and distributed scoring. I hope we don’t need Paige to be Superballer every night to win and that the team continues on this recent path.

Like the saying goes, "big time players, make big time plays, in big time games"! Paige is at her best when the lights are the brightest, I am fully confident that when the tournament starts Bueckers will be there when we need her.

 

[KY Card Fan]

Like the saying goes, "big time players, make big time plays, in big time games"! Paige is at her best when the lights are the brightest, I am fully confident that when the tournament starts Bueckers will be there when we need her.

^^^^^^^^
This.

Here's an "old guy" story that supports this. Back in the early days of computing, somebody whose name I should be able to remember developed a simulator for MBB (with a name that I should be able to remember). That simulator enabled you to set up games between about 200 MBB teams from the past. I was a huge Bill Russell fan. If you took one of Russell's great San Francisco teams from 1955-56 and matched them with a less-than-stellar opponent, Russell would score maybe 18 points and get 15 rebounds and the Dons would win easily. But when you matched them with a really good team (say one of the UCLA teams from the 1960s) Russell would score 30 and get 22 rebounds, and the Dons might or might not win.

I see the same thing with Bueckers. When she doesn't have to score 25 she doesn't. But when the going gets tough she does what she needs to do and can carry the team almost by herself.

 

[Glenn]

Massey also automatically adjusts the rating for news about teams you you in the past. So it would give less credit for UConn's victory over DePaul, for example, after DePaul loses to Creighton.

Typically at the beginning of the year Massey uses the prior year, but that effect wanes over time. This year because of fewer ninconfernce games that effect may not have waned.

 

[ScuderiaDiU]

No offense to anyone here but few to none of you truly understand how these more complex power ratings work. The best is Sagarin but that is no longer available for women's basketball. Unless you are an engineer, mathematician or physicist you are unlikely to have seen the level of math required to make a good power rating. And even those folks are rarely good enough at the math required. Sagarin is an MIT grad and uses an eigenvector technique combined with an advanced optimizer. If you have to look up eigenvector on Google, you should probably not argue about power ratings.

 

[Pre-3]

What?

 

[Kurebeach50]

^^^^^^^^
This.

Here's an "old guy" story that supports this. Back in the early days of computing, somebody whose name I should be able to remember developed a simulator for MBB (with a name that I should be able to remember). That simulator enabled you to set up games between about 200 MBB teams from the past. I was a huge Bill Russell fan. If you took one of Russell's great San Francisco teams from 1955-56 and matched them with a less-than-stellar opponent, Russell would score maybe 18 points and get 15 rebounds and the Dons would win easily. But when you matched them with a really good team (say one of the UCLA teams from the 1960s) Russell would score 30 and get 22 rebounds, and the Dons might or might not win.

I see the same thing with Bueckers. When she doesn't have to score 25 she doesn't. But when the going gets tough she does what she needs to do and can carry the team almost by herself.

Bill James ??

 

[Littlemin]

No offense to anyone here but few to none of you truly understand how these more complex power ratings work. The best is Sagarin but that is no longer available for women's basketball. Unless you are an engineer, mathematician or physicist you are unlikely to have seen the level of math required to make a good power rating. And even those folks are rarely good enough at the math required. Sagarin is an MIT grad and uses an eigenvector technique combined with an advanced optimizer. If you have to look up eigenvector on Google, you should probably not argue about power ratings.

No offense to you, but what good are complex power ratings if they can’t be understood? About as good as saying I can give you the true Meaning Of Life (sorry Monty Python) but it is written in ancient Sumerian. FWIW and IMO, any mathematical power rating in regards to sports is utterly and completely useless for anything anyway regardless of whether or not they use the eigenvector technique combined with an advanced optimizer or not.

 

[ScuderiaDiU]

No offense to you, but what good are complex power ratings if they can’t be understood? About as good as saying I can give you the true Meaning Of Life (sorry Monty Python) but it is written in ancient Sumerian. FWIW and IMO, any mathematical power rating in regards to sports is utterly and completely useless for anything anyway regardless of whether or not they use the eigenvector technique combined with an advanced optimizer or not.

Do you always understand all the "science" you claim to believe? Do you believe everything you don't understand doesn't have value? Rocket Science? Immunotherapy? I understand enough for both of us. Here is the value. These systems attempt to do in a more accurate and unbiased way what every armchair expert thinks they are doing when they argue which teams are better than which. All of the "team a beat team b and team b beat team c" or " team a has a better record but team b played better teams and won their games by more" type arguments are coded into the algorithms. Even recent play versus early season play is emphasized as are games against more similarly ranked teams. People are biased, flawed and their eyes deceive them. Power ratings are far more accurate and fair. No one would ever claim that they will correctly predict future outcomes perfectly. And, yes, that is why we "play the games". They are backward looking algorithms. They only fairly assess the merits of what the teams have done to date. Trust me, if they say Texas A&M is overrated, they probably are. There is a higher probability that they will underperform their current "poll" rankings than overperform them.

 

[Littlemin]

Frankly, I don’t put much credence in anyone who wants to lecture me about what they assume I know or don’t know; save it for the mirror. You believe in machines and algorithms, I trust in my own eyes, intelligence and common sense.

 

[huskyd]

^^^^^^^^
This.

Here's an "old guy" story that supports this. Back in the early days of computing, somebody whose name I should be able to remember developed a simulator for MBB (with a name that I should be able to remember). That simulator enabled you to set up games between about 200 MBB teams from the past. I was a huge Bill Russell fan. If you took one of Russell's great San Francisco teams from 1955-56 and matched them with a less-than-stellar opponent, Russell would score maybe 18 points and get 15 rebounds and the Dons would win easily. But when you matched them with a really good team (say one of the UCLA teams from the 1960s) Russell would score 30 and get 22 rebounds, and the Dons might or might not win.

I see the same thing with Bueckers. When she doesn't have to score 25 she doesn't. But when the going gets tough she does what she needs to do and can carry the team almost by herself.

I see the same thing with Bueckers. When she doesn't have to score 25 she doesn't. But when the going gets tough she does what she needs to do and can carry the team almost by herself.

I'm not positive that Slim is able to be so calculated re her scoring, but her brief history bears out her clutch contributions. Her relatively "low" score-high take (20 pts. on 21 takes) last game suggests that she may, indeed, have feet of clay. (Geno agrees that it wasn't Bueckers Best) But her 14 assists (record) suggest that she manages to account for a disproportionate share of the scoring anyway. This seems to be a pattern: when Paige doesn't score 30, she usually assists on more than when she does score a bunch. Kinda logical, I guess.
Hope we won't have many occasions for That Girl to have to "carry" the team; it's a big responsibility and it's aging me.

 

[UcMiami]

I think all the complex 'algorithmic' systems are having a hard time this year because so many of the important OOC games were canceled - with 350+ D1 programs the number of head to head or even common opponents is always pretty small. This year with 20+/- game seasons instead of 27/29 game seasons and a lot of the OOC schedules decimated it has become minimal. Within a conference it has always been pretty easy to rank teams based on head to head and 15 common opponents, but when the number of conference vs. conference games shrink how the teams in each conference compare to teams in another conference is much harder and the data mavens lost in the order of 2500 of those data points with games being canceled. Just among the 10 conference with ranked teams they lost about 1100 data points.

Even great teams are inconsistent and poor teams occasionally shoot lights out. Teams can play differently home and away. These complex power rankings try to even out all the variables and come to a 'true' rating of each teams baseline ability - in that process every data point becomes important and the comparative data points are essential. Losing so many of them in a season greatly reduces accuracy.

 

[willtalk]

I agree with UcMiami's post whole heartedly. The consequences of the limited amount of interconference games played this year allows those ranking the teams to pretty much use any criteria they chose to decide the relative strength of conferences. Will they chose to attempt to be objective and fair, or will they use this opportunity to indulge in flagerant unaccountability for their own personal biases? In any case it should prove to be revealing.

 

[cabbie191]

Massey has been counterintuitive this season. Oregon is still sixth despite six losses, while A&M is tenth with one loss. Also no love for NC State and Louisville. I am a firm believer in stats, but this year is pretty strange.

I think that the uneven impact of Covid on teams means that the whole season has to be taken with salt blocks, so yes, this year’s stats come with ???.

This was true for the NFL - when in prior history has a team had to play a game without a real QB like Denver And some teams had their schedules turned upside down more than others.

Thinking about yesterday’s game, Butler didn’t look to me like a 2-win team. In terms of offensive movement, I thought they were fundamentally sound. Sure they shot lights out on the 3’s in the first half, no doubt not likely to happen often, but they had to move and pass efficiently in order to get those shots off in the first place.

If the Huskies had to deal with more Covid interruptions, I’m not certain we’d have only one loss. I’m sad we didn’t get to play Louisville and Baylor but I think overall, keeping fingers crossed, that we’ve been pretty fortunate overall thus far.

 

[Littlemin]

Do you always understand all the "science" you claim to believe? Do you believe everything you don't understand doesn't have value? Rocket Science? Immunotherapy? I understand enough for both of us. Here is the value.

Well, here is my take, there is nothing less interesting nor more insecure than people who have to proclaim they are “the smartest people in the room”. So, as you have no
idea what I understand or claim to believe you should have just let it go; because I do not recognize any value in pure statistical ratings does not mean I don’t understand them or need them explained to me. I perfectly well understand what statistical ratings are and find them more amusing than enlightening. If Sagarin or Massey were so brilliant only someone with your overwhelming intellect can understand them they should be putting their time in curing cancer or maybe watching a game or two to get some real, useful sports insight.

 

[FanFromMaine]

No offense to anyone here but few to none of you truly understand how these more complex power ratings work. The best is Sagarin but that is no longer available for women's basketball. Unless you are an engineer, mathematician or physicist you are unlikely to have seen the level of math required to make a good power rating. And even those folks are rarely good enough at the math required. Sagarin is an MIT grad and uses an eigenvector technique combined with an advanced optimizer. If you have to look up eigenvector on Google, you should probably not argue about power ratings.

I never liked linear algebra but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express. And I did listen to Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, on Car Talk.