In the 1950s, Dean Smith, a math major and assistant coach to Frank McGuire at UNC, moved three decades ahead of his time when he wrote that “points per possession” played as the key stat—the entire basis for every basketball stats innovation from Dean Oliver’s Basketball on Paper to www.kenpom.com to my own www.valueaddbasketball.com measurements of players.
D’Angelo Harrison, LaDontae Henton and D’Vauntes Smith-Rivera are having three of the greatest careers in the history of the Big East.
The 15 hottest conferences in the new Value Add Rankings are led by the Missouri Valley (N. Iowa’s Seth Tuttle makes case for Player of the Year by crushing Wichita State), Sun Belt (top-100 players face off in battle of Georgia schools today), Atlantic 10 (heartbreak injury of VCU All-American opens door), and the Big East and Big 12 (a majority of teams in both have a top 100 player).
The best offensive player on the best offensive team (Frank Kaminsky, Wisconsin) scored 23 points against Indiana Tuesday (9-12 from floor, 5-7 from line, 3 assists) to pass the best defensive player on the best defensive team (Willie Cauley-Stein, Kentucky) as the top center in basketball.
More than 200,000 boys play high school basketball, with only 5% (just over 4,000) playing D1 in college. Even the best of those 4,000 has just a 63% chance at the NBA.
Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski became the first college basketball coach to 1,000 wins on Sunday with a victory over St. John’s.
USA Today summed it up Sunday: “Who needs Lebron James when you have Hassan Whiteside?”
Breitbart Sports examines the 12 players who should shoot up in the next www.valueaddbasketball.com ratings after fantastic performances Saturday.
None of the current “All-Offense” team would make the “All-American” team when you compare the top five offensive, defensive, and overall players.
Utah’s Delon Wright is on pace to join Duke’s Sheldon Williams (2005-2006) and Davidson’s Stephen Curry (2008-2009) as only the third player to finish in the Top 5 in two seasons at www.valueaddbasketball.com.
The Big 12 and Big East rank as the best top-to-bottom, the Pac-12 has the best player in Delon Wright, and Kentucky has seven of the top 100, but the ACC and Big 10 combine for 24 of the top 100 players.
The following is the final ranking of all 10 College Bowl Conferences, with the result of each conference team in bowl games. Breitbart Sports joined only Football Insiders in picking the Pac-12 as the top conference (122 human and computer
Kobe Bryant made waves by stating that European players are taught better fundamentals than Americans. Our statistical analysis shows the average international player in the NBA is a better shooter, rebounder and overall player than his American counterpart, but…
Breitbart Sports stands as one of two groups out of 125 to dub the Pac-12 as the best college football conference this season–an assessment vindicated by bowl season.
When Breitbart Sports calculated that the Pac-12 ranked as the top conference due to being +12 points better than the average team, SEC partisans vehemently disagreed. Few dispute that the Pac-12 stands as No. 1 again in the bowl season with an even more impressive +15.2 point rating.
SEC teams averaged less than 20 points a game against the two Mississippi schools this season. Those two schools played their first games all season against other Power 5 teams New Year’s Eve, and both gave up 42 points by the end of the third quarter.
Seven years after a banner flew over Cal’s football stadium reading “SEC rules, Pac-10 drools”–only to have Cal beat Tennessee–the Pac-12 received some help in their claim to be the best conference when Notre Dame upset LSU on Tuesday in the Music City Bowl.
Big 12 advocates grumbled when Breitbart Sports rated the Big 12 as the fourth best conference for the regular season, and then the committee did not choose a Big 12 team for the first playoffs. Both were vindicated Monday as the Big 12 was beaten up in their first three games to fall to 5th in the Conference Ratings.
The SEC needed USC (that is South Carolina) to pull out a win to stay one point ahead of the Pac-12, +17 to +16, as the top conference. In the system explained here, both USC (that is Southern Cal) and Arizona State won to improve the Pac-12 to 3-0 but gained less than a point each for the conference by winning by less than the spread.
The Pac-12 had the best regular season of any conference, and their quest to also top the SEC in the Bowl season started well with a blowout win by Utah, which has now won 11 of their last 12 holiday season games, including a blowout of Alabama in the 2009 Sugar Bowl.
College basketball Christmas remains more than two months away. But there’s no harm in predicting what teams might find themselves on the NCAA Tournament’s “nice” list come March.
Defense dominates the All-American team at the break. Kentucky’s duo underneath held UCLA Saturday to 3 of 37 shooting in the first half to rank as the best center and power forward, while the son of Gary “the Glove” Payton of the same name remains the only player in the country among national leaders in seven of eight categories.
Willie Cauley-Stein (Kentucky), Delon Wright (Utah), Gary Payton (Oregon State), and Luke Fischer (Marquette) had phenomenal weeks only to have Wesley Saunders move atop the www.valueaddbasketball.com ratings while studying at Harvard instead of playing basketball the past ten days.
Incarnate Word’s Shane Meling told me recently that he thought the second year team could get a win at UTEP or Nebraska–and I was shocked when this jumper proved him right. The team has a majority of the All-Southland team
Like Division III Schools, the Ivy League offers no scholarships. Yet the conference has clearly risen to the status of “mid major,” as one of seven conferences that can go toe-to-toe with the seven power conferences. Columbia just gave Kentucky
