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THE VALUE OF TEMPO-FREE STATS IN PREDICTING
TOURNEY OVERACHIEVEMENT When it
comes time to fill out your bracket for the 2008 tourney, you’ll have access to
a mountain of statistics. If you’re so inclined, you could mull over the value
of everything from seeding, conference affiliation and coaching experience to
pre-tourney momentum, offensive output, margin of victory and much more. In the tourney database I’ve been building
since 1990, I track over 40 separate attributes. With so much data available,
it’s easy for me to lose sight of which statistics really matter in determining
the teams to advance in my bracket. That’s
why I developed PASE, or Performance Against Seed
Expectations. As many readers already know, PASE compares the total number of
wins that teams with given attributes attain to the number their seeding indicates
that they should achieve. PASE is calculated by tallying the positive or
negative differences between actual and expected wins at each seed position.
The total of these differences is divided by the number of appearances to
arrive at an average number of games the teams either over- or underperform per tourney. In short, PASE provides a way to
measure the relative impact of team attributes on tourney performance. While
PASE is a useful tool for analyzing the key indicators of tourney advancement,
it’s only really effective if applied to the right statistics. While I’ve been
working for years on ways to become a better “bracketeer,”
a group of statistical gurus have been working on methods to get a more
accurate reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of basketball teams in
actual game play. If you’re not familiar with the work of Ken Pomeroy, you
really owe it to yourself to visit www.kenpom.com
and investigate the concept of tempo-free game-play stats. The
philosophy is simple. Ken and other tempo-free pioneers like Dean Oliver and
John Gasaway contend that raw numbers like points
scored and allowed per game are only meaningful in the context of the number of
a times a team possesses the ball or defends against a possession. In other
words, the most accurate way to gauge a team’s offensive or defensive ability
is to analyze its efficiency in scoring or preventing scores. Consider this: which
team is better offensively—a UCLA team that has 60 possessions in a game and
scores 70 points, or a Tempo-free
statisticians have devised basic formulas to calculate four key numbers:
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