You're Killing Me Smalls

by KevinHD on Feb 16, 2009 2:32 PM EST in Basketball

For the few/many* of you who have joined us for a basketball game thread, you might have noticed my fascination with a fairly simply toy called The Bill James Lead Calculator. Basic premise: when has the fat lady mathematically began her song?

The interesting thing about it's application to the 2008-09 Penn State basketball team is that the Nittany Lions have straight up defied mathematics with their inability to hit a free throw.

The team is shooting a league worst 65%, even after a solid performance against Minnesota (75%).

Where things get ugly, and usually painful, is watching opposing coaches use the Hack-A-Team strategy flawlessly to climb back out of the hole Penn State put them in. However, against Minnesota, there was for some reason a strange sense of confidence at the line that we haven't seen all season.

A look at the FTs to end the game last weekend (note a "Win%" of 1 is consider a lock):

Time	Play	PSU Lead	Win% +/-
1:43	David Jackson made free throw	1	+0.04
0:57	Talor Battle missed free throw	4	-0.04
0:37	Talor Battle made free throw	5	+0.04
0:37	Talor Battle made free throw	6	+0.12
0:26	Jamelle Cornley made free throw	7	+0.23
0:26	Jamelle Cornley missed free throw	7	-0.31
0:24	David Jackson made free throw	7	+0.25
0:24	David Jackson made free throw	8	+0.33
0:09	Stanley Pringle made free throw	6	+0.44
0:09	Stanley Pringle made free throw	7	+0.31

That is a total gain of 176% and a total loss of 35%. Now you aren't going to hit every free one, and a five to one ratio of cluchyness isn't bad at all.

Now compare that to the end game against Georgia Tech:

Time	Play	PSU Lead	Win% +/-
0:44	Talor Battle missed free throw	5	-0.22
0:27	David Jackson missed free throw	5	-0.13
0:15	Stanley Pringle made free throw	4	+0.15
0:06	Jamelle Cornley missed free throw	2	-0.04
0:06	Jamelle Cornley missed free throw	2	-0.04

A total gain of just 15% and a total loss of 43%. That is the definition of allowing FTs to kill you. It's also a lot less fun to watch.

*Depends on the game, really, and definitely which direction the team is trending. The last five game alone our live-thread comment total has gone as low as 47 and as high as 509.

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Comments

First

You melt the mallow.

by speedomike on Feb 16, 2009 3:04 PM EST reply actions

you put the mallow on the graham.

BSD

by KevinHD on Feb 16, 2009 7:27 PM EST up reply actions

that's the most delicious piece of technology I've ever seen

me want!

by The JuggerNitt on Feb 16, 2009 8:50 PM EST up reply actions

Do you also have the "absolute" win % for each of those situations?

seeing the change in win % helps a bit, but knowing if we’re going from 80% – 30% to 50% is slightly different than going from 55% – 30% to 25 %.

by The JuggerNitt on Feb 16, 2009 4:27 PM EST reply actions

This is all the data I computed.

The particular pressures on each shot are definitely something that would be interesting to know, but for this exercise I was mostly interested how bad each miss was actually hurting down the stretch.

BSD

by KevinHD on Feb 16, 2009 4:42 PM EST up reply actions

yeah, that's what I was wondering

plus at the end we didn’t miss any of the last 4 free throws and they collectively increased the win% by 133% (granted Minnesota sunk shots in between the foul shots, which likely would have helped their % out a bit, but when you filter that out it gets a bit…disconnected, or confusing or something.)

by The JuggerNitt on Feb 16, 2009 5:38 PM EST up reply actions