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Username Post: 2017-18 Ivy Performance
mrjames 
Professor
Posts: 6062

Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
12-10-17 06:34 PM - Post#239930    
    In response to weinhauers_ghost

Rather long post, but we're a month in, so we're far enough along to have some more concrete thoughts about the season to date and where it might be headed.

Here are the Ivy efficiencies and overall rank for JUST the games to date (i.e. NO preseason weighting):
1) Penn 102 ORAT, 99 DRAT (134)
2) Yale 104 ORAT, 104 DRAT (157)
3) Harvard 96 ORAT, 100 DRAT (205)
4) Columbia 102 ORAT, 109 DRAT (234)
5) Brown 97 ORAT, 105 DRAT (241)
6) Princeton 101 ORAT, 109 DRAT (243)
7) Cornell 100 ORAT, 112 DRAT (273)
8) Dartmouth 98 ORAT, 114 DRAT (309)

In some ways, it is exactly the season that we all expected. Brown, Columbia and Cornell have been frisky at times, but bad at others. Penn has been solidly in the mid-100s, but no real threat to crack the Top 100. In other ways, it's been a product of circumstance. Dartmouth loses Boudreaux right before the season... what do you expect? Yale loses Mason and Bruner... what do you expect?

In still other ways, though, it's nowhere close to what we expected. Harvard and Princeton have been shockingly poor. Let's start there.

Princeton's run last year was powered by defense, allowing opponents just 1.19 points per possession on layups, which was 50% further ahead of 2nd-place Harvard (1.34 ppp) than Harvard was of 7th-place Dartmouth. This year, Princeton is still in the Ivy lead at allowing 1.35 ppp on layups, but it's just 0.05 ppp away from being 7th. That is, there's no longer anything elite about Princeton's rim defense. This season, opponents are making a higher percentage of shots at the rim than opponents were even on just the unblocked shots last season.

The good news for Princeton is that some of its woes are luck-based. The Tigers are allowing opponents 1.23 ppp on 2PT Js, which is unbelievable and should regress (no Ivy allowed more than 1.05 for the season last year) and 1.65 from the FT line (no Ivy allowed higher than 1.56). That should make the Princeton defense look better than it has, but...

Princeton won the league last year because it won the TO battle in EVERY SINGLE GAME. In fact, in its two closest near losses were the two Harvard games and it won the TO Rate battle in those games by 27%-16% and 28%-8%. This year, that script has flipped: Princeton has gone from +5pp in TO Rate to -2.5pp. And the Tigers are already getting 1.41ppp on offensive possessions with a 3 (which leads the league and is 0.08ppp higher than the leader from last year), 1.14 ppp on 2PT Js (also 0.08ppp higher than last year's leader and likely unsustainable). And Princeton's offense on layups has been just 1.13 ppp, which is awful - but that's the area of the court most controlled by the defense and not as likely to improve by mere regression alone.

Where that leaves us is with a Princeton team that should improve DRAMATICALLY over its current 269th rating in defensive efficiency but one that may not have a ton of room to improve upon its 193 rated offensive efficiency.

On to Harvard, which is a completely different animal. The 105 offensive rating on 3s is possibly the most shocking number over this time period that I've ever seen. Last year, Harvard led the league in ORAT on poss with a 3 at 133. From that team it lost the two worst three-point shooters to have taken at least 20 threes and now it is nearly 0.3 ppp worse. For a team like Harvard that would usually have about 20-30 offensive poss with a 3 per game, we're talking about 5.5 - 8.5 points per game that Harvard is leaving on the table (or per 100 poss, about 8-12 pts). On threes alone, Harvard would shoot from 278th in offensive efficiency at 95.7 to somewhere from 100th-150th. Combine that with Harvard's 124th-ranked D currently, the Crimson would instantly be the top team in the conference, before even solving for any of the other issues.

And those issues abound. Harvard's insane steals allowed rate on offense has led to 7% of opponent shots being in transition off of takeaways (which are resulting in oppts shooting 62% on those shots). The bloated turnover rate is tough for an offense that, at Fordham, for instance, only scored 0.89 points per NON-TURNOVER possession, but the pressure that it puts on the defense is great as well. Every steal Harvard allows costs it not only the point or so expectation on offense, but fractions of points defensively over the expectation from normal defense.

The good news for Harvard is that once it starts scoring more, it will get more chances to set its defense. Currently in the 41% of possessions that come after a score, opponents are only shooting 42 eFG%. That does gloss a bit over the fact that Harvard has been really poor across the board at defending the rim (usually after getting caught in rotation and forced to either foul or concede easy attempts inside), and the failure to figure that out will continue to be a drag on any improvement in defensive efficiency.

Right now, if I had to put my money on which team will post the best efficiency margin from here on out, I think I'd pick Harvard.
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