PennFan10
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Posts: 3589
Reg: 02-15-15
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10-22-19 01:49 PM - Post#288920
In response to Jeff2sf
Reposting from the main board as the media poll for the Ivy's is in:
The Ivy League preseason media poll came out today: https://ivyleague.com/news/2019/10/22/mens- basketb...
1. Harvard (15 first place votes) - 134 points
2. Penn (2) - 117 points
3. Yale - 94 points
4. Princeton - 88 points
5. Brown - 62 points
6. Columbia - 51 points
T7. Cornell - 33 points
T7. Dartmouth - 33 points
Mike James posted on twitter (and I echo) surprise that Penn got 2 first place votes. Otherwise pretty stock predictions.
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palestra38
Professor
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10-22-19 02:03 PM - Post#288922
In response to PennFan10
It's surprising if you just compare the teams on paper. However, Harvard has had the best team on paper for most of the last 5 years with no titles, so there are those who will bet against Amaker.
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mrjames
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10-22-19 02:31 PM - Post#288923
In response to palestra38
Harvard has won three titles (all shared) in the past five seasons. And if we exclude the year where he clearly didn't have the best talent on paper (2015-16), that's three titles in the four other years with 43 wins.
The media poll isn't predicting who will win the Ivy tourney, it's just predicting the order of finish, something that Harvard has finished first in three times in the past five seasons.
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palestra38
Professor
Posts: 32871
Reg: 11-21-04
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Projections
10-22-19 02:48 PM - Post#288924
In response to mrjames
Isn't it fun riling him up? And if Harvard had the best talent those 3 years, isn't tying for the title an underperformance? Where are those 14-0 and 13-1 years expected of a dominant team?
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HARVARDDADGRAD
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Posts: 2697
Loc: New Jersey
Reg: 01-21-14
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10-22-19 03:22 PM - Post#288926
In response to palestra38
Injuries
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palestra38
Professor
Posts: 32871
Reg: 11-21-04
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10-22-19 03:43 PM - Post#288929
In response to HARVARDDADGRAD
Everyone has injuries.
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TheLine
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Age: 60
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10-22-19 03:59 PM - Post#288930
In response to palestra38
Harvard's are more important because their players are all better.
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91Quake
PhD Student
Posts: 1126
Reg: 11-22-04
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10-22-19 04:42 PM - Post#288932
In response to TheLine
Oh, it sounds a lot like basketball season is almost here. Love it!
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mrjames
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Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
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10-22-19 04:55 PM - Post#288934
In response to TheLine
One - I think Harvard's injuries have been more significant than others. They've lost essentially two full seasons of POY-caliber players plus a lot of other injuries to core players. And if we grant your premise that they've been the best team on paper, if they've lost a lot of starter minutes due to injuries, their injuries must have ipso facto been more damaging.
Two - It's just a lot harder to go 13-1 and 14-0 these days. Much lower bar for the lead dog in a 20s league to post that record. At Bart Torvik's site, Harvard is 17th nationally, and it is still only projected to go 12-2 in the league. Now, I'd take the under (big time in some cases) on each of the Top 6 teams there, so the league overall is projected to be way tougher than it likely will be, but that just illustrates how good you have to be to make 13-1/14-0 an expectation.
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palestra38
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10-22-19 05:08 PM - Post#288935
In response to mrjames
I disagree on the difficulty of winning 13-14 games. 2 years ago, Penn was a terrible ref call from going 13-1, the year before that, Princeton was 14-0 and the year before that Yale was 13-1. If you have the best team, you have to win the games that allow you to call yourself the best team. And so far, Harvard has failed to do that since their run that ended 5 years ago despite having the best rated recruits pretty much consistently.
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mrjames
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10-22-19 05:26 PM - Post#288937
In response to palestra38
I disagree on the difficulty of winning 13-14 games. 2 years ago, Penn was a terrible ref call from going 13-1
That was the worst league year since 2010 by a mile. Very similar to 2000s quality when a team around No. 100 could indeed churn through the league at 13-1/14-0.
the year before that, Princeton was 14-0
Princeton was No. 58 in Pomeroy and that league, at No. 18, was third-worst since 2010.
the year before that Yale was 13-1
Yale was No. 47 in Pomeroy and won a tournament game. That league was fourth-worst of the decade.
If you have the best team, you have to win the games that allow you to call yourself the best team.
This is a meaningless quasi-tautology. The quality of the league matters when it comes to the aggregate wins expectation for the winning team. That's a mathematical fact.
You should still have to win the league to say you're the best, which Harvard has done as many times during this five-year failure state as Yale (3) and more than any other team.
If this league is the toughest of the AI era - as is being projected - it will be much, much tougher to go 13-1 or 14-0 than in years where the league is significantly weaker (even including 2016, 2017). Not sure that should be such a tough concept to understand.
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palestra38
Professor
Posts: 32871
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Projections
10-22-19 05:51 PM - Post#288938
In response to mrjames
Sorry, Mike, you are the one engaging in the "quasi-tautology" (if there ever were a oxymoron, that is it--a tautology is a = a---how can that be "quasi"?) You are taking the pre-season ranking and making that more important than performance. There really should be no preseason rankings. Everyone starts with the same ranking. Then you don't have the same preconceived notions of what constitutes the quality of the league. Indeed, if Harvard has the best recruits every year as we are told, then Harvard should be top 50 every year and the League would have a much higher ranking in the years you claim the League sucked (like when Penn won). It appears that Harvard's underperformance is dragging the League down. I would be upset at Amaker about that.
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mrjames
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Re: Projections
10-22-19 06:38 PM - Post#288940
In response to palestra38
As I always say, I think we're just coming at this from two different angles. You're looking at the problem like a fan would; I look at it like an analyst. The fan views the game through the lens of hope, possibilities and narrative. The analyst views the game like a puzzle, asking testable questions to increase his or her fact base and gradually improve projections moving forward. Neither one is better or worse than the other - it's just how we prefer to take in the game.
This leads to inevitable conflict, though. Your statement about preseason rankings, for instance. Leave aside Bayesian philosophy on priors, you are thumbing your nose at an empirical truth - that we are able to predict, with great accuracy, team performance in the preseason. And those predictions (cue Bayes) help us arrive at a better understanding of true team quality much faster than when we used to pretend everyone was equal to start. Assuredly, there will be misses (big ones, at times), and the fan will be quick to use those to argue that preseason rankings are BS because *anything* can potentially happen. Which is true. But the analyst knows that anecdote is merely one miss among myriad hits that make preseason rankings a tool with empirically proven value.
Fans like to talk about recruiting too. They like to put a lot of hope on recruits, praising rankings when they're good while quickly providing anecdotes about that unrated guy who was all league proving these ratings mean nothing when they're bad. The analyst would build a database of rankings and outcomes and try to figure out roughly how bad or good the recruiting rankings are. That analyst would favor a stable target variable (win shares) over an unstable one (title team). And then the analyst could tell you that the 2016 class is pretty much dead on projection despite the injuries.
We can get into home court advantage, two-point jumpers and so on - the difference will always come back to that fundamental approach of narrative versus empiricism.
I don't think you should have to change the way you view the game. I'm sure it would make it boring for you. But it does make it challenging for us to have a conversation about the game we're watching.
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Silver Maple
Postdoc
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Reg: 11-23-04
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10-22-19 07:02 PM - Post#288941
In response to mrjames
I'm not sure it's just random chance that Harvard has been so beset by injuries. You could make that argument that a 4-star HS player who picks an Ivy over a high-major program might have good reason to be less sanguine than most recruits at that level about his pro prospects, perhaps due to a history of injuries (a fact that HS players often keep to themselves). That being the case, an Ivy program might actually be better off recruiting somewhat less highly rated prospects who are more likely to stay healthy.
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Mike Porter
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Reg: 11-21-04
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10-22-19 09:12 PM - Post#288950
In response to Silver Maple
Silver Maple - I usually agree with a lot you have to say, but this is a very weird take buddy.
Why would a lower ranked recruit be any less or more likely to be injured? We've had a wide variety of injuries over the years and it wasn't just highly recruited kids. We could look as recently as Betley who wasn't that highly ranked, was a very good player for us, yet still got hurt.
I can't imagine a single Ivy coach thinking... hmm, maybe we should start lowering our goal of landing the highest, most well regarded recruits we can.
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Silver Maple
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10-22-19 10:31 PM - Post#288954
In response to Mike Porter
Sorry-- I probably wasn't clear.
II don't think a lower ranked player is less likely to be injured than a higher ranked one. However, there are just a lot more lower ranked prospects. Coaches can be pickier with them, and might pursue the more durable ones more aggressively.
I think it's possible that a more highly ranked player who is good enough to start for a high major and considered a pro prospect, but who instead opts to play for an Ivy, might make that decision because he has been injured or is injury prone and realizes that this significantly reduces the possibility of success at the pro (and even D1) level. So, education becomes more important to a player like that.
Put another way, while I don't think it's more likely that a lower ranked recruit would be less prone to injury than a more highly ranked one within the context of all high school basketball players, I think it might be true that, among those players who would opt to play for an Ivy, the particularly highly ranked players might be more injury prone.
Realize, this is just a hypothesis, and it's based on very little data, and probably isn't even testable. But it might explain why so many of Harvard's highly rated players have gone down with injuries.
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palestra38
Professor
Posts: 32871
Reg: 11-21-04
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Re: Projections
10-23-19 08:46 AM - Post#288963
In response to mrjames
Mike, I don't disagree with your analysis---I too think that Harvard has the best talent and has had the best talent for the last 3 years. Thus, the fact that they have not done better than tied for first place means they have underperformed. And your explanation is injuries, i.e, "luck." That's all.
Well, other than a possible explanation could be the coaching.
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mrjames
Professor
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Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
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Re: Projections
10-23-19 06:48 PM - Post#288986
In response to palestra38
We're talking about two different things. I'm talking about one class (2016), and you're talking about the team. It is possible to believe that one class is amazing and yet not think the overall talent level of a team is amazing. Let me explain...
Harvard's 2016 class was the best haul of the AI era. Its surrounding classes were bad, and with injuries, became a LOT worse. I've addressed the specifics in a different thread, but suffice it to say that Harvard's 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017 classes were varying stages of average to garbage.
Even though Harvard has four more Ivy wins over the past three seasons than the next closest Ivy team during which was purported to have "underachieved," I know you only care about those Ivy tourney finals. The leading scorers for Penn and Yale in those games were seniors (pre-2016 classes). At the same time, in those two games combined, Harvard got just 34 minutes and two points from players from pre-2016 classes.
No matter how good one class is, it's going to struggle without ANY contributions from multiple other classes - especially those more senior to it.
Especially considering the injuries, this is probably the first time in the four years where Harvard has clearly had the best talent. Mostly, that's because it's no longer facing strong upperclassmen from other league teams while getting nothing out of its own.
Now, having said all that... coaching matters. Amaker is a good defensive coach, but he's not a good offensive coach, tactician or rotation manager. That's why Harvard's best teams have been those with obvious choices to play and great two-way players that can create out of the motion offense. Most of that is true this year, except maybe "obvious choices to play..."
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SRP
Postdoc
Posts: 4919
Reg: 02-04-06
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10-25-19 12:09 PM - Post#289082
In response to mrjames
That’s an interesting point about complementarity between player and coach. Makes Wesley Saunders look ideal given your description.
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