A few weeks ago, Spartans Weblog did a rather complete game by game graphical analysis, including trendlines of all the Big Ten schools efficiency numbers for the past season.

I decided to take a look at his Penn State numbers in a little more detail. First some background on the graphs:

Background info

First, some notes on the graphs:

• the data only includes the regular season, the Big Ten Tournament game against Illinois is not included.
• the efficiency numbers don’t distinguish between home and away games but SW says that the trendline should smooth out the home/away differences.
• these are raw efficiency numbers that are not adjusted for the opponent so it’s possible that up or down trends are related to the quality of opposition.
• for offense, the higher the number the better, thus upward trends are good. For defense, lower numbers are better, so downward trends are good.
  trendlines are used to smooth out data.
• Spartan’s Weblog used a third order polynomial trendline. I’m not sure that was the most appropriate trendline to use but SW doesn’t go into his rationale for the choice. Also, some of the reader comments imply there aren’t enough data points for the analysis to be meaningful.

Still the data is interesting to look at.

PSU Efficiency Chart

Here’s Penn State’s chart.

When SW analyzes it, he basically says the defense was poor all year long, the offense started out ok, went downhill with Claxton’s injury, then rebounded as the freshman matured.

I wanted to take this a step further.

Big Ten Tournament

First, I know for reasons of consistency across all teams, Spartans Weblog chose to use only regular season data. Since I was only interested in PSU’s data, I decided to take a look at the numbers including the Big Ten Tournament game against Illinois.

Here’s that graph:

Efficiency Margins

The difference between a team’s offensive and defensive efficiency numbers is called their efficiency margin. Since, by definition, teams have the same number of possessions in any specific game, if you have a positive efficiency margin for a game, you have scored more points than your opponent and thus won the game.

Here’s a graph with Spartan’s Weblog’s choice of a 3rd order polynomial trendline of PSU’s efficiency margin for all their Big Ten games, including tournament play.

Other Trendlines:

Spartan’s Weblog never described his rationale behind choosing a 3rd order polynomial to plot his trendlines. I know little about what defines the appropriate order to choose. I do know that an N-order polynomial will plot a graph that has at most N-1 hills and valleys. So his choice of a 3rd order for the trendline means the graph will have at most one hill and one valley. We see that in the chart of the offensive efficiency. The defensive efficiency just has one hill.

As an experiment, I decided to plot the efficiency margin charts using 2nd through 6th order polynomials, thus providing a graph with at most one hill or valley, in the first case, and five hills and valleys in the last case. Here are those charts.

Efficiency Margin 2nd Order Polynomial Trendline

Efficiency Margin 4th Order Polynomial Trendline

Efficiency Margin 5th Order Polynomial Trendline

Efficiency Margin 6th Order Polynomial Trendline

As you can easily see, the 4th through 6th order polynomials look remarkably similar. They do differ from the 3rd order polynomial in that the 3rd order shows a season ending downturn while the 4th through 6th show a year end improvement (as does the 2nd order polynomial). Someone with a better knowledge of trendlines than I can argue which is more meaningful but my “blue and white goggles”, “glass half full”, “DeChellis lackey” viewpoint is going to choose to dismiss the 3rd order and go with one of the other views.

According to his Philly Daily News column, Penn State color man Dick Jerardi is a fan of Ken Pomeroy and tempo free stats.

Dick Jerardi: Even the refs are monitored at this Web site | Philadelphia Daily News | 02/06/2008 via kwout

We are now halfway through conference play so it’s time to take another look at the key tempo free team statistics. I’ll run through many of the numbers and note any significant change for Penn State from the previous report that I published on January 15th.

Penn State remains 7th in the league in pace of play averaging 63.3 possessions per game which is down from the 64.7 possessions two weeks ago. This is undoubtedly a conscious decision that was made following Claxton’s injury.

Two weeks ago we were a remarkable second in the conference in offensive efficiency with a 107 rating. We’ve since dropped back to the middle of the pack with a 101 rating. We remain next to last in the conference in defensive efficiency. That means we’ve fallen from seventh to ninth in efficiency margin with a negative 11.8 rating. Not surprisingly, Michigan and Northwestern are the teams behind us.

Quite naturally our shooting percentage mirror our efficiency numbers. We’re middle of the pack in two point and three point shooting but 10th and 9th respectively in two point and three point field goal defense (with a huge delta between us and 8th place Minn in 3pt defense). That doesn’t bode well for us tonight since Purdue is the best three point shooting team in the conference. Of course the good thing with three point shooting is that pretty much no one is always on. Every team is going to have an off night some night, perhaps tonight is it for Purdue.

We made a ton of free throws against Michigan State which has solidly in fifth place in the league in free throw proficiency (FT prof measures how well you get to the line and make your free throws). Unfortunately, that’s entirely do to the fact that we’ve managed to get to the line a lot. We sure haven’t been making our free throws when we get there though as we are now dead last in the conference in FT shooting percentage at 61.1%.

Losing Claxton has meant that we have tumbled from previously being second in the conference in offensive rebounding to fifth. We haven’t slipped near as much on the defensive glass however. Previously we were tops in the conference, now we are second only a hair behind Indiana.

We continue to protect the ball well and are third in the conference in turnover rate just a shade higher than we were two weeks ago when we were second. Unfortunately, our soft defense doesn’t create many turnovers and we are only 8th in that category.

With out low turnover rate, you might think that we would sit high in the conference in assist to turnover ratio. Surprisingly, that’s not true and we are way under 1.0, 0.93 to be exact, in our A/TO ratio. That’s not good and, I believe, a symptom of our lackadaisical passing. Just the opposite is true on defense. Our soft play lets out opponents work the ball looking for the easy shot. Thus we are next to last in the conference in A/TO defense.

That’s a quick synopsis of where we stand with out tempo free numbers. Feel free to play around with the tool to check out other teams.

Because this is year long data, the numbers for Penn State don’t reflect the loss of Geary Claxton and thus the tool’s utility for this game can be questioned.

However, I’m still publishing it because the data is most certainly valid for other league games and people might want to make use of it.

Don’t know that there’s much to say here. Indiana has a solid lead in many of the categories. We do have a slight edge in offensive rebounding but with Claxton’s loss, who knows if we can sustain that. Turnovers are the one area where we look ok. We are better at protecting the ball and have a very slight edge in causing turnovers. That will certainly have to be a stat we maintain if we are going to have any chance on Sunday.