Introducing Hoops Hindsight
Telling the story of some great college basketball teams, through the numbers
You are receiving this email because you are a subscriber to my Hoops Insight newsletter. If you wish to be removed from receiving Hoops Hindsight, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of this post. I will still be publishing my UofL and UK newsletters as well…I’ll have an update on those closer to the season.
I love college basketball and writing about it through the lens of analytics. I was crushed when the 2019-20 season had to end prematurely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I honestly don’t know what the 2020-21 season is going to look like. I’ve decided to start a new email newsletter to guarantee that I have an outlet to write about college basketball no matter what happens this season. That newsletter is Hoops Hindsight, and it launches on October 19th, 2020.
The concept behind Hoops Hindsight is as follows: I’ll select some interesting teams from the past few years in college basketball and write about their seasons, focusing heavily on advanced stats and data I get from analyzing play-by-play. I’ll look at things like lineup performance, player on/off stats, shot location & distribution, clutch performance, and more to tell a unique story about each team.
While my prior work has focused on Kentucky and Louisville, I’ll be expanding my lens to look at more college programs in Hoops Hindsight. I’m limited a bit by the availability of quality play-by-play data, so I’ll be looking at teams from 2011-12 and forward. In the beginning, I’ll try to focus on 1 season per program, but I might break that rule as I go on.
I’m going to aim to release 2 articles per week, 1 on Mondays and 1 on Thursdays. I’ll write 3-4 articles per team, each focusing on a different story of interest about the team. My goal is to provide new context to some notable past teams and highlight information you won’t get anywhere else.
I really hope you enjoy this series, and I’m looking forward to re-examining some really interesting teams. Most of the teams I’m going to select weren’t champions, but were especially interesting because they were flawed or fell short in some way. I don’t know all of the teams yet, but here are the first few teams I plan to focus on:
· 2014-15 Kentucky (nearly a legendary season!)
· 2015-16 Louisville (best team to not play postseason in modern NCAA era?)
· 2018-19 Duke (Zion!)
· 2013-14 Kansas (Wiggins + Embiid)
· 2017-18 Michigan State (JJJ + Miles Bridges)
For subscribers to my UofL and UK newsletters, I’ll still be doing those throughout the season as well! I’ll have more info on them as we get closer to the season.
If you have suggestions for other teams I should cover, give me a shout at @HoopsInsight on Twitter. I hope you enjoy, and remember: they say hindsight is 20/20, but 2020 is Hoops Hindsight.