It’s finally here. The 2021-22 college basketball season is just a few days away.
Before the Cards tip off for real, I wanted to recap a couple things I wrote this summer that may be of interest to UofL fans:
1) How will Ross McMains impact UofL’s offense?
When the new assistant coach was named, I dug through stats for his New Zealand national team as well as his Melbourne United team. Some of the key insights I found are:
His teams played at an incredible pace that would have led college basketball last season
His teams avoided the midrange, and doing that could elevate Louisville to a to-tier offense
His teams didn’t record many assists, and recorded a lot of turnovers…but were still great on offense
2) Some over/under props for UofL next season
I crunched some numbers to try to project how Louisville might fare next season in what I believe to be some key advanced stats. You can read the article for the full background, but I expected the offense to be excellent, the team to shoot well from three, and for Jae’lyn Withers to have a big year scoring.
Introducing the Hoops Insight Stats Engine!
I’ve been doing data-driven basketball analysis for a few years now, but it’s always been me crunching numbers on my own computer. I’ve wanted to develop better ways to share some of what I actually do with people who have similar interests. This offseason I turned that into a reality by learning some coding to develop a webpage where anyone can dig into the same data I’m looking at. The result is the Hoops Insight Stats Engine, available here.
The idea is pretty simple: you pick a team, and can choose all sorts of filters around which games to include, players to be in/out, score, time of game, and so on. The data is organized into stats for the team, lineups, players, as well as some shooting stats. It’s completely interactive, and I’m planning to keep adding some fun miscellaneous stats of interest. I’ll be keeping this updated through the season with the latest UofL games, so bookmark it and check it anytime you want to comb through data on UofL men’s basketball. I’ll also be adding some historical data from the past few seasons as well.
Here’s a video to explain a bit more about how to use the stats engine:
Let me know what you think! I hope some like-minded readers get a kick out of it.