Lehigh Sports Forum

Game Notes

LU’s
https://static.lehighsports.com/customp ... 1510069857

LOM’s
https://loyolagreyhounds.com/news/2019/ ... tball.aspx


How Ken Pom Sees It

LOM (4-10, 0-1) Ranked 292nd
@
LU (8-4, 1-0) Ranked 150th
LU wins by 12 (86-74)

In other PL match-ups this weekend, Bucky and Army are the choices to win on Saturday while it’s Colgate and Holy Cross on Sunday.


At first glance, it would appear that Pomeroy has it right this time. The Greyhounds of Loyola have a weakness that fits our strength, i.e., defending the “3.” Only 14 teams across America give up a greater percentage of their opponents’ 3-ball attempts than LOM. And, this will be their ninth game away from home with but one win to show for their road efforts. That came against a then 3 and 6 Binghamton team who currently sits 4-11. We are, of course, going for our sixth straight win at Stabler. That said, let’s remember that neither of us are particularly strong on the boards and seldom can we block a shot. And, in terms of like-opponents, the record shows we each got the measure of Mt. St. Mary’s by 10, To further throw doubt in the mix, let’s recall that it only takes one hot hand to spoil the party. With that, let me introduce you to 6’4” Jr. Guard, Andrew Kostecka. The guy dropped 29 against Holy Cross on the heels of scoring 23 against UMass/Lowell and 27 against NC State. He sports a season-long .404 from “3” and .503 overall. To read more about LOM’s 48 pt. second half effort that fell short against The Cross, I give you…….

https://loyolagreyhounds.com/news/2019/ ... ath=mbball

See you all on Sunday!

if he is their only big gun, I like our chances with the guys we can throw at Kosteca, KL, CB and MW are good defenders

Lehigh65 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 04, 2019 5:32 pm The Greyhounds of Loyola have a weakness that fits our strength, i.e., defending the “3.” Only 14 teams across America give up a greater percentage of their opponents’ 3-ball attempts than LOM.

Pomeroy made an interesting study a few years ago on teams defending the three. Interestingly he found that past defensive success (or failure) against the three has almost no correlation to future success, i.e. that it mostly seems to be randomness. As his starting point, he took the top 20 teams at defending the three and the worst 20 teams one month into the season. What he found was that for the rest of the year, there was almost no difference between the "best" teams and the "worst" teams in defending the three going forward.

https://kenpom.com/blog/3point-defense- ... onents-3p/


Pomeroy: "On average over the rest of the season, there will be a roughly a 1-2 percent difference between the teams currently in the top and in the bottom 20 of opponents’ 3-point percentage. We’re talking about a difference of one make every two or three games between the best and worst groups. Without more analysis, one can’t say precisely how much skill a team has at influencing its opponents’ three-point percentage, but there’s a fair amount of evidence it’s not much, and even end-of-season figures are the result of significantly more noise than skill."


It will be interesting to see how Loyola does against the threes.

may be more of a case of who you played and how adept they were at shooting 3's

"Trey" bien...

All I know is Loyola has given us fits lately. Hopeful we play up to snuff tomorrow on defense.

van wrote: ↑Fri Jan 04, 2019 8:32 pm may be more of a case of who you played and how adept they were at shooting 3's

Might be a little of that - but for his sample, he had 40 teams who each played a total of 35+ games with perhaps 25 3-point attempts per game. Maybe 35,000 attempts. Pretty big sample size to have one group suddenly to have to defend much better shooters the second half of the season and the other group to suddenly play much worse shooters.

If I remember the kenpom research correctly, the best correlation he found for 3 pts defense was 2 pts defense. I read 2 things into that: teams that play good defense play good defense, but also - maybe - playing good 2 pt d causes opponents to take not-paticularly-good 3s.

So wading thru the analysis,the question is can our Gs take out their Gs? They certainly should easily. These are the games that make me nervous. Doc has to make sure this squad doesnt put out a WTF effort.

Marques out today - academic issues from 1st semester.
Damn. That sucks.