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By David in Naples
This year overall field goal % = 52.2%
Last year overall field goal % = 47.9%
This year 3 point field goal % = 34.2%
Last year 3 point field goal % = 39.9%
This year free throw % = 69.3%
Last year free throw % = 69.7%
So, the overall field goal shooting is better than last season, while the 3 point accuracy is down over 5%. That figures since the two best 3 point shooters are gone. Megan hit three at a 45.1% rate and Crystal was at 41%. Free throw shooting is almost dead even, but this year's team is getting to the line more (12.4 made per game vs 9.6 per) vs last year.
By far the most interesting stat is points per game. Currently, the Huskies average 85.1 per game. Last season, the average after 32 games was 78.7 per. That was the first below 80 point average in years. Looks like Geno's complaints are just the boy crying wolf.
Go Huskies..!!
I’ve long been interested in the concept of home court advantage. Everybody knows that teams tend to do better at home and everybody is right. Home court advantage isn’t simply one thing, it’s an accumulation of several things. At home, players get to sleep in their own bed, eat food they are used to eating, and follow an established routine.
When the game starts, the home team gets to play on the floor they are used to playing on, and when they take shots especially long-range shots, they are shooting against a familiar back drop. Finally, and most importantly for fans, they usually have a number of fans cheering them on to victory. Fans in the stands can contribute in two ways, the most obvious being the adrenaline rush a player gets from the positive feedback when playing well, and some believe that referees are unconsciously biased, with some reluctance to make a close call against the home crowd.
Statisticians have attempted to quantify the overall home-court advantage. Teasing out the relative contributions of the various factors is a lot tougher. There are statistical techniques to do this, but they often get dwarfed by “noise”. In some disciplines, such as physics, one can analyze the contributions of various factors by doing experiments in which some factors are held constant. That’s generally tougher to do when analyzing sports results. However, the very limited silver lining to the Covid cloud is that we have some data where crowds are significantly reduced or nonexistent. In theory, that should give us some insight on the contribution of the crowd, although any results need to be tempered by the fact that this is such a wacky year, so other things will be affected as well.
The Massey stats, to which you’ve heard me refer ad nauseum, contain much more than just rankings of teams and expected results in upcoming games. One of the stats they measure is HFA, short for home-field advantage. For women’s basketball, the HFA value was a little over three (in the past), which not coincidentally, matches the general rule of thumb that home-court is worth about three points.
This year, however, the HFA is closer to 2.75 points. It varies by team, and I don’t see an overall value but Massey calculates it by conference, and those values are generally in the 2.75 to 2.8 range. This observation leads to two differing conclusions: first, that the impact of crowds not being in the stands is measurable and shows up in the data. Second, it doesn’t seem to be worth a lot. Are we really saying that driving all the way out to Gampel and screaming our heads off is only worth a quarter point a game or so?
I believe it’s worth a little more, and Ken Massey agrees with me (I think). You don’t want me to get into the weeds discussing Bayesian analysis and prior distributions, but I can cover the basics by noting that rating systems based on computers rather than human voters can be roughly categorized into two groups. One group (which includes RPI and NET) uses the statistics for the current season only to come up with the ratings. The other group includes approaches that have starting values derived from prior year’s results. (In Bayesian terms that’s called a prior distribution). I’ve always known that Massey falls into the second category. Those of you who have followed ratings closely know that the ratings from the first group such as RPI are nonsensical in the early part of the season, and take a while to settle down. I think that’s part of the reason the NET results were not provided publicly early in the season — they waited until they had several games under their belt. Massey ratings start using historical values, which obviously means they can be a bit off if there is a significant change in roster, but that typically more than offsets the nonsensical results from the rating systems that ignore the past.
While I’ve always known that Massey included some weight for historical results. I didn’t know and hadn’t attempted to estimate how much weight was used. He was kind enough to respond to some inquiries and said that the waiting includes three or four prior seasons. Very roughly, this might mean that the quarter point showing up in the data might really be a full point of impact but is diluted a little bit because of the weight on prior years.
Ken Massey also provided some interesting links about analyses and other sports. When I found very fascinating is this site:
https://statsbylopez.netlify.app/post/playing-at-home/
The site summarizes home-field advantage by professional teams, noting a relatively close clustering within sport except for professional basketball. I observed that the largest disparities were dominated by West Coast teams, which I think is driven by the longer travel distances and time zone changes. Ken remarked, “ ‘Homefield advantage’ is a convenient term, but I think it's just as much an ‘away disadvantage’ “. I think that makes a lot of sense. The West Coast teams get the disadvantage of traveling east, but also have large traveling distances even when visiting West Coast teams. In contrast, while the East Coast teams will have a disadvantage when going West, they will have more visits to relatively nearby East Coast competition so the aggregate away disadvantage for East Coast teams is smaller than for West Coast teams.
Finally, I monitor a number of stats and always like it when UConn is doing well in most of them, but a home-court advantage is a two-edged sword. The positive is that it is nice as a fan to think we help contribute to it, but for teams interested in national championships, those will be played on neutral courts and a large home-court advantage does nothing for us in the final four.
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