Doggydaddy's Den: Doggy's Doghouse 12/7/2022

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GO UCONN!!!!!

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UCONN vs Princeton

7-1 5-2

Princeton really misses Abby Meyers. She was by far the best player on the team. She led the team in scoring and three point percentage.

This year, it's been an ok start for the Tigers. They beat Temple 67-49 to open the season and battled Big East's Villanova only losing by 10 points 69-59. They beat the next Big East team they player, a 62-58 win over Seton Hall. In a game they should have won by more, Princeton squeaked out a 70-67 win over Fordham.

The only comparison game we have right now is against Texas, who has dropped out of the rankings but was No. 19 at the time they played the Tigers. The Longhorns blew out Princeton 74-50.

Princeton is on a two game winning streak after beating overmatched Maine 65-51 and Towson 71-54.

Here is a quick blurb on their players.

Princeton Starters

6'3" Sophomore Forward

Princeton Bench

Ellie Mitchell is a 6'1" rebounding machine. She just has a knack for where the ball is going off the rim. She had 23 rebounds against Seton Hall and averaged 13.7 per game. Pretty amazing. But she doesn't do much damage in the scoring department averagin only 6.1 PPG. But she loves to get her hands on passes and has 25 steals on the season.

Chen, Cunningham and Stone, all guards, are the leading scorers for Princetone. Chen shoots 41.2% on threes, and Stone is right behind her at 39.3%. The Huskies are going to have to stay with them on the outside.

6'3" Morton is the only real size on the Princeton team but she plays pretty small. She only averages 2 rebounds a game and 2 blocks on the season.

Not much help from anyone else on the roster.

Good news is Juhasz is a game time decision, but even without Azzi and Dorka, UConn has more talent on the floor at any time. Does that mean an easy win? Probably not. Princeton is well coached and will make it tough on UConn to score, especially without their leading scorer. But I also expect the UConn defense to play one of their better games.

I think they will oversome the injuries one more time and put away the Tigers by 12+ points.

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Game Preview

Pregame Interviews

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KK Arnold set a new school record with 43 points Tuesday.

43 points (16-29 FG, 6-14 3-PT, 5-6 FT), 7 rebs, 6 assists, 3 steals

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GAMES

UPSETS IN RED

No. 7 Virginia Tech 73 Boston College 58

No. 8 North Carolina 64 UNC Wilmington 42

No. 10 Iowa State 70 No. 16 Iowa 57

No. 19 Baylor 91 UT Arlington 36

No. 24 Kansas State 72 Kansas City 45

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No.

Straight from the Dog

No. 16 Iowa's Caitlin Clark had 19 points, 8 rebounds, 8 assists and 5 steals in a great performance as they beat No. 10 Iowa State 70-57. Of note in this game is the improved defense, only allowing 57 points. Clark got on the team after a 94-81 loss to NCST. Looks like her talking got the team going. They can be a tough team if they can play some defense to go with their stellar offense.

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By PHIL

Massey Ratings and Rankings

Yes, we all know that the AP dropped UConn to 6 after the loss to Notre Dame. We also know why it happened. Notre Dame had their best win of the year, and not just a win but a convincing win, and deserve to move up. Similarly, UConn suffered a loss and deserved to move down, with the only question “how much?”. The voters decided to slot UConn one position behind Notre Dame. Completely understandable. Voters might factor in the loss of Azzi Fudd in the game, and if it had come down to a buzzer beater, who knows, UConn might’ve dropped less, but we know if they had remained above Notre Dame, some tongues would wag. However, the final score wasn’t close, so it made the voters actions easier.

The computer algorithms look at it differently. For one thing, while one might imagine an algorithm that adjusts for missing players, the Massey algorithm does not, so that’s not a consideration. More importantly, the algorithm doesn’t say to itself the two teams are reasonably close in the rankings and the lower one beats the other head-to-head, they should flip the order. The computer algorithm has an overall ranking for each team, and when a game is played, each ranking is updated based upon the result. The team that lost is going to see its ranking go down, the team that won is going to see its ranking go up, and two new values will be produced. It’s possible but not necessarily the case that the order of the two teams will reverse.

Notre Dame had an 8.43 rating before the game. They now have an 8.59 rating, which is a significant increase, understandable because of a win over a highly ranked team. Notre Dame was and is highly ranked in Massey as they are in the AP, but in Massey, the ranking moved from 15th place up to 9th.

UConn’s rating was 9.30 before the game, and because of the loss it dropped all the way to 9.09. I get that many readers aren’t used to looking at the rating numbers, so you may be interested in how far UConn fell in the Massey ratings.

They fell all the way from second to… Second.

I suspect this surprise some people. It surprised me and I look at these numbers every single day.

But looking closer it makes sense.

Before the Notre Dame lost the top three teams in Massey were:

Rating Team

9.45 South Carolina
9.30 Connecticut
8.92 Stanford

Note something that probably surprises many people — Connecticut is separated from South Carolina by 0.15 while being separated from Stanford by 0.38. They were much closer to South Carolina than to Stanford.

This was recently posted on a UConn fan site:

From my perspective, Gamecocks and Cardinal are clearly better than the rest of the field. Then there are 8-10 teams, including UConn in the next tier that can beat nearly anyone on a good day and lose to nearly any other good team on a bad day. A # 6 ranking seems fair after yesterday.

I get that. My gut says the same thing, but it’s interesting to see that the numbers tell a different story (I do think the numbers are important, but I don’t pretend that they are infallible).

The loss to Notre Dame did hurt Connecticut in the Massey ratings. They dropped 0.21 — for perspective Utah is ranked number 11 in Massey and Baylor, ranked number 22 in Massey, are separated by about the same amount. The drop was significant – it just happened that Connecticut was rated so far above Stanford that the drop did not result in moving down a single position.

Referring again to the Magic quote, it is useful to look at Massey rankings to see how teams cluster.

While you can do it by looking at the numbers, it’s much easier to look at a bar graph.

I plotted the top 14 teams (according to Massey) as a bar graph. I followed that with a graphic with some groupings.

Before the recent loss, Connecticut was closer to South Carolina, but not quite close enough to group them as a pair. After the loss, it still looks to me like South Carolina stands alone, Connecticut follows but by itself, then Stanford and NC State are almost indistinguishable from each other.

Following that is a group of four: Indiana, Ohio State, Virginia Tech, and Michigan which are very close to each other, and that’s followed by a group of five: Notre Dame, North Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Oregon which are very close to each other. UCLA rounds out the group but is distinguishable from Oregon.

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