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HookEm

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Posts posted by HookEm

  1. Marquette is the #39 program per KenPom going back to 1997.  They have finished 56, 10 and 14 under Shaka, which puts them ~top-20.  If I'm honest, Shaka is better than a top-40 coach, and is just on the fringe of the top-25.  So, for Marquette he is a great fit.

    At Texas, he had us with the #23 best average KenPom ranking over his tenure.  He had VCU as the #31 ranked team over his tenure there.  

    I wish he would have worked out at Texas. I was really excited when we hired him... almost as excited as when we hired Beard.  And he was just about as hot as Beard as a coach when we hired him. But he was such a moron here, that I will root for him to fail wherever he goes.  Does that make me petty? Yes. Next question.

  2. 5 hours ago, HookEm said:

    I'm going to hold off on further comments about Shaka choking until he bows out this year.  He beat the hell out of us and very well could be in the Elite 8 by this time tomorrow.

    OK. Now we can make fun of Shaka again.  Whew!

  3. 22 hours ago, 'stache said:

    That's a pretty meh hire for a place like Louisville.

    Agreed. I think they could have done better. This is a risky hire in my opinion.

    Just for fun, here are Pat Kelsey's KenPom team stats compared to Rodney Terry's record prior to Texas:

    • Pat Kelsey –  12-YR Career Avg: 153 –  Best 5 Teams:  71, 101, 101, 113, 140 – Tourney Wins: 0

    • Rodney Terry – 10-YR Career Avg: 151 – Best 5 Teams: 79, 98, 108, 109, 116 – Tourney Wins: 0

    Pretty similar. Kelsey has made more tourneys, but his teams weren't actually rated very well.  

     

  4. KenPom had us at #16 pre-season, and we were an improbable pair of made TN free throw away from potentially making the Sweet 16.  The only other schools who got close were Oakland, Colorado and A&M.  So you could say we finished the year in the 17-20 range.  Pretty solid prediction. 

  5. Texas should definitely be the 800 pound gorilla in this era of college sports, regardless of the sport.

    The last 3 years have definitely favored experienced teams, with all of the 5 and 6 year players enabled through Covid.  But with the extra Covid year now over, I think the young talent will go up in value.  And it is good timing because we are reloading with some top-tier young talent.

    Regarding Mitchell, if he leaves it will be to a top team like Kansas - and then we are all going to watch with dismay when he is a huge contributor.

  6. I thought it might be interesting to trend the data from all of Derka's KenPom updates through the year.  It seemed like the team got a lot better in the later part of the year, especially on defense and I wanted to see what the data looked like. 

    The blue line is offense rating, the green line is defense.  The solid line is where we finished the year.

    We ended up finishing about where we started on offense.  KenPom's had us at #30 in the preseason and we finished at #29. Most of the season we in that range.  

    Defense was a different story. KenPom had us at #6 to start the year and it took us it took 6-7 games for the model to settle in where we belonged ~50-60.  Our average and median rank was 44 and 50 respectively.   We bottomed out after the BYU game ranking #74!! on defense.  For me, that felt like the low point of the season. 

    From there, we took Houston to OT and then beat TCU and K-State and punished West Virginia.  The only real defensive lapse was giving up 93 to Baylor, which accounted for the spike toward the end of the season. Overall, there was a definite positive trend in the last 2 months of the season.    

    image.thumb.png.b2969a67ff5b019586a32f5942d51a8f.png

     

    Our overall ranking mirrored our defensive ranking to a large degree.  

    image.png.1bbc02f7a90f2da3b6e0eec11d8ba944.png

     

  7. Perhaps, but Shedrick is #2 on the team in BPM and for me he had at least as many cringe moments as Hunter.  Mitchell was #3 on the team and half the people on this thread want him to hit the portal.

  8. I agree with just about all of that.  I don't think being "nice" is a criteria at all.  That said, recruiting matters a ton. Retention of your elite talent matters a ton. Motivating and in-season improvement matter a tremendous amount.  Handling the media and donors and assistants matters a lot too.  Being nice is great if you can leverage it to help with all that.  But you can also be an asshole and do all of that well too.

  9. Tyrese Hunter has started all 106 games of his college career. And as a starter, his team has won 6 tournament games (a Sweet 16, an Elite 8 and a Round of 32).  On the ISU Sweet 16 team, he lead the team in assists and was 2nd in scoring and minutes. On last year's Elite 8 team, he was 3rd in scoring, 3rd in assists and 3rd in minutes.  On this year's team he was tied for 1st in assists, 1st in steals, 3rd in scoring, 2nd in minutes.

    TJ Otzelberger and Chris Beard both thought enough of him to make him a starter - and he has proven he can start on an elite team that has success in March.  Just about anybody you get in the portal to replace him is going to carry way more risk than they bring in upside.  Hunter also has a lot of "dog" in him and can be a defensive menace.

    By far his biggest issue is the turnovers. My goodness the turnovers.  We have had a lot of players who have had similar turnover metrics, but it isn't really the number of turnovers, it is when and how they happen. For the year, he averaged 2.6, which isn't terrible considering that at their BEST, TJ Ford had 2.5 a game. DJ Augustin had 2.8. Matt Coleman had 2.6.     

    I still mainly blame our roster composition. We had to have Hunter handling the ball to try to free up Abmas to move off the ball as our primary scorer.  I love Weaver, but wouldn't trust him as a primary ball handler against a team like Tennessee.  And Horton was also not the answer. 

  10. 5 minutes ago, Captainant said:

    I still have a major problem with a vision only driving model. There is not enough data to safely navigate around other independent agents 

    I don't know anything about any of this, but curious why a vision only driving model is insufficient.  Isn't that what humans have?

    I'm all for doing BETTER than humans, but if we can do just as good, then that is a solid start.

  11. 5 minutes ago, Firemans4Horn said:

    “I feel like [Coach Terry] really saved basketball for me,” Disu said, per the Austin American-Statesman. “I was in a tough spot that first year here at Texas, and even going into the second year was tough. But when RT took over, things started to kind of shift for me and my love for the game kind of starting to return. I’m so, so grateful for him for that. I appreciate him more than I can describe.”

    Disu added, “He gave me just a different style of coaching that was a little different from the previous one (coach). That really helped me to get back to being me, on and off the court.”

    Interesting quote that gives a lot of insight into the program. Not really that surprising, and is kind of a double edged sword.  The team clearly likes playing for RT, play very hard, and seem to (generally) improve in March. 

    On the other hand, it is clear that Beard was a much tougher coach as I'm sure we all appreciate.  That will give you a more disciplined and mentally tough team, but it can burn out some players.  You can also expect more attrition.

  12. ·

    Edited by HookEm

    Looks like our offense is now #29 and our defense is #30 on KenPom after yesterdays games.  So I retract my argument that our offense and defense were the same.  Our offense is indeed better than our defense.

    Carry on.

    Happy Eddie Murphy GIF by Laff

  13. We have had a few decent players over the years who turned it on and had great senior seasons. I am hopeful that could happen with Tyrese Hunter. 

    Tyrese Hunter

    image.thumb.png.db1f6a8c173af2893f51b33d95a331c1.png

    Javan Felix

    image.thumb.png.8351bf10257cc083a9f61e16bf0a294c.png

    Matt Coleman:

    image.thumb.png.93242c727cc1f19bb3e06ced7db1d58f.png

    Kerwin Roach:

    image.thumb.png.3be06b9679eb371cf554f2c24f261122.png

    If you look at all of these guys, their productivity and efficiency all went up in their senior year.  Hunter improved in most facets this year except in his turnovers and free throw shooting.  His defense was really solid.

    I attribute the turnovers as much to roster composition than anything.  Last year he turned it over less because he was asked to do less.  Pairing him with Abmas was just not good at all.  You basically have two undersized shooting guards out there.  Horton and Weaver are also not great to pair with him.  None of them are great passers.

    If we can get a floor general in the portal, a mature player who can play defense and lead us in transition, it could really unlock Hunter. I could see him averaging 15 ppg and cut his turnovers in half with the right running mate.

     

    image.png

  14. People spend $10 on a basic analytics website, do lazy copy and paste work and think they are writing for Fangraphs. 
     
    image.thumb.jpeg.cea1e0fa4add48871b759d29f00a20a1.jpeg

    To be fair, I only subscribed to KenPom because it seems to be the Bible around here. Sorry if our defensive improvements in the last week suddenly made the data worthless. [emoji1787]
  15. 26 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

    this team was 260th nationally in 3P defense,

    Yes, they were 260th. Now they are 157th.  Maybe if they would have played this good all year, we would have had a better year.  Considering the WHOLE season though, this team played better 3 point defense than nine other teams since 1999.

    image.thumb.png.e5187f65f4cacd36a03dcb12a6692715.png

    If you want to compare regular seasons, without Big 12 tourney and without the NCAA tourney, that is fine. Just compare apples to apples across all the years.  

  16. Look, it is very simple. If you use the end of tournament KenPom defense rankings for 1999-2023, you should also use the end of tournament ranking for 2024.  This isn't complicated.  

    And comparing an absolute defensive ranking from 2013 to one from 2024 is stupid.  The game is different now.  We shoot more 3s.  We have 5th and 6th year players.  We have players foregoing the NBA draft because of NIL.  Comparing the national rank is a better measure of how we stack up in the given year.

    None of this has anything to do with RT. It is just basic logic. 

     

    Go Crazy Wtf GIF

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