by BabaGhanouj (2020-07-20 09:38:48)
Edited on 2020-07-20 09:48:38
Like most others, I was surprised by our dreadful season last year. My recognition of the importance of experience has grown over the years, mostly thanks to postings of others on the Bench. In fact, spurred by last year’s debacle, I’ve modified my average ratings collections to also account for experience. That’s a future subject, however.
I wanted to put together some stats to show why Notre Dame’s lack of experience played a major role in last season’s poor performance. But when I gathered the facts together, I was shocked.
I selected Notre Dame’s top six players in playing time last year, along with the top six from some other schools, and compared their previous minutes of playing time before the season began. I chose Connecticut, because that is typically the standard and a rival, and also South Carolina since they ended up ranked number 1. I also threw in Oregon’s experience for fun (Note, like the other schools, this is Oregon’s average of their top six players’ experience at the beginning of last season!). Here are the results:
After the surprising results, I threw together the average ratings for those same players.
There is plenty of fodder here for discussion. I’ll let you handle that, but I was shocked at the relative lack of experience in both Connecticut and South Carolina. Numbers never tell the whole story (I’d start with our only 2 players with significant experience.), but they can lead us to find explanations.
A few notes:
• Column 3 is just the average of the minutes in column 2.
• Just from glancing at other teams, I’d guess that most teams’ top six average 1,200 to 2,000 average playing time minutes going into a season. The three teams selected for comparison just happened to have a number of freshman playing significant minutes. Oregon was special in the other way.
• The ratings for Mikayla Vaughn, Aubrey Griffin, and Mikiah Harrigan were inconsistent. In Vaughn’s case they ranged from 25 to 56 with 150 by Prospects and 107 by Sports Madness. For Mikiah Harrigan they were in the 64 to 74 range with a 151 by Blue Star. Aubrey Griffin’s ratings were 21 through 59 with a 90 by Prospects. (Dillon’s druthers to throw out the worst rating, at least, would have merit, though in Vaughn’s case it might be best to throw out the 2 worst.)
• UConn’s ratings were the average of only 5 since Anna Makurat is from Poland. Also, imagine UConn’s ratings if Griffin were thrown out since she only averaged 16 min/game.
The two highest values drop to 0 -- and you have four starters with 0 previous minutes and the average drops dramatically.
Then try the next best metric -- players that played college basketball the previous season. Again, 4 from ND did not play the previous season, and a 5th didn't play 75% of the previous season, and the 6th barely played while recovering from being out the previous season -- and then missed the first half of the season being evaluated.
In short -- ND is the only team that had in effect zero returning players that played college basketball the prior season and 4 of 5 starters that had zero minutes playing for ND.
although one player was the issue
That shocking bastard
to why those teams were so much better. Those were the point guards on each of the 3 teams you list the minutes and each was the player with the most minutes. Then you bring up Oregon and I don't have to even look at the stats to know Sabrina had the most minutes on that very experienced team. Sniezek was only with her team 1 year while the other 3 were 4 year players on the same team. All the point guards were eligible to be drafted in the WNBA. They go: #1 Sabrina, #7 Harris, #16 Dangerfield. Sniezek not drafted, but she will parlay her Stanford/ND education to a fine future.
Add that the second experience player for the 4 teams you compare were drafted by the WNBA at #6 Herbert Harrigan, #8 Hebard, & #9 Megan Walker vs Destinee who still has a year left and probably won't go that high in next years draft, the quality of that experience matter as the glue to a team's success with the equally talented younger rosters (with the exception of the more experienced Duck team).
At one point, I suggested that UConn wasn't as far from a season like ND's if they had had similar experiences (player with most experience out for the season. 2nd most experienced player out for quite a few games early on, a senior to be leaving early, etc.).
One common response was "You can't compare those particular players being out due to the difference in talent level! Those aren't equal talent rankings!" (Ignoring the fact that I was using playing experience and position, not talent level in my comparison).
Auriemma typically doesn't go that deep most seasons anyway (typically going only 6-7 player deep until they get to the blowout stage), but last year they had a lot less experience in their backups than usual. They wouldn't have been able to make a 2001 type recovery (when they lost Abrosimova and Ralph, yet still stayed in the top 2 and made the Final Four) if they had a similar injury situation to that year.
For Notre Dame's players, many of those "previous minutes" came from other teams. I think if there was a way to take into account "previous days on team roster" then we would get a more faithful explanation for the woes of 2019-2020. For Notre Dame, Vaughn's and Gilbert's combined 556 previous minutes were darn near the only previous minutes played in a Notre Dame uniform on the entire roster (Cole and Benz contributing a scant bit otherwise). Meanwhile, aside from the freshmen, everyone in these tables for Connecticut and South Carolina had been on their respective rosters in 2018-2019, and although you don't show the players I think the same is true for everyone on Oregon besides Minyon Moore. That's at least one whole season of practicing, learning the coaching style, learning the plays, and developing chemistry that every player on those teams had that Notre Dame didn't - not even Sniezek and Walker who came from elsewhere.
Like you said, numbers don't paint the whole picture. If we consider how many minutes our players had logged in South Bend, it provides some more context to your numbers and helps explain the rag-tag nature of the team this past year.
also contributed.
The peer group integrated talented new players and let them grow in their roles. You always want to restock rather than rebuild. It wasn't surprising to me that the team played better when Mik returned from injury. Other symptoms of this were a large number of unforced turnovers (players in the wrong place) and desperate shots at the end of the time clock.
Other issues were the number of players who were coming back after missing most of the previous year and an imbalance of skills (nice way of saying we didn't rebound well).
I'd be interested to give values of 1-10 for each players ranking and 1 - 5 for minutes played and multiply them together. Teams with more talent in younger players, like us, should stand out.