Bulldogs Roundball

Losing Simons and Shooting Fish in a Barrel

2012-02-05T15:59:00.004-06:00

Nothing like one day to completely shatter your expectations of a team. We learned yesterday that Ben Simons has mono. Coming from someone who had mono when I was Simons' age, he's out for the remainder of the season. Even if he comes back, he won't be the same player.

Losing Ben is huge, and it became painfully obvious by last night's 57-39 debacle against Missouri State that this team isn't ready yet to compete without him. A fair argument can be made that Simons is one of the most consistent players in the MVC (He seemingly always shoots well, gives you 15+ a game, doesn't make many mistakes, and is reliable). That's huge on a team filled with lots of guys who can be quite volatile in their production (Rice, Alexander, Hawley) or others who tend to be tentative (Jeffers). Taking away that rock leaves the team out of sync and unfortunately nobody could make an adjustment.

We really needed Rayvonte Rice to step up in Ben's absence, and he couldn't have done more of the opposite. Other than a dunk (which really came from a great feed from Judd Welfringer), Rice was 0-10 from the field. He certainly wasn't the only one that laid a goose egg, but it was ugly.

After seeing him shoot several bricks from three, I got curious as to just how bad Rice has been from three this year. The answer is horrendous. With his 0-3 night from three last night, Rayvonte Rice is now shooting 6-40 (15%) from three in MVC play. That is so bad it's actually astounding.

Before thinking through the implications of that number, let me first voice my frustrations. Rice is so good at basketball, no question. Everyone is aware of his superior athletic ability.

He is 63-148 (43%) from two. Very solid given that he uses more possessions than anyone in the MVC.
He is in the top 10 in the MVC in rebounding
He has gotten to the line more than anyone in the MVC
He leads the conference in steals.

Simply put, he does a lot. But he DOESN'T shoot threes well. The frustrating part is that he doesn't seem to notice and/or care. It would be one thing if this were his weakness and he took a three every now and then. However, he averages 3 attempts per game. Only Simons and Hawley have shot more threes on our team in conference (72 and 45). He is clearly looking to get three point shots off. I'm not sure if he's seen a stat sheet or not, but he probably should realize that every time he takes a three, he's more or less giving away a valuable possession.

Let's think through how ridiculous shooting 15% from three point range is:

If you give Kraidon Woods (a 43.1% free throw shooter) three free throws, he will hit all three of them 8% of the time. So about half as often as Rice hits threes, Kraidon Woods could hit three free throws in a row.
Putting it into perspective against someone more proficient at it, Aaron Hawley has shot only five more threes in conference than Rice. However, he has made three times as many (18-45 versus 6-40).
Chris Carpenter, pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, batted 0.155 this season. So Rice is as successful at converting three pointers as Chris Carpenter is at getting base hits.
Tim Tebow's maligned Denver Broncos offense conveted 30.8% of their third downs, right at the bottom of the league. So Denver is twice as good at converting third downs as Rice is at shooting threes.
The New Orleans Hornets are 4-20 so far in the NBA (.167). So, the second worst NBA team is as good at winning games as Rayvonte Rice is at shooting threes.
In 1920, Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in 458 at bats, homering in just under 12% of his at bats. So, Rice is slightly better at converting a three pointer than Babe Ruth was at knocking the ball out of the park in 1920.
Manute Bol shot 43-205 (21%) from three in his NBA career. So Bol, a 7'7" shot blocker was able to shoot threes (even from a further distance) at a more successful rate.
More than half the teams in the NHL convert their power plays more than 15% of the time.

If I'm sounding overbearing on this, that is the point. 15% from three is beyond abysmal.

Projection Time!!!

2012-02-04T13:54:00.003-06:00

The MVC conference season is two-thirds complete. It's a great time of year, because with 12 conference games down, we know quite a bit about each team. However, there still exists a lot of uncertainty of how the next three weeks will play out.

To help understand what could and very well might happen, I built my standard simulation model that I do around this time every year. In the past, I've relied on Ken Pomeroy to help with the probabilities of winning. However, he's hidden that information behind a yearly subscription that I'm not willing to pay. Boo-urns. End result is that it made me have to actually do more work this year.

The following paragraph and bullet points describe my method. Feel free to skip this if you want to save yourself the details. Just know that, from what I have been able to piece together, it's not all that different than what Pomeroy does, but likely has some different assumptions and I probably don't have as many back end adjustments as he does. Ultimately, I got data from my favorite college basketball stat website, Statsheet.com, I pulled game by game results (efficiencies and possessions) for each MVC game that has occurred this year (all 60 of them). I then built my model doing the following:

Determined each MVC team's overall offensive and defensive efficiencies on both home and the road. This is critical, because there's a difference in how the teams play, and it's not consistent across the teams.
Took those raw numbers and adjusted them for opponent strength. This washes out the bias against teams who have played tougher schedules and now have easier remaining games. This gives us a feel for how a team would perform (home or away) against an average MVC opponent.
Used the Pythagorean Expectation Method to turn those efficiencies into an unbiased expectation of winning a game against a standard MVC team.
Using these unbiased probabilities of winning, I pitted teams against one another using the log5 formula to come up with a simple chance of winning for the home team.
I then used Monte Carlo simulation techniques to simulate out the remainder of the season.
In the event of ties, I applied the description of the tiebreaker formula from the MVC website. I used OOC SOS from RPIForecast.com and didn't change those in each scenario (which implicitly assumes the games that happen in the MVC don't impact games from other conferences, which I'm fine with).

The following is a snapshot of what I was seeing in 5,000 runs:

TEAM	Rank	%Thu
CREI	1.4	0%
WSU	1.6	0%
IllSt	4.4	8%
MSU	4.4	7%
EVAN	5.4	32%
DRAKE	5.5	32%
UNI	6.3	50%
ISU	7.1	71%
SIU	8.8	99%
BU	10.0	100%

This lists the teams in decreasing order of their average finishing rank in the conference, and their probability of playing on Thursday. Interesting conclusions include:

My model really likes the remaining schedule for Illinois State (gets BU twice, and is a solid home team) and Missouri State (four road games, but SIU is one of them and EVAN is another, who is a poor home team. This combines with very winnable home games against ISU and BU).
It sees Evansville and Drake as really volatile teams over the next several weeks, ending at anywhere from 7-11 wins for each. Schedules are generally tougher than the two mentioned above. DRKE can own the tiebreaker against both IllSt and EVAN if they win those next games, which tremendously helps their chances.
UNI can sweep DRKE with the H2H tiebreaker. They're one game back (5-7) from DRAKE, EVAN, IllSt, and MSU. It actually likes their chances tonight against CREI. If they can pull that game out, it would be huge for them, and really puts pressure on the 6-6 teams -- most notably DRAKE. Believe it or not, tonight's game against CREI has major implications for DRAKE.
ISU (That's Indiana State) has similar issues that UNI does. They've been an awful MVC road team so far and they still have dates @WSU and @MSU along with hosting CREI. The thing I'll say is that this looks a lot at what they've done -- to the extent that Odum continues to get healthier, it's quite possible what is up there is too punitive.

Things are still so much up for grabs. Tonight is going to be a HUGE night in the MVC.

Other things I noticed when I built this model:

EVAN is actually a more efficient team on the road than at home. While their record is the same (3-3), their offense has somehow been way more productive on the road. It just is imporant to note that when they come to DRAKE in a week or so, it's no easy task for the Bulldogs.
CREI scores anywhere, practically no difference between home and away. Sign of a top tier team.
WSU's defensive performances at home have been absolutely nasty. I've got them as almost 20 points per 100 possessions better as a defensive team at home. Going in there is going to be nearly impossible for the Bulldogs.
Our ability to score on the road is considerably worse than at the Knapp, which is really the reason why we have such differences in results (4-2 vs. 2-4). I'd be willing to wager that a lot of that has to revolve around three-point shooting and free throws.
IllSt's defense is about 20 points per possession worse on the road. They go from the fourth best defense at home to the worst defense in the MVC at home. It's puzzling, and something to keep note on. This is the same case with UNI, and why they've struggled this year. For some reason they can't get that classic UNI defense to work outside of Cedar Rapids. Both of these teams are the toughest to beat at home outside of CREI and WSU.

BracketBuster Reactions

2012-01-30T21:14:00.002-06:00

Here are the TV matchups, sorted by Away Team RPI as of right now (RPI Source = Statsheet.com):

Away	Home	A RPI	H RPI	A Rank	H Rank
Saint Mary's	Murray State	25	37	1	2
Wichita State	Davidson	32	69	2	7
Long Beach Stat	Creighton	33	18	3	1
Northern Iowa	Virginia Common	55	89	4	11
Akron	Oral Roberts	57	51	5	3
Nevada	Iona	62	58	6	4
Drexel	Cleveland State	88	59	7	5
Drake	New Mexico Stat	92	94	8	13
Buffalo	South Dakota St	96	66	9	6
Valparaiso	Loyola Marymoun	117	106	11	16
Asheville	Ohio	130	70	14	8
Old Dominion	Missouri State	132	78	15	9
Texas-Arlington	Weber State	140	93	17	12

I'd be pretty irate if I was a Creighton fan right now, for three reasons:

REASON #1: CREIGHTON IS BETTER THAN MURRAY STATE AND GOT LEFT OUT OF THE PREMIERE GAME

"But Murray State is AP#9 and Creighton is only AP#13! Murray State is better!" OK, let me respond to that ill advised position by pulling the blinders off. I'm pretty convinced that the voters are not even watching Murray State games... it's truly that goose egg on the right side of the hyphen that is the only reason Murray State is in the Top 25.

If you look at things from an overall resume perspective, I can make a fairly convincing case that AP #13 Creighton is better than AP #9 Murray State, and it's not even close:

Murray State is really 18-0 and not 21-0. I'm sorry, Harris Stowe, Tennessee Temple, and Alaska Anchorage are not D-1 teams. I usually don't mind that a school throws a D-2 opponent on their schedule at the beginning of the season to tune up, but holy cow -- three? Creighton is 20-2, a legit 20-2.
RPI Top 100: Murray State 3-0, Creighton 6-2
RPI 151+: Murray State 14-0, Creighton 7-0
Murray State worthwhile wins: Memphis, Dayton, Southern Miss
Creighton worthwhile wins: San Diego State, Nebraska, Northwestern, Missouri State, Wichita State, Missouri State, Drake

If you're literate, you just read that Creighton has played five more games against Top 100 teams and have won three more. They have played half as many bottom feeders and have built wins against really quality teams. I shouldn't come off as so harsh because mid majors are in a system that makes it difficult to schedule games against quality teams. But, when we have a mid major that is the most deserving to shine, I struggle to see why it makes sense to not reward them.

Ultimately, this is the classic desire to paint a "feel good" story instead of actually looking and seeing that Murray State has played three good opponents this year. There's probably a few teams on that list above that would go 18-0 (see above on the three games I subtracted) with Murray State's schedule. Ultimately, because of the fact that the MVC is a damn good league and they have multiple teams at the top, Creighton gets the hose. It's embarassing.

REASON #2: THE MVC IS GOOD

Because the MVC is so good, Creighton doesn't even match up with the next best team in this event (Wichita State) because they'll probably end up playing them three times already this year. So for those keeping score at home, that's already another tier that Creighton has slid down.

REASON #3: THE SCHEDULE JOBBING

Despite being the best team in this event, Creighton got stuck with the 10PM Eastern game -- the latest time slot. So, if this game goes into overtime and has a fair amount of stoppages, it very well could butt up against midnight central time. Hard to believe that they got stuck with the late start. I'd be irate.

Other MVC Teams have some pretty fair gripes:

SHOCKER WHAT???

Wichita State fans can't be too happy either. They're essentially paired up in a "You win, you gain nothing -- you lose, you lose a lot" matchup with Davidson. Why not Oral Roberts? Why not Iona? Where did Davidson come from here? I'll admit that their win at Kansas was absolutely fascinating, but they've accomplished nothing past that. It's quite likely that if they knock off Wichita State (assuming the Shockers stay on a run), Davidson catapults themselves into the bubble conversation. On the flip side, if Wichita State takes care of business, it's quite unlikely this win really helps them out that much due to Davidson's incredibly lackluster resume past one win. Oral Roberts would have made more sense here to me. Heck even Cleveland State would have been better.

HATE THE DRAKE

New Mexico State will be a great matchup for the Bulldogs. Any Top 100 RPI team that we get matched up with is fantastic. Plus, we're on TV, who can complain? Well, if we're a top 10 road team (which we are), I think we actually can complain a bit. Why not Davidson, Ohio, VCU? Those were probably the teams more towards what we deserved to play. I'm not going to say that we aren't liable to lay a stinker on the road. We've proved that more than enough times. But what happens if Drake rattles off five in a row and has grandiose dreams of post-season tournaments? Having the opportunity to play a better opponent would help that cause tremendously.

GET OFF MY TUBE YOU DAMN TREES

Indiana State gets left off of TV. They struggle a bit from the UNI profile of having such a strong non-conference resume and then just laying a goose egg once conference season rolled around. Still, I find it hard to believe that UT-Arlington is more deserving.

THE LAST WORD

Bottom line: UNI gets a matchup that has a fun storyline, and the rest of the MVC gets jobbed in one form or the other. The MVC better be getting an exhorbitant amount of revenue from the TV contract for this. If not, why are we even in this thing?

Theory: BracketBuster Pairings are All About the Storylines that they can create

Murray State: ESPN wants to talk about the unbeaten streak, even though it's not horrendously impressive (Drake's 21 games in a row was much more impressive, BOOM eat that Racers).
Both UNI and VCU are squared off against one another so focus can be on recent tournament success.
Davidson was elevated to relive the Steph Curry days ("Remember the Curry days!!?!??!?") and to promote their only quality win ("This Davidson team is dangerous, they beat Kansas" and not "They just got beat by Samford, who you probably hear that and think is a single person, but no it's just a horrendous D-1 basketball program")

If they were about the best basketball matchups, I'd argue it should go:

St. Mary's @ Creighton
Wichita State @ Murray State
Long Beach State @ Oral Roberts
Northern Iowa @ Davidson
Drake @ Ohio
Drexel @ Missouri State
Indiana State @ VCU

Probably all of those should be televised, along with a few other matchups.

Creighton beats Drake 77-69 and Robot Fan and McDermott get in a tangle

2012-01-26T20:59:00.002-06:00

So, plenty about the game out there. What I'm having a tough time believing is that nobody is talking about the Doug McDermott / Robot Fan throwdown that happened last night. I've got a picture and audio from Robot Fan's press conference after the game, and some of the pictures from the scuffle. No video though. Probably because the Robot Fan is ninja like in how he strikes.

Robot Fan at the Press Conference (Picture):

So, Rayvonte Rice and Ben Simons are in the middle of talking about the hard fight, and Robot Fan just walks in and interrupts them and sits in between them. he then goes on the following tirade about his nemesis Doug McDermott:

Click on This for Robot Fan Post-Game Press Conference Audio

Notable Pictures Referenced in Robot Fan's Audio:

And with that he stormed out. I can't believe nobody is talking about this.

Transcript of Post-Game Words:

Robot Fan In The House. People have been asking me what the heck went on with me and Doug McDermott tonight.

About 10 minutes into the game Drake was up 17-16. I was wearing McDermott out. He could not handle Robot Fan. Chants such as "Daddy's Boy" were nothing compared to the jaw I was giving him. I cannot repeat the lip I was giving him but he was totally getting worn out. There is a picture of McDermott being coached by his dad and all he can do is look over and hear my dope words. Robot Fan was in his head.

Unfortunately the Jays got on a roll and were up double figures right before half. McDermott thought that the game was over because when they were up with a few seconds left McDermott threw me the finger. Robot Fan figured that he would be able to count to two, but apparently he cannot. He ran off of the court thinking the game was over. When he had to come back to Ron Pearson court for the second half, Robot Fan was totally in his head.

He started dropping balls out of bounds and getting totally out of his element. Robot Fan was letting him have it. Dude is like the pro Christian Laettner. Ha. Ha. Ha. Drake was storming all the way back and Robot Fan was in Doug's head.

Unfortunately, Double Zero (Echenique) sat on Rice's head and McDermott really enjoyed that and got back into his rhythm. What a weird man. After they beat Drake, McDermott got mouthy back with Robot Fan over in the corner. He was like "You are nothing, Robot". Robot Fan said "How about a taste of this" and smacked him across the face like he was a pale Charlie Murphy. Robot Fan smacked him so hard he had a black eye immediately.

He was smiling in the post game photos but Robot Fan could hear him sobbing the second he hit the tunnel.

That is what happened. If you hear a word otherwise it is lies. Trust a Robot, not a McDermott.

To that Nancy boy, I own you, Doug. Watch your back from the Robot Fan. No questions. I am out.

And We're Back!!!

2011-11-13T17:00:00.001-06:00

As a true fanatic of major league baseball, the energy that my St. Louis Cardinals gave me in the last month of the season, throughout the playoffs, capitalizing in a World Series Championship hasn't worn off yet. It won't for quite some time. From my perspective, one of the many beauties of college basketball is the perfection with which it inverses the baseball schedule. Right as the World Series wraps up, it's time to start focusing towards college media days and looking forward to position battles and early opponents. Undoubtedly, it would be asinine to expect the Bulldogs to put together they type of year that the Cardinals had. That said, despite our early struggles against Quincy I'm still excited for the start of another basketball season. I've been traveling the past few weekends and can't wait to get into the Knapp for the first time this season.

Blogger has moved into the 21st century and has provided BulldogsRoundball with the functionality to reformat some things which I've happily taken advantage of. I've tried to clean the site up a bit and simplify things. Hopefully, I'll add some other interesting tidbits here soon (I'm throwing around Poll ideas, picking against the spread, and most importantly a glossary of some of the terms I typically throw around). I'd encourage anyone, even the anonymous reader to post comments with items you'd like to see.

It's hard to believe it's here but Tuesday brings Iowa State. From my point of view, it's a match up of two teams that bring plenty of questions into this season. From the Drake perspective:

Who will win the point guard positional battle? Karl Madison, David Smith, or Kurt Alexander?
Will Rayvonte Rice take a step forward or be hampered by off-season idiocracy?
Will Seth Van Deest play this year? When will Reece Uhlenhopp rejoin the team?
Will Jordan Clarke and Kraidon Woods be able to strengthen the rebounding issues that plagued the Bulldogs a season ago?
Who will provide scoring support after Rice and Ben Simons? Jeremy Jeffers, Aaron Hawley, Alexander, Judd Welfringer, someone else?
How well will the Bulldogs be able to stretch opposing defenses with the graduation of sharpshooter Ryan Wedel?

These could go on and on. We've got several injuries early on, but it's time to really put this team to the test. Unfortunately we lost a complete stinker to Quincy, but those box scores show a team that we shouldn't see for the rest of the season. While a loss to a non D-1 opponent is inexcusable in any capacity, I don't think it is quite indicative of how well this team will play in the future. Likewise, I don't know how much the blowout win over Upper Iowa tells us other than the Quincy game was more of a hiccup and less of a reason to jump.

That said, we're going to face a stiff test on Tuesday. It's going to be an Iowa State team quite different than what we've seen in the past. They have questions of their own:

Is this really going to be a NCAA Tournament team, or just an overhyped squad that can't come together? We've heard plenty so far about Royce White, but will he be the real deal? What is going to be this teams identity?
Is the 18 turnovers at Lehigh a blip on the radar, or some ballhandling issues to be exploited?
Is there enough depth in that interior?
Is Anthony Booker going to make another three pointer in the remainder of his career after draining one against Lehigh?

Tuesday will be a stiff test. I'm hoping the following will occur:

Drake doesn't have too big of cohesion problems after not truly playing a game yet together this season.
Rice presents an offensive game that Iowa State isn't ready and capable to handle.
Jordan Clarke and Kraidon Woods play enough interior defense on White and more importantly, beat him on the boards.
Drake wins the shooting percentage substantially (we'll need lady luck on our side for this one).
Foul trouble does not plague our bigs.

If some of the above can occur, could definitely see the scales tipping our way. Either way, it will be good to see a big time matchup again in the Knapp.

Arch Madness Bracketology Pt. 2

2011-02-08T22:00:00.002-06:00

Thursday

#10 Bradley (4-14)

#7 Drake (7-11)

#9 Illinois State (5-13)

#8 Southern Illinois (6-12)

Friday

Illinois State/Southern Illinois Winner

#1 Wichita State (14-4)

#5 Evansville (10-8)

#4 Indiana State (10-8)

Bradley/Drake Winner

#2 Missouri State (14-4)

#6 Creighton (9-9)

#3 Northern Iowa (11-7)

Updates from last time:

With their recent surge in offensive efficiency and their three game winning streak, Drake has overtaken SIU as the seventh seed, and by a healthy margin. Even in the event of a tie, the Bulldogs hold the tiebreaker, owning the season sweep.
While no hit to their seeds, Wichita and Missouri State take a one game step back to the pack with some human performances of late. Wichita State goes down at home to SIU (a huge blow to their at large chances) and Missouri State recently had a two game skid.
Likewise, UNI still holds their seed but looks a lot more beatable without O'Rear.
Tonight's loss sets Creighton back a game, potentially costing them a seed. Coincidentally, the continued strong play by Evansville pushes them into the fifth spot.

Altogether, what looked like a clear two horse race has seen the odds open up to the field. While the recent skids could quite possibly be late season hiccups before the tournament (see UNI's loss to Evansville last year as a prime example), they do nevertheless show that any team can beat any other team. Arch Madness is primed to shape up with some great matchups.

Another interesting takeaway is the distribution of our final conference record:

6-12: 19.9%
7-11: 43.7%
8-10: 29.8%
9-9: 6.3%
10-8: 0.4%

Our odds of getting out of the play in round have increased from 1.0% to 4.0%. Essentially, we're going to need to win 9 or 10 games and have one of Evansville, Creighton, or Indiana State win LESS than 9 games. Because we'll essentially have split the series between these teams if we win, we'll lose in the tiebreaker because we currently have the worst RPI (assuming that continues of course). Therefore, we'll likely need to leapfrog one of those three. It's a tall order at this point, but it sure could happen.

It's essentially the same probability as Southern Illinois going into Wichita State and beating them at their house (Ken Pomeroy had it at a 3% chance).... which is exactly what happened tonight.

Stranger things have happened.

Some Thoughts on a Thursday

2011-02-03T21:27:00.002-06:00

So we really have SIU's number, huh? Regardless of the opponent, it's critical to secure the two game sweep against any opponent we can. And we sure did it in stylistic fashion last night.

While the 16/24 statistic from last night is unquestionably the most gaudy one of the night, the thing that stuck out to me was that, in two conference games, SIU has put up offensive efficiencies of 77.5 and 74.6 (points per 100 possessions). That's WAY down from our season average of 101.5, and basically represents a total lack of offensive firepower.

It's surprising to me because our next best in-conference defensive effort was allowing 90.6 against our only game against Bradley so far. That's a significant gap, and it roughs out to about ten points in a standard MVC game [65/100 x (90.6 - 75)]. Altogether, I know that the current standings make this not likely to happen, and there's that old saying about beating a team three times in a year, but I wouldn't be too sad to have to match up with them come Arch Madness.

Shifting to the other side of the ball, the Wedel experiment at the 1 is really starting to turn things around for the offense. While it came to fruition during back-to-back offensive stinkjobs at Evansville and against Wichita State, our offense has recently put up a 103.6 offensive efficiency in the past five games (well above the 89.7 we put up in our first seven conference games). Overall, the improvement we've seen in Drake's play as of late has come from the offensive side of the basketball, and it came shortly after Phelps made the switch at PG. After shooting 40.4% from the field and 31% from three, we've seen a sharp increase towards 47.5% from the field and 53% from three in the past five games. Even after normalizing out the ridiculous shooting spree at SIU, we still shot 49% from the three in the previous four games.

Again, I'd point to a two reasons that this experiment works out so well:

Don't look now, but Ben Simons is our most efficient offensive player in MVC play with a 113.0 offensive rating by my calculations. While he's not the guy or all-MVC at this point in his career, getting him off the bench and into the starting lineup is perhaps one of the smarter moves Phelps has made. Overall, Ben has chipped in 126 points in 12 MVC games and has done so at an efficient clip. He's shooting 44% from three in MVC play, and more importantly, has been visibly confident.
Furthermore, putting the ball in Wedel's hands has ensured that he gets shots and uses more possessions. Considering that he's one of more offensively efficient players (109.4 offensive rating), that's a good thing. His past five games have seen the following for shot attempts: 11, 4, 14, 12, 9. Other than the 4 in there which consisted of UNI taking him away, it's gotten him more shots.

The last thing I'll note continues the trend of Wedel. Check out these three point shooting splits this season:

Home = 48.7% (38/78)
Neutral = 47.0% (8/17)
Road = 31.4% (11/35)
Conference Home = 59.4% (19/32)
Conference Road = 30.4% (7/23)

Quite the difference. Unfortunately, I don't know how representative the "Neutral" is with only 17 attempts, and them being so far early in the season. Curious as to how this translates to the Scottrade Center as we make the trip in about a month...

Arch Madness "Bracketology"

2011-02-01T22:06:00.003-06:00

As of the end of tonight's games, I am putting our chance of getting out of the play in round at 1.0%. This is using a model I developed that simulates games using adjusted efficiencies and adjusting for home and away (perhaps I'll detail it more at another time).

In 5,000 scenarios, the best the Drakies did was go 9-9 (i.e. 6-1 the rest of the way). Unfortunately, that happened a whopping 3 out of 5000 tries. We're much more skewed to the other end, having a chance of losing out at 10.7%. Our most likely final record at this point is 5-13.

MVC Bracketology goes as follows:

Thursday:

(10) Bradley (3-15)

(7) Southern Illinois (7-11)

(9) Illinois State (5-13)

(8) Drake (5-13)

Friday:

(#) Play In Winner

(1) Wichita State (15-3)

(6) Evansville (9-9)

(3) Northern Iowa (13-5)

(#) Play In Winner

(2) Missouri State (15-3)

(5) Creighton (10-6)

(4) Indiana State (10-6)

Notes:

This adds up to 92 wins (there should be 90) due to rounding
I did apply the MVC tiebreaker when applicable, but this was done by scenario. The rankings above were the most likely scenario that fell out at this point in time.
Strictly by the numbers, Drake actually has a favorable schedule compared to UE, SIU, and ISU from here out.
The play in teams are fairly set at this point in time, with probabilities of getting out of the play in round at 10.1% (SIU), 1.0% (DU), 0.5% (ISU), 0.0% (BU). I'm not entirely sold that Bradley is actually mathematically eliminated yet, but their chances are so minute they round off here.

Don't look now but our offensive rebounding is improving

2010-12-28T21:11:00.005-06:00

It's something we have struggled with all season. It's been a great hindrance to our offensive efficiency. It's been perhaps our largest weakness this season. It is offensive rebounding.

To understand how our offensive rebounding performs, I like to look at Offensive Rebounding Percentage (OR%) instead of pure counts. The reason is that it normalizes for thing

s that can skew the results. For example, if you force a lot of turnovers and the opponent doesn't get up shots, it can make your offensive rebounds seem artificially low. There are numerous other reasons as well -- OR% does the best at normalizing these out.

How is it calculated? Basically it is equal to your offensive rebounds divided by your offensive rebounds plus opponents defensive rebounds. It truly is the percentage of rebounds that are up for grab that you get. For example, if Drake has 10 offensive rebounds in a game and the opponent has 20 defensive rebounds, Drake's OR% is 33.3% (10 / 30).

The MVC tends to run at a slightly lower OR% than the national average. So far this year, the average OR% for MVC teams is 33.4%, with the best team being Wichita State at 39.3% and the worst team being Bradley at 25.6%. The Bulldogs come in ninth at 26.3% for the season, 7.1% below the average and only 0.8% ahead of the worst team. Nationally, we come out at 303rd in the nation, so that should underscore how big of a difficulty we have had on the offensive boards this season.

Looking at it game to game, there certainly is an interesting trend:

The blue line represents our game by game results for OR%. As you can see, we were sitting roughly around 30% for the first five games of the season. Starting with the Colorado State game, our performance on the offensive boards dropped substantially, to the point that we had back to back games of 11%.

However, with the last two games, we have seen a renewed fury to the boards, logging OR% results of 36% (Dartmouth) and 34% (Chicago State). This is essentially back to where we were at in the beginning of the season. It certainly doesn't put us in the ballpark of greatness -- if you exclude our results of the Eastern Michigan, Boise State, Iowa games, we improve from 26.3% to 29.9%, good for 258th nationally and only 3.5% below the average team in the MVC. Again, nothing to celebrate, but something that will desperately limit a disparity that has of late put significant pressure on the offense.

Now, a fair point to make is to question the quality of competition in Dartmouth and Chicago State. Fair point. Dartmouth comes in at 298th nationally in OR% allowed. Chicago State comes in at 311th nationally in OR% allowed. So our improved performances were against teams that really struggle in limiting other teams offensive rebounds. To that I'll kindly note that:

Given the level we were rebounding at and the level of improvement, it's a notable achievement regardless of the opponent.
Colorado State was not a strong opponent when we started our slide (24% OR% in that game, against a team that is 228th nationally at preventing offensive rebounds).
Even though the other teams in our offensive rebounding skid were better opponents, when you adjust for opponent difficulty (in other words, adjusting for the fact that some teams allow different OR%'s) we still were coming out way low in our skid.

Given those items, I'm cautiously optimistic about our performance the last two games.

Can the improvement continue? Tomorrow comes the real test. The Southern Illinois Salukis are beasts on the boards, allowing only 27.9% of opportunities to be rebounded by the other team's offense. That's good for 29th in the country. With 6-9 Gene Teague and 6-7 Mamadou Seck patrolling the defensive glass, it's going to be a tall task to keep this improvement going along. But it's important, and with some help from Jordan Clarke coming back and what looks to be an improving Kraidon Woods, perhaps we can keep this trend rolling forward.

Work In Progress

2010-12-09T21:05:00.003-06:00

Unfortunately, my updates have been lacking lately. I wanted to pass along that I'm making some headway on building my own stats database -- which will allow me a much wider depth of analysis using advanced statistics. I'm looking forward to continually tracking Kraidon Woods' likely lead among all MVC players in fouls committed per 40 minutes, and way more useful statistics of the sort.

Look forward to the next update which should be real soon. In the meantime, plans are to do another Phelps poll this next week.

Southern Utah Thunderbirds (1-2) vs. Drake Bulldogs (1-1)

2010-11-23T20:06:00.004-06:00

SIZING UP THE THUNDERBIRDS

Last year's Southern Utah team was 7-22 (3-15 Summit), and they graduated their most efficient scorer (Davis Baker, 16.9 PPG, 49.8% EFG, 102.2 ORtg). But don't let that fool you, as the Thunderbirds added three junior college players and two freshmen.

Southern Utah started off their season with a dismal loss to Cal Baptist (69-79), followed by a win against Cal State Bakersfield (66-58) and then a loss to Utah State (53-66). In the statistics below, I have thrown out the Cal Baptist game since they are not D-1. Without further adieu, let's size up the Thunderbirds:

Likely Starters (* = newcomer):

*Ray Jones Jr. PG, 6-2 JR. Started at point guard in all games played so far. Seems to be struggling early on with 11 turnovers in the past two games to 6 assists. Shooting 2/15 (13.3%) in the past two games, but is able to get to the line and is 11/12. Junior college transfer.
Jordan Weirick, SG, 6-4 SO. Started at guard in their past two games. Shooting 8/17 with a 52.9% EFG, averaging 11 points per game in the past two games. Shot 44% from two and 31% from three last year as a freshmen.
*Ramell Taylor, SF, 6-6 JR. Junior college transfer that has stepped right into the starting lineup and hasn't looked back. In the past two games, Taylor has scored 38 points on 15/28 shooting from the field, 7/8 from the charity stripe. Leads the team in rebounds over the past two games with 14. Seems to be a potential all around player for the Thunderbirds.
Matt Massey, C, 6-9 JR. Shot 42% from two last year and scored 7.9 PPG. Has not looked to score early on with three shots in 33 minutes. 5 rebounds in the past two games, and averaged 4.3 RPG last year. Adds significant size on the frontline.
Matt Hodgson, C, 6-11 SO. Shot 58.4% from two point last year en route to 6.3 PPG. Has kept that same pace going with 15 points in the last two games with like shooting. Pulled down five rebounds over the past two games, pulled down 4.8 RPG last year. Additional size and rebounding on the front line. Struggled from the line last year (58.5%) but early (and admittedly small sample size) returns have improved at 7/8.

Key Reserves (* = newcomer):

*Kyle Davis, F, 6-8 FR. Lots of height to add. Has struggled with his shot in the early going (1/9 on field goals), but is second on the team in rebounds with 12 over the past two games. Saw 43 minutes over the past two games.
*Tyson Koehler, F, 6-7 SO. Junior college transfer. 8 points and 9 rebounds in 39 minutes over the past two games... like some of the other newcomers, is struggling with his shot.
Ryan Brimley, G, 6-3 JR. Led the team with 41 three point baskets (shot 35.0%) last year. A three point shooter off the bench.
Jake Nielson, G, 6-2 SO. Started first game and appeared to be primary ballhandler all of last season (has been replaced by Jones, Jr.). Had 83 assists last season, but more than offset that with 95 turnovers. Appears to play spot duty at this point.

As you can see, there are lots of different pieces here -- especially size. This will not be a cakewalk for the Bulldogs.

KEY ISSUES FOR TOMORROW

Who takes care of the basketball? As mentioned above, both primary ballhandlers on the Thunderbirds have had their share of turnovers. If the Drake defense reverts to how it performed against Texas Southern (22 forced turnovers), this could be a major driver to helping the Bulldogs win tomorrow night. On the flip side, point guard play has not been very strong for the Bulldogs this season but the Thunderbirds have only forced 24 total turnovers in their last two games. If the Drake defense can harass the ballhandlers on Southern Utah and Wiseler/Alexander can have a strong game, that's a huge advantage for the Bulldogs that we certainly could use.
Keeping them from taking it to the tin. While there are a few shooters on their squad, the Thunderbirds have tremendous size for a Summit league team and their leading scorer Taylor takes it to the tin. It will be imperative for Drake's defense to keep SU from getting to the basket at will -- something they were abysmal at in Ames. Overall, in the past two games, SU has taken 12 three pointers out of 99 field goal attempts. They're going to take it to the tin... can we stop them from doing it?
The Rebounding Battle. With their size, the Thunderbirds have been solid on the boards, beating Bakersfield tremendously (OR% 43.9% to Bakersfield's 29.3%) and holding their own against Utah State (OR% 20.0% to Utah State's 23.1%). With two starting posts and tremendous size off the bench, it's not hard to believe. How will Drake counteract? We held our own against Texas Southern but got shredded on the boards by the Cyclones. If we can hang with them on the boards, that will be critical to our success.
Who can shoot it? Both teams aren't lighting up the scoreboard with their shooting, with the Thunderbirds sporting a 40.4% effective field goal % (EFG) compared to Drake's 34.1%. As you can see from above, a lot of Southern Utah's newbies are struggling with their shot early on, likely as they are making the transition to the new game. We can't let them get on a roll or trouble will ensue. Meanwhile, we have to regroup and get our offense going after that disaster in Ames. Nevertheless, I wouldn't be surprised to see a defensive battle considering both teams haven't been lighting it up so far.
Hodgson vs. Van Deest. I'm interested to see how Seth matches up against their big man. Seth hasn't had a chance to get on a roll yet, it will be interesting to see how he fares against another true big man in Hodgson.

DON'T JUMP!!!

2010-11-18T21:26:00.006-06:00

FOUR FACTORS FROM LAST NIGHT'S GAME

Effective Field Goal %

ISU = 60.8%

DU = 25.9%

Turnover %

ISU = 16.4%

DU = 27.4%

Offensive Rebound %

ISU = 38.2%

DU = 28.6%

Free Throw Rate

ISU = 29.2%

DU = 34.5%

I don't want to write a whole lot about these, because last night was one of those games where advanced statistics don't really tell you much more than what you already know. Drake was dominated on both ends of the floor, shot horrendously, played incredibly poor defense, could not hold on to the basketball, and got beat on the boards. It was an all around thrashing.

In retrospect, it was probably the program's worst loss in a game like this since Drake was taken down by 42 in a 101-59 loss to the Iowa Hawkeyes in December of 2001.

BUT WAIT, DON'T JUMP!!!

It's hard to keep your head straight after a game like that. If you're like me, I completely expected a great game. The spread seemed fairly close, neither team was ranked, and basically everyone involved expected a tough fight.

Then we got absolutely thrashed, seemingly out of nowhere. I know I'm reaching pretty far ahead, but I feel like it is fair to say that Iowa State is extremely unlikely to reach the NCAA Tournament. Therefore, to get rolled by 48 by a non-tournament team makes you wonder what exactly Drake can achieve this season? Should we even expect to avoid playing Thursday night in St. Louis anymore?

To attempt to answer these questions, I conducted a crude study of past "unexpected blowouts", a term that I think is more than fair to use for last night's outcome. I wanted to understand how often these unexpected blowouts occur, and what type of impact they have on a team's season. Before digging into the analysis, I first must define what I coined an unexpected blowout:

Game played in November (i.e. VERY early in the season)
Spread of ten points or less
Neither team is ranked
One team wins by more than 35 points

Essentially, I wanted to isolate the conditions that occurred leading up to and throughout last night.

I then scoured game logs and spreads in each November from 2000 to 2009 using my criteria. I isolated fifteen different games that met my criteria:

2009. Washington State def. San Diego by 37. Spread of 2.5.
2008. Tennessee Tech def. Louisiana Monroe by 38. Spread of 6.
2008. Idaho def. UC Irvine by 54. Spread of 1.
2007*. George Mason def. Drexel by 47. Spread of 7.5.
2007*. Kent State def. St. Louis by 41. Spread of 5.5.
2006. New Mexico def. Colorado by 41. Spread of 9.5.
2006. Hawaii def. Oregon State by 44. Spread of 8.
2006*. VCU def. Elon by 42. Spread of 9.
2006*. Butler def. Tulane by 40. Spread of 2.
2005. New Mexico def. Mississippi by 53. Spread of 5.5.
2005. Florida State def. Purdue by 40. Spread of 10.
2003. Pennsylvania def. Indiana State by 38. Spread of 6.5
2002. Vanderbilt def. Georgia Southern by 36. Spread of 10
2002. DePaul def. Central Michigan by 36. Spread of 7.5.
2000. St. Louis def. East Carolina by 36. Spread of 8.5.

* Denotes that the winning team went to the NCAA Tournament

Now, one thing I think is clear in these unexpected blowouts is that sometimes it turns out that the winning team ends up being phenomenal, seemingly out of nowhere. Nobody knew who Eric Maynor was in November of 2006, but by the time VCU upset Duke in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in March of 2007, it became fairly reasonable to look back and realize that the spread of 9 against Elon was probably inappropriate.

And that is certainly possible now. There probably exists a scenario where Diante Garrett is Big 12 player of the year and he leads the Cyclones to 20+ wins and a tournament berth. That said, I think that scenario is extremely improbable, and think it is prudent to take the perspective that Iowa State will be a solid or very good team this year, but not elite.

In looking at the data from the results above, it actually did not look materially different in the impact on won/loss records. That said, when drawing final conclusions I will leave those teams out because I tend to think that it's easier to get blown out by a tournament team than a non-tournament team.

So, back to the numbers. For all of the teams listed above, here were their average finishes:

Wins = 12.4

Losses = 17.1

Conference Wins = 5.9

Conference Losses = 10.7

Conference Win% = 0.356

Not so hot. Still, what would you expect from a team that gets beat by 35+ when expected to compete? It seems that, on average, teams that have this phenomenon occur to them go on to subpar performance for the remainder of the year.

But wait! Don't jump! Not just yet! While the vast majority of teams that were unexpectedly blown out proceeded on to subpar seasons, there were a few examples of teams that were able to put the loss behind them and proceed on to anywhere from okay to great seasons:

2002 Central Michigan = 24-7 (14-4), NCAA Tournament Berth
2002 Georgia Southern = 16-13 (8-8)
2006 Tulane = 17-13 (9-7)
2007 St. Louis = 16-14 (7-9)

I think we should throw out the final two teams on the list, because they were blown out by NCAA Tournament teams (I spoke on this above). That leaves two remaining teams:

The 2002 Georgia Southern was able to turn their season around, finishing midpack in the Southern Conference -- nothing that you would call great, but certainly a turnaround for them after such a horrendous start.

The team I do want to focus on is the 2002 Central Michigan Chippewas. They started off 2-0 on some tight wins against George Mason and Illinois State, and then they were absolutely throttled by DePaul by 38. The halftime score of that game was actually 48-22, not all too different from last night's halftime score (45-21 ISU). It was certainly a backbreaking defeat, and at the instant it happened, likely made the Chippewas think their season was going to take a massive dive.

But they were able to turn things around. With tremendous talent, including now NBA-veteran Chris Kaman, they rattled off multiple win streaks and won the MAC conference tournament, got an 11 seed and even beat Creighton in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

Is that our future? Most likely not. But what Central Michigan had that several other teams on the list didn't was superior talent. We do have that. Are we going to put it together? Only time will tell. But, just because we were throttled last night doesn't mean the season is over. There is precedent for success and rebounding after such a tough loss. Hopefully we can regroup, rebound, and start a little streak of our own to distance ourselves from such a poor display.

Drake 60, Texas Southern 46

2010-11-14T15:35:00.004-06:00

FOUR FACTORS ANALYSIS OF LAST NIGHT'S GAME

If you need any more detail on what these figures mean, a pretty good explanation from Dean Oliver himself can be found at: http://www.rawbw.com/~deano/articles/20040601_roboscout.htm

Factor #1: Effective Field Goal Percentage

Texas Southern: 40.2%
Drake: 42.2%

I found it interesting that we basically created the same amount of points from the field goals we attempted. Reason being that the Bulldogs got their work done from the three (DU 9-25 vs. TS 1-12) while the Tigers got their work done within the arc (TS 15-29 vs. DU 11-33). All said, both teams really struggled to shoot the basketball last night.

Factor #2: Ballhandling (Turnover %)

Texas Southern: 34.4%
Drake: 14.1%

This was the story of the game. Our defense harassed the Tigers into an astounding 22 turnovers, while the Bulldogs themselves kept their turnovers to single digits at 9 (which I am sure made Coach Phelps proud). We were creating turnovers by the boatload. It was truly a team effort, especially when you consider that eight Bulldogs recorded a steal last night. Jordan Clarke led the way with 4 steals, despite only playing 22 minutes due to foul trouble. I would say it was a successful night when we forced their primary ballhandler Kevin Galloway into 10 turnovers.

It's fairly remarkable that they are already showing so much potential on defense considering how poor of a defensive team we were last year. It's early, but it sure is looking like the switch to the M2M was the right call. We'll see if that trend continues.

Factor #3: Offensive Rebounding (OR %)

Texas Southern: 25.9%
Drake: 25.0%

Now, I know a lot of people are going to look at the box score from last night and criticize the Bulldogs for getting outworked on the boards, but a word of warning to be careful. You might draw the wrong conclusion.

In actuality, Drake really held their own on the boards, especially when you look at things on a possession neutral basis via Offensive Rebounding %. This metric essentially looks at how many offensive rebounds were given up for each time a rebound was available. You tell how we did on the offensive boards by looking at our number (25%) and you look at how we did on the defensive boards by looking at the other teams number (25.9%), and vice versa for Texas Southern. Average in MVC conference games last year was 29.3%, so I'd say that we were slightly below average on the offensive boards but not horrible.

Back to the main issue at hand, getting outrebounded 37-30 isn't great, but it's slightly misleading if you don't also consider that Texas Southern turned the ball over 22 times. Because of all of those turnovers, there were a ton of possessions where they didn't hoist up shots that turned into missed field goals, offering us our fair share of rebounding opportunities.

Altogether we certainly held our own. There's more room to grow, but also keep in mind that Jordan Clarke sat a lot with foul trouble and Kraidon Woods didn't play. I'm excited to see the potential of our ability to grow.

Factor #4: Free Throw Rate

Texas Southern: 43.9%
Drake: 27.6%

People do this different ways, here FTA / FGA is shown. Again, free throw attempts were actually just 18 to 16 (Texas Southern with the 18), but since they turned the ball over so much, when they actually ended a possession "on their own terms", they were getting to the line at a fairly decent rate.

This shouldn't be too much of a surprise if you were able to see last night's game. For stretches, Drake really fell into the lull of hoisting up a lot of threes. Fortunately for our part, Ryan Wedel and Aaron Hawley were hitting their threes at a 50% rate last night. Everyone else wasn't so lucky.

Still, a lot of our success from the three last night were from penetration and kicks to a wide open Ryan Wedel. We were struggling to find our rhythm early, and were shooting way too many threes. In the first half, 15 of our 27 shots were from beyond the arc. Once we got more penetration and got the ball inside to Seth way more in the second half, that ratio became way more balanced at 10 of 31 shots being from beyond the arc. I'd sure like to see that aggressiveness continue in Ames.

Overall, I think it's clear that our defense won us last night's game. We were relentless at forcing turnovers which really flipped the tide into our favor. We were pretty unbalanced early on, but got better penetration and really turned it on in the second half.

THE GOOD... THE BAD... THE UGLY FROM LAST NIGHT

The Good: Ryan Wedel and Sharing

Ryan Wedel was huge last night, shooting 6 / 12 from the field (all from three) and hitting numerous big shots en route to a 20 point performance. His bombs really seemed to get things going in the second half to allow us to open up our lead, and we never looked back.

Also important was how strongly we shared the basketball. We had 16 assists on 20 made field goals, absolutely fantastic to see. I don't want to take anything away from Wedel's performance (because he was fantastic), but he's even better when he can straddle the arc and catch and shoot. Like Ryan, many of our scorers are going to be even more efficient as we keep sharing the ball.

The Bad: Falling in Love with the three

I won't rehash the points made above, but it was bad to see us so stagnant early on, and hoisting up 15 threes out of our first 27 field goal attempts.

The Ugly: NBA Jam Session

Boy, we gave up a lot of dunks last night, huh? Two backdoor alley-oops really stick out in my mind. Don't sleep on Texas Southern's athleticism, for a SWAC team, they sure brought some hops.

LOOKING AHEAD

We're right back on the horse Wednesday night at Ames. Don't look now, but Iowa State is 2-0 going into our matchup. More details to come...

OFF TOPIC: Top 50 Dunks of All Time.

One last item I thought was awesome. I don't agree with the order, and some "honorable mentions" really should be in the list. But, holy cow, there are some pretty insane dunks in this video. Check it out if you have some time to kill:

http://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/blog/?p=178

Parkside Wrap-Up

2010-11-07T17:31:00.003-06:00

Well, last night wasn't close by any means, which is a good thing. Not a ton you can necessarily take away from it against such an inferior team, but there sure were some good signs. Here's what I posted today on DrakeNation:

Season ticket holder, was there last night. Few thoughts stuck out:

1. The defensive effort, particularly in the first half, was outstanding. We weren't playing a tough opponent, but we were able to absolutely take away literally just about everything they were trying to do on offense in the first half.

2. Team speed is outrageous. Part of it may be that I haven't watched a live D-1 basketball game in 7-8 months, but the speed of Drake seemed much superior to last year. They were really flying around. I hope they can force tempo because it really seems to fit our athleticism and depth.

3. The Good: Tie between Jordan Clarke's tenacity and us only allowing five offensive rebounds. The Bad: Frank struggled with taking care of the basketball in his 15 minutes. The Ugly: The game seemed like it was over after a few media breaks.

Apparently Jordan Clarke was nervous last night. You sure couldn't tell:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20101106/SPORTS020403/101106026/1097/SPORTS0204/Drake-men-s-basketball-Clarke-s-double-double-helps-calm-his-nerves-in-opener

An ode to Tom Davis (and while we're at it, let's not forget Maury John, people)

2010-11-06T08:38:00.006-05:00

On the morning of the start of the season (sure it's an exhibition, but who the hell really cares, Drake basketball is BACK), I can't help but get excited for where the next step of the Mark Phelps era will take us. I feel like the transformation he wanted to make to our program is complete, and now he has the pieces to fully implement his vision for Drake Basketball.

As I look forward to the possibilities in the future, I can't help but think about where we have been. Let's take a second to consider the recent coaching eras:

Shown are average wins and losses per season, the winning percentage over that time, and then two metrics:

SRS = Simple Rating System. This essentially is point differential, adjusted by opponents point differential. I've taken the average of each SRS for each season and shown it above. Note that these are not available for any of Maury John's years or many of the post-John era, so disregard. A value of 0.0 implies an absolutely average team on a national scale.
SOS = Strength of Schedule. Average of opponents SRS. Think of it as how many points above average your schedule is.

Using these figures, let's step back through history, starting from the bottom working up:

Maury John Era. You don't know who Maury John is? If you don't, do the following:

Look at the banners in the rafters of the Knapp Center and ask yourself "Who was coaching during those awesome times?"
Read this: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/19950716/SPORTS11/50627033/Maury-John-Drake-University-1995. Seriously, it is a fantastic piece.

A lot of this is reiteration of the piece above, but it is worth reiterating. Maury John was a hell of a coach and an absolute icon of Drake Basketball. You must know him as a Drake fan. 211-131. Three NCAA Tournament Appearances, 1969 Final Four. Coach John's era was quite simply the absolute of where we want Drake Basketball to be. Winning, Teamwork, Unselfishness.

Post-John Era and Gary Garner Era. There's no replacing someone like Maury John, as evidenced by the years running through Gary Garner's tenure. We were fairly mediocre, both on a national scale (SRS 1.0 during Garner era) and in overall record (220-251 between both eras). We were trending in the wrong direction, returning to mediocrity. It was time for change.

Pre-Davis Era. Unfortunately, the change was for the worse. For 14 seasons, we were undoubtedly in the argument of the worst program in Division 1 basketball. After going 25-35 in less than two seasons, players refused to play for Tom Abatemarco and he left the program under scandal (Google it). Rudy Washington took time to clean up Abatemarco's mess, and actually was MVC Coach of the year in 1992-1993 when he led the dogs to a 14-14 record. But the bottom fell out, and he went 35-46 in his next three years. Scandal later followed Washington, as he would later be fired as the SWAC commissioner for allegedly mismanaging funds (i.e. overpaying himself) http://media.www.therip.com/media/storage/paper443/news/2005/04/13/News/Bc.Hires.Former.Drake.Basketball.Coach-923556.shtml.

In stepped Kurt Kanaskie, who took losing to a new level. He went 62-136, and started 0-36 in the MVC for his first few years. I know it's brutal to say, but he took us to rock bottom. I attended Drake University during his tenure, and one moment that sticks out from his time was the blowout loss at Iowa in the fall of 2001 (http://statsheet.com/mcb/games/2001/12/12/drake-59-iowa-101) cementing that we absolutely didn't belong on the same floor. At that point in time, I think it's fair to say we were probably more likely to see a move to non-scholarship basketball before we would make our next NCAA D-I Tournament appearance. The losing continued into 2003.

For a stretch of 14 years, we were dismally below average (-3.1 SRS), scandal ridden, faced with endless ineligibility due to athletics, and a joke of a basketball program within our own state. This was all while we were playing perhaps the easiest stretches of opponents in recent coaching eras (1.7 SOS).

Tom Davis Era. And one day in 2003, a small beam of light came through. Drake hired Dr. Tom Davis. Instant credibility came to the program. Hard work would be needed, but we would soon belong on that same floor with Iowa and other big teams. Attendance surged. His teams pressed like crazy. We started knocking off decent MVC teams every now and again at home. It took time, but we slowly got better and better. And then, in 2006, we blew out Steve Alford's Iowa Team at home on ESPNU. The seasons of losing were over, as this big win catapulted us to a 17-15 record. Sure it was 17-15, but we were back out of the cellar. We were a winning program again. More work was to be done. We needed to start winning MVC tournament games, stringing together more wins. It was time to turn the keys over to Keno.

Keno Davis "Era". It's hard to call one year an era, but it was such an unforgettable season and feeling that you really have to refer to it as its own era. It was short lived, but a magical 28-5 season that saw astronomical offensive efficiency in the form of Adam Emmenecker and a list of shooters. But it was too good to last, and Keno moved on.

The Mark Phelps Era. And that brings us to the present. The Mark Phelps era is really just beginning. The first two years were certainly rocky, essentially providing us mediocre basketball that fans saw during the Gary Garner era. But I don't think that is the normal run rate under Phelps' watch. It's been rocky, but its clear that he's taking the program in a different direction, but I like what I see. We have had the top rated recruiting classes in the MVC for two straight years. We haven't had this talented and athletic team in quite some time. It's time for big things to happen.

And so, as an ode to Tom Davis, keep him in mind when we see Kraidon Woods dunk a basketball and hang from the rim by his elbow, or when we see Rayvonte Rice bowl through the lane, or when we see Seth Van Deest block multiple shots, or when we see Ryan Wedel pull up from the HyVee line. We're not going back to the dark days. Things are looking up from here. While there was a transition period from the Davis watch -- we are where we are because Dr. Tom Davis gave his time to make this program able to achieve the greatest of heights. To Dr. Tom, a big thanks.

Let's get this show on the road.

Using Win%s to Illustrate the Impact of Being in the Play in Round

2010-02-25T18:21:00.005-06:00

Last night's loss at Missouri State was a big back breaker, as it virtually cements us into the Thursday night games in St. Louis next week. Before we dive into the main topic of this post, here were my reactions:

One of the drivers that allows us to be an efficient offense is Phelps' insistence on taking care of the basketball. Well, 12 turnovers in 60 posessions is pretty high for this team, and rounds out to a TO% of 20% (12 / 60 = 20%). Other than last Saturday's game at Cal State Northridge (TO% = 19.2%), we haven't seen a turnover rate this high since our January 23 win over Wichita State @ the Knapp (the Frank Wiseler 12 assist game).

We showed against Cal State Northridge that we can be successful when we turn the ball over if we have a strong shooting night and if we get to the line (52.9% shooting, 28 free throw attempts). That wasn't the case last night as we shot fine (48.9%) and didn't get to the line (11 total attempts).

We're not good enough defensively to bang out wins when we turn the ball over and don't shoot particularly well. I guess that's something we should already know by the last game of the regular season.

Oh well, back to other things. I was curious as to the impact of this loss -- or in other words -- quantifying the impact of watching my pipe dream of a #6 seed float away last night. To do so, I created a model that attempts to use a simplified framework that is similar to how Ken Pomeroy simulates games (Pythagorean Expectation combined with the Log 5 Method). I used the Pomeroy expected win percentages and made no adjustment for venue, under the assumption that St. Louis is a neutral court and would have no impact on either team.

This assumes that the tournament starts today and seeding is as follows:

This could or could not be what ends up occurring, but I'm too impatient to wait. So, using expected win %s and the log 5 method, I simulated our chances of winning the tournament, showing up at the final (i.e. being there on Sunday), and our chances of showing up at the quarterfinal (i.e. being there on Saturday). Using the setup above, I projected them as follows:

Pr(Alive on Saturday) = 4.6%
Pr(Alive on Sunday) = 1.8%
Pr(Missouri Valley Champion) = 0.5%

This is not too out of the question, considering that we would have to win a game against a Valley opponent and then play the best team in the league. Contrast this to the results when I switched Missouri State (currently #6) and Drake (currently #8) in the model:

Pr(Alive on Saturday) = 28.0%
Pr(Alive on Sunday) = 7.8%
Pr(Missouri Valley Champion) = 1.8%

Quite a big difference. You can see that we have not an excellent, but a decent shot of making it to Saturday. This probably isn't a shocker, but it reinforces the fact that your odds dramatically improve when you consider the fact that (a) you play a weaker opponent and (b) you don't have to win a game to get into the tournament.

Nevertheless, 1.8% versus 0.5% is not terribly significant, essentially because you still have a good shot of playing a strong UNI team, or you at least have to beat several strong teams in the way. But it really hurts us, a lot.

Oh well, at least I can say the following:

Pr(Me Drinking Beer at the Last Day of West End) = 100%

Well, what are our chances now?

2010-02-24T12:51:00.002-06:00

Well, lots of things last night shook up the old Valley. Evansville, the bonafide worst team in the MVC, managed to take out a sure fire NCAA tournament team in UNI. In addition, Creighton dealt us a fairly hard blow by beating SIU. But our chances of getting out of a play-in game aren’t dead yet. That said, we’ll need some help.

Tonight’s game at Missouri State is huge. It gives us the opportunity to finish 2-0 against the Bears, which would mathematically cause us to finish with a higher seed. Considering that we’ve already locked in higher seeds than SIU and Evansville, that would be huge. It, in essence would allow us to focus on passing one of Indiana State, Bradley, and Creighton. The issue with that is Bradley and Indiana State have the tie breaker against us. That means that we have* to finish one game ahead of either of those teams to pass them. Assuming that we win tonight, ONE of the following has to happen:

Creighton loses to Bradley. We must beat Evansville in this scenario. We need tiebreaker points to work out.
Bradley loses to Creighton, and Bradley loses to Wichita State. We must beat Evansville in this scenario.
Indiana State loses to Illinois State and Missouri State. We must beat Evansville in this scenario.

We need one of those bullet points to occur. While we need some help, consider that Creighton and Bradley play each other, which effectively gets part of bullet point #1 or #2 completed. In addition, two Indiana State losses are not out of the question.

You’ll notice the * earlier. Technically, if three or more teams tie, the determinant is total wins against all tied teams. While we might sport an 0-2 record against a team, if we’re tied with several teams that we have wins against, theoretically there is a possibility that we could proceed to tiebreakers with said team. I haven’t run through all of the scenarios on this, but one clear one comes to mind. If we win tonight but lose on Saturday, and Missouri State wins on Saturday, and Indiana State loses to Illinois State and Missouri State, the teams will be in a three way tie (DU is 2-0 against MSU but 0-2 against INS. INS is 2-0 against DU but 0-2 against MSU, etc…). Therefore, that goes directly to tiebreakers, and we would need the points to work out.

Also, consider that tiebreaker points can change significantly over the next few days. As teams we have beat (Creighton) slip down that hurts us. The opposite holds true for us and other teams. From my looks at it, there’s too many moving pieces to definitively say that we do or don’t stack up against a team on tiebreaker points right now. More to come on that later in the week.

All one way to say that we really need to win tonight. Let’s get one more in the win column and take a look later this week on how things have to shake for us to get out of that Thursday night matchup.

SIU

2010-02-16T08:41:00.002-06:00

Short post this morning. Saturday was a back breaker of a loss, as far as I'm concerned. I haven't worked through the math yet, but it seems quite likely that we have sealed our doom in the play in round.

With how the standings fall, there is a distinct possibility that we could be watching the #8/#9 matchup that ultimately gets played in the MVC tournament. Obviously, with three games left (and a significant bunchup of teams) that can certainly change. But if the season ended today, this game would be to play UNI.

Our defense has really slipped these past few losses. Looking back to our win against Creighton (which was really won because the offense stepped up and shot 59.4% EFG), our defensive efficiency has gone (measured in points/100 posessions):

106.3
107.6
118.8
131.0

The last two were the UNI game and then Saturday's game at Indiana State. Fortunately, we've been a strong enough offensive team that when we are shooting well we can keep it close. Take the first two games above (@Bradley and @Illinois State). Those two were decided by a total of four points - mainly because we have a pretty efficient offense.

The trend is certainly moving the wrong direction, and is the reason we've been on the short end of the stick against UNI and Indiana State. Whether its due to allowing offensive rebounds (UNI) or allowing way too high of a field goal % (Indiana State), the defense has to shore up if we are going to think about winning tonight and in the next few games. For tonight's game, we HAVE to improve the defense and keep SIU from too many easy baskets, or the drought will likely continue.

Catching up with the Panthers

2010-02-09T19:07:00.002-06:00

Well, it's not every night that we have the chance to knock off a Top 25 team at home.

Tomorrow night might be our best chance.

UNI has lagged a bit in their last three victories, as they were by a combined seven points. While a win is a win is a win, it nevertheless signals a few ways that we can significantly improve on our last performance, a 16 point loss in Cedar Falls last month.

As I looked through the numbers, I saw two significant ways that teams gave the Panthers a run for their money:

The first is to absolutely dominate on the offensive glass. Missouri State did this three games ago, in a one point loss in Springfield. They netted 15 offensive rebounds, which actually translates to an extremely large percentage (42.9% OR%) when you consider the limited amount of possessions (52 in that game). They didn't shoot particularly well (39.3% from the field), but when you give yourself that many added opportunities to score, it significantly increases the percent of possessions that result in a score. Coincidentally, this is measured by "Floor%", which again is the % of possessions that result in a score. MSU posted a Floor% of 57.8%, well above the average 46.4% that UNI gives up, and the reason is purely due to MSU's dominance on the boards and getting themselves significant amounts of putbacks. If perhaps that's too technical, consider that they had 12 more field goal attempts in the game than UNI. Very impressive.

Unfortunately, most of us know that offensive rebounding is perhaps the Bulldogs' biggest weakness. It's pretty unlikely to imagine that we're going to significantly beat up UNI on the offensive glass.

Fortunately though, SIU and Wichita State made the Panthers sweat in a different way. They kept it close by outshooting the Panthers, particularly from three. Both opponents shot 8-19 (42.1%) from beyond the arc, virtually 10% above UNI's shooting in those games (31.3% and 33.3%, respectively). It wasn't just threes though, both teams outshot UNI overall, (45.2% vs. 38% and 46.2% vs. 37.8%). Strong team defense and timely shooting on the offensive end is obviously critical.

That said, both teams managed to screw it up through a few major letdowns. Wichita State shot 10-17 (58.8%) from the free throw line and Southern Illinois committed 17 turnovers. Those are two things that you simply can't do against a Top 25 team, especially considering they were on the road.

So what are our chances? Well, like I stated above, we're obviously not going to rip down an exceptional amount of offensive rebounds. That said, we have a fantastic shot to turn the tables on the Panthers in the shooting department. While we just played in Cedar Falls and were outshot 47.1% to 38% (and we only shot 4-17, 23.5% from three), there's something about this team that makes them seem to play better at the Knapp.

I looked through this year's stats in total and in conference, and there is no surprise that we shoot significantly better in the friendly confines:

Home -- Full Season = 137-338 (40.5%)
Away -- Full Season = 81-247 (32.8%)
Difference -- Full Season = +7.7%

Home -- MVC Play = 61-153 (39.9%)
Away -- MVC Play = 44-154 (28.6%)
Difference -- MVC Play = +11.3%

Obviously the schedules don't line up exactly and we played some fairly easy teams at home in the non-conference play, but the difference in MVC Play is significant and clear. With 150+ shots, I feel like it's even statistically significant. I could thumb through the calcs, but the difference is relatively clear.

That said, it's certainly not a shoe-in that we're going to drop 40% from three tomorrow night, especially against such a strong defensive squad in UNI. But, if we can (a) get the ball rolling from beyond the arc and vastly improve on the 4-17 we dropped in Cedar Falls, (b) hold UNI's offense in check, ideally better than we did in Cedar Falls, to the tune of mid 30%'s, and (c) avoid stupid mistakes like excessive turnovers or missed free throws (the latter has been an issue this year), there's absolutely no question that this team can knock off the Panthers. I'm actually seeing it as a distinct possibility.

-dutl

Why I think the Bulldogs can win today

2010-01-23T10:03:00.002-06:00

Stupid Mediacom -- been out of internet a fair deal of this week -- really has thrown a wrench in the gears of research for Drake games. Oh well, at least the radio still worked on Wednesday as we were treated to another notch in the win column.

Today brings a mighty task for the Bulldogs. Wichita State is already 17-3 overall and is sitting at 6-2, a clear second in the conference. They just came off of a huge win against UNI and are absolutely rolling. At the rate they're at, I think it's fairly reasonable that they can begin the whispers of two Valley bids in the tournament this year.

As much as I'd love to see that, I'd even more love to see a convincing Drake victory today. It's going to be tough though, because the Shockers bring an insanely balanced attack featuring Toure' Murry (12.7 PPG), Clevin Hannah (11.8 PPG), J.T. Durley (11.6 PPG), and Graham Hatch (9.6 PPG). Three of those four shoot 44% from tree, and roughly 60% EFG. They're just as strong defensively -- holding down the oppositions attack, especially from the three (they have allowed just 14-60 three point shooting in the past four games, "good" for 23.3%). In addition, they keep the opposition off of the boards, as they are 6th in the nation in opposing offensive rebounding percentage (only allowing 26.6%, well below the national average of 33%). After a poor rebounding showing against Creighton on 1/9, they allowed 8, 10, and 6 in their past three games.

That said, I think the following gives us a chance today:

(1) The look of the Bulldogs team is incredibly different than what the Shockers saw on 1/1. Gone are the times of Ryan Wedel starting at the point, which he did in that game. Frank Wiseler only played 4 minutes in that game -- he'll obviously be a significant difference in today's game. In addition, while JY took 12 shots in that game and will likely take several today, he's essentially a different player now that he's focused on driving and dishing instead of taking clear jumpshots. Adam Templeton took 6 shots and got 1 rebound in that game -- I find it difficult to believe he'll look the same as well. All in, you can make the argument that four of our significant players (Wiseler, JY, Wedel, Templeton) are playing either significantly different styles or roles since the last showing. That's not the same opponent that Wichita State saw earlier in the month.

(2) The Shockers have not been forcing as many turnovers as of late. They average forcing 15 per game for the year, but in the past three games, they have only forced 9, 9, and 10. That's 5-6 shots per game, which if you shoot in the 40% range, is another 4-6 points, a significant amount. This is obviously Phelps' forte, and if we can keep that number low while Frank and JY fills in, that's going to benefit our offense tremendously.

(3) Something has to give. Their three point defense has been fantastic, in fact 18th in the nation at 29.1%. Earlier in the post I mentioned how that has been fantastic as of late (23.3%). That said, in their past three games, the Bulldogs have hit 14, 9, and 10 three pointers en route to 47.8%. Now, this irresistable force/immovable object situation likely favors the defense, but given items #1 and #2 above, I'm not so sure that we can't force the issue and turn the heat up from the three point line. Given what we saw against Missouri State and Illinois State, if Drake can get a few long shots going in the Knapp, they certainly can get on a roll. I'm not saying this is going to happen 100%, but it's certainly a possibility. In their (WSU) loss against Illinois State, they allowed the redbirds to toss up a 9-18 (50%) game from beyond the arc. Funny, that loss came just two games after their other big win of the year, at home versus Texas Tech (85-83). Could this team be a victim to another road letdown following a huge home win? I certainly think there's a good shot...

Illinois State Redbirds @ Drake Bulldogs

2010-01-16T21:20:00.005-06:00

And we meet the Redbirds again. These schools have provided some fairly brutal beatdowns to one another in recent memory. We all remember the 30 point beatdown that Drake put on Illinois State in the MVC title game two years ago, when they showed Dick Enberg and the world that we were truly an elite team that belonged in the NCAA with a high seed. Well, the Redbirds didn't take too kindly to that and gave us our own 22 point beatdown in the Knapp Center.

I'm thinking that trend will not continue tomorrow night at the Knapp, as I expect a hard played game by both teams.

We've seen our first win streak since mid-December, as we notched a solid win over a good Missouri State basketball team. It was quite the follow up to a huge win at SIU.

On the other side, Illinois State has started off the season strong at 4-2, looking pretty good until they were absolutely stomped by UNI 59-44 (in a game that was arguably not even as close as the final score indicates). But ISU regained their thunder and dropped 70 in a win over the Aces.

The UNI game should indicate just how strong of a defensive squad the Panthers are. This Illinois State team is a very strong offensive team. Throwing out the game against UNI, their offensive output (measured by points) has been: 72, 64, 68, 82, 70. They can do a lot of things on the offensive end and they have some great pieces on that team, all that made the 44 point output vs. UNI more puzzling (and perhaps even scary as to how good defensively UNI can be when they're on).

The first thing you think of when you hear Illinois State is Osiris Eldridge, their unquestioned leader. He's a star in the Valley, and truly one of the players that the MVC can point to when showing the quality of basketball that we have. He's having a fantastic year so far, perhaps his best at 16.8 PPG, 3.6 RPG, 2.8 APG, while shooting 45% from the field and 40% from beyond the arc. His athleticism in the Valley is unquestioned, and he's likely going to make some new highlight special plays before the end of the year.

What bothers me about this matchup is that Illinois State is truly so much more than the "Big O":

Dinma Odiakosa is a man child. He's really come a long way since last year. He's putting up 11.5 PPG/8.4 RPG, absolutely unreal numbers as a true center in the MVC. In addition, he's been even better in Valley play. If you throw out the first game against Evansville (he only played 10 minutes due to fouling out, which is fairly ridiculous), he's averaging 10.8 rebounds per game over his last four full MVC games. He's also been in double figures scoring over those four games, so essentially he has been averaging a double double in recent MVC games.
Lloyd Phillips is picking it up. His season numbers indicate shooting lines of 37% from the field and 33% from the three. But he's been a lot better than that as of late. Over the past four MVC games, he's averaged 13.3 points a game (up from 10.8 on the season). To do so, he's shot 11-23 from beyond the arc for a clip of 47.8%, well above his season averages. WHile doing so, he's done a great job distributing with 22 assists to 11 turnovers. This is exactly the play you want out of someone to complement your big man and your big scorer, someone who can shoot and distribute, and Phillips has really gotten back to doing that very well as of late.
Other players can do very useful things for them. Alex Rubin is shooting 44% from the three on the year, and scored 13 in both of the last two games while hitting 7-8 from the three. Jackie Carmichael at 6-9 has chipped in 8 points a game on 53% shooting while also adding nearly 5 boards a game.

Overall, there's a lot of solid players in that lineup that can do a lot of things and attack you from a variety of different ways. This is virtually the exact opposite of Missouri State, where you knew to expect a lot of shots from Weems and Leonard. While Osiris is obviously going to get his shots, Illinois State really can afford to use him as a decoy for stretches and let some of their shooters or big men pick up slack in the meantime. Altogether, that makes me a little concerned about this matchup -- we can't just guard the three point line and expect to hold them down as they'll eat us up inside. We can't just pack in the key because Osiris, Rubin, and Phillips will find ways to score. In general, Osiris is going to command his own attention on top of that as well.

WHAT DRAKE NEEDS TO DO

To overcome all of this, Drake's going to need another magical shooting night. ISU is a top tier team with regards to rebounding, particularly with how well they keep the opposition off of the offensive boards (they have an opposing OR% of 28.4%, well below the national average of 33%). So we're going to get few secondary chances unless we can actively do something about it. What can we do about that?

Get Odiakosa in foul trouble. Whether its through the use of SVD or Templeton inside, or through some drives to the lane, we've got to get Odiakosa reeling. He's likely looking at double digit boards otherwise -- and if thats the case -- some of those double digit boards are directly rebounds that could have been second chance points for us otherwise with him off of the floor. If he sees ~30 minutes, we're in trouble.

PREDICTION

Overall, I'm fairly worried about this matchup. We're going against a team with a player who is dominant on the boards, a top notch Valley scorer, and some other guys who are really starting to find their rhythm from beyond the arc. I'm worried about a step back defensively from the Drakies, as they find themselves overmatched and their zone matchup fails against the diverse attack that the Redbirds can throw against us.

We need to shoot the ball well and perhaps catch some breaks (Odiakosa in foul trouble, or perhaps a cold shooting night from ISU) while capitalizing on all opportunities presented. Unfortunately, I think with the personnel between the two teams, I think we're going to see a tough stretch where we have a lot of one and done possessions. If the shots aren't falling, I just don't think we can keep the streak rolling.

Redbirds 74, Drake 66

(dutl 8-5 on the season)

Missouri State Bears (13-3, 3-2 MVC) @ Drake Bulldogs (6-11, 1-4 MVC)

2010-01-11T21:31:00.002-06:00

Tomorrow night brings a stiff test, in the form of the Missouri State Bears. They're 13-3 overall, and sit tied for third in the Valley with a 3-2 conference mark. Their non-conference play went fantastic, finishing 10-1 with wins over Auburn, Tulsa, and St. Louis. Their two conference losses were by 8 @ UNI and by 3 at home v. Wichita State -- arguably the two best teams in the Valley.

Who to watch for

They've got two strong shooters that can burn us from the outside, and really guide the Bears offense:

Adam Leonard, junior transfer from Eastern Kentucky is shooting 40-95 from three (42.1%) and is averaging 13.0 PPG
Kyle Weems, the fantastic sophomore, is shooting 33-68 from the three (48.5%), and 52% overall en route to 16.1 PPG. He's also chipping in 5.8 RPG.

In additon to those two, there are some other key role players that fit in very well. To name a few:

Jermaine Mallett (Jr Guard) has scored in double figures in 8 of his last 9 games, en route to a season PPG of 10.8.
Justin Fuehrmeyer averages nearly four assists per game off of the bench.

That said, this seems to be a two horse team on offense. In their last game against Bradley, Leonard and Weems hoisted up 30 shots combined. They'll likely try to find ways to get open shots against our zone tomorrow night.

What do they do well?

They do a lot of things well overall on offense, and using adjusted efficiency they look to be one of the top offenses in the nation thus far through the season.

Part of the reason for that is they take fantastic care of the basketball. Their assist to turnover ratio AS A TEAM is 1.25. In addition, they only turnover 17.9% of possessions, well below the national average of 20.9%. In short, they take care of the basketball -- something that is going to make our defense work even harder.

Given the statistics above, it shouldn't be surprising that this team shoots the ball very well from beyond the three, obviously guided by Leonard and Weems. Overall, they shoot 39.7% from the three as a team, which will certainly put pressure on our zone defense to extend against those shots.

On defense, they do a fantastic job keeping other teams off of the boards, only allowing 29.2% of opportunities to be fetched by the opposition (well below the nat'l average of 33%).

They're going to be a stiff test for us, and it will be interesting to see if the improvement we've shown over the past few games continues against them.

What can we exploit?

Well, hopefully we can utilize our improving defense. Looking at all of our Valley games, we haven't allowed over 31.3% shooting by any of our opponents in a game. Considering the importance of the three point shot for MSU, if we can keep that trend going, that will be critical to holding their offense down and allowing us opportunities to capitalize. I'd say that keeping MSU under 33% from beyond the three is critical.

Hopefully we can keep MSU off the boards as well, particularly if they do miss from the outside. I'm specifically looking at Templeton, because he's been huge and has really turned into an on court leader for this team. He's developing into a player that just makes you feel better about our chances when he's on the floor, hopefully that continues into tomorrow night.

Now, MSU is not a strong offensive rebounding team. If you throw out their 17 against Bradley, their prior four Valley games shows this. Consider their game by game results: 8, 9, 6, and 6. If we can keep MSU in single digit offensive rebounds, coupled with above, we're going to drive down their efficiency on the offensive end.

On our end, when we do have the ball -- we have to improve on our poor shooting. Wichita State got away with 38% because they got 14 offensive rebounds. UNI had little to no offensive rebounds because of their fantastic 53% shooting on the night. Altogether, I think we need to be above 40% tomorrow night to help us put ourselves in position to win. We need Josh Young and Ryan Wedel to lead the charge from that standpoint.

So those are my three keys for tomorrow's scorecard:
(1) Keep MSU < 33% FG
(2) Keep MSU < 10 offensive boards
(3) Shoot > 40% FG

Prediction

I think the keys fall in our favor pretty well. We're back at home after a strong road trip, we're playing better, and I feel like some of the keys above are things we can certainly accomplish tomorrow. I think we're going to really hold them down from beyond the arc tomorrow, and that's going to critically stump their offense for stretches of the game.

I think the combination of returning to the Knapp and some confidence built from a strong road trip is going to really catapult our offense tomorrow into a level we haven't seen in several games. Cuonzo Martin is doing a fanastic job with this Bears team, but come tomorrow night, I think he's going to be surprised with what hits his team. I'm honestly thinking this is a game we can snag.

Drake 68, Missouri State 66

Drake Bulldogs (5-11 0-4) @ Southern Illinois Salukis (9-4 2-2)

2010-01-09T17:29:00.005-06:00

A few words on tonight's game. These aren't the same Salukis that flew around back in the mid 'aughts. Those teams were ridiculously strong and athletic. In addition, to call them defensively superior would be an understatement. The year they lost to Kansas in the Elite 8 (2007), they posted an adjusted defensive efficiency of 86.6 for the season, an absolutely insane level of efficiency from their defense.

But those times are gone. Over the past two years, Chris Lowery's team has essentially become an average defensive team. Their adjusted defensive efficiency has just been below average over the past year and a half (99.7 in '09, 99.4 this year). Opponents are shooting an EFG% of 50.0%, well below the glory days when they allowed mid 40%'s.

They never were barnburners offensively, but they were efficient. With the addition of Tony Freeman and the development of Kevin Dillard and Carlton Fay, they now have some potent options to score the basketball. Consider:

Tony Freeman is shooting 45.5% from beyond the arc, and three other players have 16 made three pointers (Dillard, Fay, Justin Bocot)
Six players shoot 50.0%+ EFG in significant minutes
They play a faster tempo than average. While this doesn't necessarily indicate strong offense, it nonetheless illustrates how they've really changed as a team.

Make no mistake that they're going to give us a tough test. But one item we can really exploit is their tendency to foul at a high rate. I haven't seen them play in a while, so I don't know if it's just that they now get whistled when refs used to let them play, or if they actually are just less disciplined than in the past. But they are among the worst teams in the NCAA in allowing opponents to get to the line.

Want an example? Anthony Booker commits an astounding 8.3 fouls/40 minutes. It almost seems as if he is trying to foul his way right back on the bench once he gets into the game.

Now, we've been a poor free throw shooting (and poor shooting) team as of late. We need that to change tonight. While I've said before that we really don't have a team of slashers, that doesn't mean we can't be aggressive and try to find ways to get to the line. But we need to be smart about it and not set up bogus plays like Frank Wiseler one on one against Tony Freeman.

All that said, I don't expect a win tonight, but I continue to expect improvement. We were really seeing it before the offensive hiatus that occurred within the past few weeks. But @ Creighton was a real step forward and I'm thinking that even though @ SIU sounds like a scary matchup for us, we keep taking steps. That said, I don't think we're quite there yet.

SIU 70, Drake 64

Coming soon -- I have fit a model to predict the probability of Josh Young breaking the scoring record. Results are looking pretty good, but there are a few i's to dot and t's to cross. More on that soon.

What happened!?!?!??!?

2010-01-03T11:24:00.009-06:00

What is going on? I go away for New Years and come back to find that our early season strength (shooting) has now become our #1 weakness in conference play.

When we shot an EFG% of 41.8% against Bradley, I chalked it up to a bad night from beyond the arc (28.1% for threes that night). Considering that our defense has made significant strides, and that we were beginning to get some rebounds, I felt like we at least had a shot to be competitive against Wichita State. With a spread of Drake (+15) in that contest, I felt fairly certain that the gambling man was practically "losing money" by not betting on Drake.

Boy was I wrong. I almost thought I pulled up the wrong score when I saw that the Drakies lost 61-38. Again, another story where we were in the game (if I recall correctly, the score was 35-31 WSU at one point) but decided to stop scoring for a long, critical stretch (finished being outscored 26-7).

Again, our defense was solid (61 points allowed, an efficiency of 92.4 PPP [Points Per 100 Possessions] which is well below Wichita State's season average). We continued to rebound the ball in an acceptable range (OR% was 26%, we allowed Wichita to get an OR% of 36%, roughly at our season average). But we shot a horrendous 24.6% EFG.

What are we going to do? At this point, I have two thoughts:

(1) Continue to find a way to generate QUALITY three point shots

I'm sure this sounds incredibly stupid on the surface. Given the poor performance of their shooting over the past few games, the last thing one might think to do is to continue to find ways to have the Bulldogs to jack up threes.

But consider the makeup of our roster. We have one average-to-solid post player (The Beast) and one that has two serviceable moves (Urban Legend). We have an undersized point guard that can slash, fight through contact, but is an average finisher at the rim at best (Stanley). And then we have a team that is either jump shooters (Wedel, JY, Simons) or are too young to have the body to fight through contact and finish strong (Hawley, Uhlenhopp).

Translation: We have zero slashers on this squad. Thinking back to the last two games I was at (San Diego State and Bradley), there were two players that stuck out to me: Taylor Brown (BU) and Kawhi Leonard (SDSU). I know these names might not ring a bell, but watching them play, they looked like they belonged on the Southern Illinois teams from the mid 'aughts. These guys were athletic, long, tough, and MEAN.

Who would we throw a back door alley-oop to on this Drake team? Who do we have in the open floor that makes the opponent scared they're going to get posterized/dunked on? The answer is nobody.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think you want 5 of those guys on the floor at the same time. But until we have one or two of them, I don't see how you can make the argument that we should avoid being a jumpshooting team.

Perhaps Karl Madison and/or Rayvonte Rice might change that. Until they're here, I think this is a team that needs to find a way to shoot effectively from beyond the arc and take ~40%-45% of their jump shots from three. Considering our personnel, it's the way you maximize your efficiency on the offensive side of the floor.

(2) Stop using women's basketballs at shooting practice

The harder part is figuring out how you can get these guys to start knocking down shots again.

I don't know if they are shooting with women's basketballs during practice, or if the practice hoops are lowered to 9'6", or if Phelps & Company spend 30-90 minutes berating each player individually into the point that they feel like they are nothing as a person. Whatever it is, they need to (a) get more work in to find out whatever fundamental/mechanical flaws might exist, and (b) build some confidence for some of these guys.

I think it's clear that the trio of JY/Wedel/Simons are struggling. Over the past three losses, they have combined for 23/80 FG (28.8%) and 11/44 3PT (25.0%). If these three are going to continue to take 25-30 shots per game (and 15 or so threes) they HAVE to shoot at a better clip. We're flat out not good enough to win when they shoot this bad.

I'm not close enough to know whether Phelps should consider to keep bringing Simons off the bench or not -- but he needs to be careful that he doesn't wreck Simons and set him back 1-2 years in his development. Don't get me wrong, Hawley has outplayed Ben and deserves the minutes, but I think Simons clearly has the higher potential on the offensive end (look at what he did against a Big12 team in Iowa State). In my opinion, we're better off in the second half of this season if Phelps can get Simons back to .470/.390 FG%/3P% rates.

The same goes for Wedel and JY. I don't think you sit these guys based on their experience, but they have to get back to "effortlessly" making open three pointers in game situations. Until they do, I don't see how we excel on the offensive end like we did in the first half of the season.

PREDICTION

This team is becoming one of the most difficult ones to read in quite some time. Tonight's no easier, as I expect a tough test from Indiana State.

I've always been a fan of Harry Marshall since he was a sophomore. While he was pre-season MVC watch, he still has always seemed like a great below-the-radar player in the conference that does a lot of great things for you. Consider his line last year: 13.6 PPG, 4.3 APG, 3.5 RPG, 0.9 SPG.

However, Marshall was suspended for one game a few weeks back for an undisclosed violation of team rules. Since his return, he's averaged 9.3 PPG, 2.7 APG, 4.3 RPG, 1.3 SPG, while shooting 37.9%. He'll be ready.

Jake Kelly is a different story. We've recently learned that due to a recent knee injury, he'll need season ending surgery. It's a tough blow to the Sycamores, as he really started to put together a fine run of play, which included a game winning shot to beat Toledo on the road.

A quick look at the numbers shows that they have been a fairly above average defense this season, only allowing a 45.1% EFG%. They have allowed a bit of a high % of opposing points to come from 2-point baskets (at 52.8%), which I wonder is due to the fact that they play so many guards. That said, I don't think this is something we can really expose, due to my point #1 listed above, and due to the fact that they'll likely go back to a larger lineup with Kelly's minutes now needing to go to someone else.

Obviously, the question remains as to whether Friday was an abberation or was a scary warning sign to what is to come for this offense. While I think 38 points is an anomaly, we're going in the wrong direction. I have to go with Indiana State tonight.

Sycamores 65, Bulldogs 54

Bradley Braves (5-5, 0-0) AT Drake Bulldogs (5-7, 0-0)

2009-12-29T08:29:00.003-06:00

Don't have time this morning for a full graphic, but here are some quick thoughts:

Our defense has shown some improvement over the last two games. While we did allow an average of 73.5 points over that span, we have shown some minor improvement in adjusted points/possession numbers. This is especially the case when you compare them to our poor defensive performances against Binghamton and North Dakota (again, on an adjusted basis). I don't have the full breakdown, but I am intrigued to see how we fare tonight against Bradley, which is essentially a spot on average offensive ballclub.
We need to figure out how to win close games. This is obviously a sign of a young team, but consider that we have been leading in the second half of 6 of our 7 losses. If we were able to figure out how to hold onto the leads in half of those games, consider how we would be looking, with a 8-5 record heading into conference play.
I'm especially looking tonight at how Simons responds to his recent slump, how JY responds to failing to close out a big game for us, and how Wedel plays with what appears to be an ankle that is 100%.

Bradley's coming into tonight on a three-game skid after their big win over Illinois and a follow-up win over Northern Illinois. However, those losses weren't against poor teams (one was against Iowa State and another was against a 10-2 Western Carolina team).

That said, both teams are coming back from a break following a tough loss. Drake obviously blew several chances to beat a great San Diego State squad, and Bradley virtually got run out of the gym in Ames until Iowa State let up and let them back into the game late. It will be interesting to see who utilized their break to put their tough loss behind them.

I'm guessing both teams will come out playing hard and we'll see a great game. I haven't had the chance to research this as much as I'd like, but I have a feeling this could be a close game. Considering our recent play in holding leads in tight games, I have some concern.

Prediction: Bradley 68, Drake 65

BulldogsRoundball Letter to Santa

2009-12-24T12:58:00.004-06:00

Dear Santa:

Thanks so much for the other night's game. While we lost a heartbreaker, especially one that we likely should have closed out in regulation, it was fantastic to see the Bulldogs play at a high level against a quality opponent. Tuesday was the most fun I have had at a Drake game since we beat Iowa 60-43 at home last year.

While our 5-7 record doesn't indicate that we're having a great year, make no mistake that the guys have been good boys this year. They don't get into the legal problems that players at bigger programs have been struggling with, they go to class and contribute, and they generally work their tails off. Even when things aren't going our way (take the Iowa State game), they still compete and never give up. If that doesn't make them good, I don't know what does.

Because of that, I'm hoping you can bring the guys a few things for Christmas:

Ben Simons shot. Since the UCF game where he scored 11, Ben has been averaging 7.6 PPG and has been shooting 37.3% from the field. In addition, he's shot 8-30 from beyond the arc, which translates to 26.7%. While we have guys on this squad that can shoot, I think Ben is critical to adding that extra option, and I'd like to see him pick it up. He showed signs of that in the second half of Tuesday's game, maybe for Christmas you can keep that going into Valley play.
Josh Young's Confidence. I'll preface this by saying that JY is extremely mentally tough. But there's no way anyone would not be reeling after missing multiple opportunities to win a huge game for their team. It's unquestionable that he is a leader on this team, and his play is critical to how well we finish this season. Please ensure that Josh keeps his confidence and steps it up after having a rough night, Santa. He was really starting to turn things around lately, scoring in double figures in the past five games, en route to posting a 16.8 PPG average over that same timeframe.
Some breaks for Adam Templeton. Adam has visibly been working hard and playing a critical role to the team, leading us with 6.5 RPG. He's also shooting 44.7% from behind the arc on the year. He has been fantastic and has been playing like the true '4' this team needs. Please reward his efforts with a breakout game or a clutch shot down the stretch against a big Valley opponent, because he sure deserves it.
Continued Development of Seth Van Deest. This team obviously has a rebounding deficiency. Please help SVD continue his interior development to get those 7+ rebound games (like he did on Tuesday) to be more of a norm from him. Even though he had a bit of an off night shooting, he still offers a great interior scoring option as of late, and if he can continue to rebound at a clip like that, he will continue to help this team in a critical way.
Large Crowd for Next Tuesday v. Bradley. Please help the DSM fans to continue to show up and be loud like they were on Tuesday. Please excuse 99% of the crowd for remaining with 0.3 seconds left and not supporting our team for 45 minutes even though they gave us a hard 45 minutes of basketball. We really do need a big crowd to show up for what could be a tough matchup against Bradley. It seemed that the guys really fed off of the crowd on Tuesday, and I ask you Santa that you help continue that in upcoming games.

We'll try to get some Bulldog shaped Christmas cookies along with a tall glass of milk for you at the Knapp Center, so you can leave the items above.

- dutl

Aztecs @ Bulldogs

2009-12-21T20:44:00.005-06:00

Tomorrow night brings the next test, a home game against the Aztecs of San Diego State, courtesy of the MVC-MWC Challenge.

The Aztecs come to town just off of a narrow 55-52 loss on the road to Arizona State (who I think might have a shot to be pretty good, despite all that they lost). Their most notable win is likely their 63-46 drubbing of Arizona, which occurred just back on 12/12.

While there's no clear cut superstar that sticks out on this squad, I'm absolutely terrified of this matchup. Look at how solid of a unit they put on the floor:

Tyrone Shelley_6-5 G / 10.3 PPG / 4.2 RPG
D.J. Gay_______6-0 G / 10.2 PPG / 2.4 RPG
Kawhi Leonard__6-6 F / 9.5 PPG / 9.5 RPG
Malcolm Thomas_6-9 F / 10.5 PPG / 7.1 RPG
Billy White____6-8 F / 12.2 PPG / 5.8 RPG

That is an absolutely stacked starting five. All of them virtually average double figures, and they all rebound the heck out of the basketball. Kind of like UNI on steroids.

This team is active and gets after it, getting 61% of their points from within the arc (well above the national average of 52%). If they don't score the first time, they're going to get second chances, with an offensive rebounding % of 43.5%, SIXTH in the nation. I really like where their floor percentage (the % of posessions they score on) is, at about 58%. All in all, as I look through the numbers, this seems to be a balanced attack that really puts pressure on you and generates ridiculous amounts of added opportunities. This does not bode well for the Drakies, and possibly is the worst matchup we have had to face yet this season.

CEASING TO BE SUCH A DEBBIE DOWNER...

On the bright side, consider the play of Seth Van Deest over the past five games:

25.0 Minutes/Game
12.3 Points/Game
5.0 Rebounds/Game
0.622 Field Goal Percentage
0.810 Free Throw Percentage

Absolutely oustanding stuff. He's been efficient (0.622 FG%), he's made his free throws (0.810), and he's getting us great offense out of the post. If anything, I'd like to see him get more touches. A strong post presence that you have to respect opens so many options for an offense. It will be interesting to see if he can keep this run going as we really start to hit the meat of the schedule.

GETTING TO CRUNCH TIME

The next four games is really going to show us how the rest of the season is going to shape out. Using data from RealTimeRPI.com, our average RPI of our 11 played opponents is 182. That changes in a hurry, as the next four opponents (SDSU, Bradley, Wichita State, and Indiana State) combine for an average RPI of 76. It's looking like one of our tougher stretches of our season, and it certainly will tell us where the remainder of the games are going to go.

Focusing on just the next game at hand, I think I gave my perspective above. We're going to struggle to matchup with this team, and I just hope that their take it to the rim style doesn't get Van Deest in foul trouble, because I'd love to see how he continues to progress. I'd also like to see Ben get back on track, but perhaps that's food for thought for another time...

Prediction: Aztecs 75, Drake 64

(dutl 4-3 on the season)

Bulldogs (5-5) AT Hawkeyes (3-7)

2009-12-19T14:56:00.003-06:00

Well, it's finally here, the annual showdown with Iowa. I'm sitting here, T-2.5 hours from tipoff and couldn't be any more jacked.

Perhaps it's because I've only been following the team since 2003, but this has really been the signature game of the year to me over that timeframe. To me, there's no better of a measuring stick than to see how our guys perform against the Big10 team that is on the other side of Highway 80. While the Hawkeyes have certainly been in a rebuilding mode the past year or two, I don't think that changes anything. This is a signature game, and an important one for the remainder of the season for the Bulldogs.

I'll be watching the game with perhaps a 50-50 split of Hawkeyes and Iowa fans. No better example to show that then the couple hosting the party is evenly split, one for the Hawkeyes (him) and one for the Bulldogs (her, that'a girl!). She has been a huge proponent for Drake this week, even pointing out how the Bulldogs have had their own Bud Light fan cans ever since they changed to the new logo (which is Blue and White... pretty close).

As I look forward to tip, here's whats running through my head:

Q: How has Iowa fared against poorly ranked defenses?

Here's the figures on the two worst defenses they faced:

NC Central (109.4, 300th) - Iowa scored at a rate of 112 points/100 possessions.
Bowling Green (104.5, 236th) - Iowa scored at a rate of 113 points/100 possessions.

Iowa's more of a 104 points/100 possessions team, so this clearly indicates that they've performed well against poor defenses in the limited sample we have. The key issue here is that we're certainly one of these poor defenses (statistically speaking) as well.

That said, both of these examples were very poor offensive teams, so that makes me inclined to think that Iowa likely had to work a bit less on the defensive end. You can make a very fair argument that those two are fairly independent of one another, but I'm not necessarily swayed in this particular case.

The end result is that they're certainly going to put pressure on our defense. We need to shore up that zone, and this game is absolutely going to give us a feel for where it's going to go. I personally think we've had a few games where we've shown progress, but have reverted a bit as of late. If that trend continues, this game could get ugly.

Q: Let's talk about the other end of the floor. What does Drake have going in their favor?

An item that has creeped up in their numbers that needs to be exploited is the fact that they have been allowing the three.

Their opponents are shooting 37.3% from beyond the arc. That may not sound too high, but consider this: only two opponents they have faced this year shoot above that rate themselves (Texas San Antonio at 40.6% and Iowa State at 44.6%). The rest shoot roughly at that range, or well below (with a number in the 20% range).

What does this mean? Well consider some examples:

Wichita State shoots 36.6% on the season but hit 11-21 (52.4%) against Iowa
NC Central shoots 35.2% on the season but hit 8-18 (44.4%) against Iowa
Duquesne shoots an abysmal 25.5% on the season but still managed 8-22 (36.4%)

We're better shooting teams then all of these teams, at 40.3% on the season. The three ball will be huge as we need to get Wedel, Young, Simons, and company rolling from beyond the arc. If we do, we're going to score our share of points, which hopefully will put pressure on the Hawkeyes on the other end of the floor.

Q: What else is critical?

Well, it wouldn't be a blog posting if I didn't mention rebounding. It's obvious that we need to hold our own on the defensive glass and avoid second opportunities. But I'm going to go a different route here -- turnovers.

Believe it or not, Drake is currently 15th in the country with a TO% of 16.9% (average is 21.0%). Iowa is just above the average at 22.9%.

While I think part of Drake's low # is because we have played so many poor defensive teams, I still think it's key they take care of the basketball on the road. In addition, they need to find a way to tip passes, force turnovers, and get the ball away from the Hawkeyes.

In a 65 possession game, 17% versus 23% results in 11 versus 15 turnovers. With how we've been defending, it will be critical to keep a 4+ turnover edge in our favor. If we can do that, we're certainly on our way to a win.

So what's your thought?

This game is huge. While Iowa is certainly struggling, consider the ramifications of a win in Iowa City. We go into the San Deigo State game with huge momentum (a three game winning streak) and possibly keep that going into the Valley season. While a loss today is by no means a season breaker, it certainly is a missed opportunity for this team to really get on a roll.

I think the Hawkeyes are struggling. While we're young, I don't think there's much of a psychological edge for us to travel to Iowa City. Josh Young has done it before, and he'll have to play a critical role.

I'm predicting that he continues to get back on track, showing some results from all the extra work he put in. I'm predicting that Drake's defense shows up and puts up defensive numbers somewhere in the range of the better 1/3 of games they have statistically. I'm predicting the upset (Drake is +6):

Drake 68, Iowa 63

(dutl 4-2 on the season)

HyVee Tournament: Take Two

2009-12-11T13:21:00.004-06:00

I'm in Texas finishing up a seminar for a designation I have been working on for years. It's been a great week, but I was away from a computer starting Tuesday until today. I'm not going to go too in depth (i.e. players to watch for) due to the fact that I'm out of town. However, as I look forward to this weekend's games, I have the following thoughts:

vs. South Dakota

SD is a part of the Great West Conference -- along with Utah Valley, UT-Pan Am, North Dakota, Houston Baptist, NJIT, and Chicago State. I don't think this existed before this year... wonder if they get an automatic bid -- if so that sounds like BS to me.
Their 5-3 record is rather suspect, with four of those wins coming from non-Division I-A teams.
Surprisingly, they have struggled with rebounding as well, losing the OR% on the year 20.6% to 35.7%. That looks a lot like the numbers that Drake posted earlier in the year -- allowing mid 30's to the other team and barely touching 20% ourselves. Considering that SD has played four non-D1 schools, I like our chances of getting some rebounds. Would like to see SVD have a big game on the boards.

vs. Binghamton

Their plight is well known, as they have seen a very rough 2009 due to various sanctions. http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=4504739
Their suspended coach from that is Kevin "don't call me Calvin" Broadus
They turn the ball over an astounding 28.2% of the time. Be sure to get that full court press ready, coach.
The only D-1 team they have beat is Bucknell.

These are some fairly easy games for DU this weekend, but we saw what can happen with the SIU-E game last week. Ideally this is our chance to get to .500 before we go into Iowa City and follow that up with San Diego State. While the Hawkeyes are struggling this year, they're going to give us a tough game -- and San Diego State will surely be a stiff test. We NEED to win these games to right the ship and gain some momentum as we approach the conference schedule.

PREDICTIONS

I haven't had a chance to work through all the numbers, but I predict the following:

Binghamton gets us into a slow, clunky game. However, we respond and still win 61-51. I don't think that our press is going to force the up and down game that we would like... maybe if this was an experienced team, but I think we all can see that this team has trouble controlling a game at this point.
I think South Dakota could give us a tough game. While we certainly could be better on the boards, I'm worried that they've already seen enough good teams on the road (Texas Tech, Marquette) that they're going to play focused in the Knapp. It's pivotal we take advantage of their inefficiencies rebounding the basketball, and grind out a victory. Prediction: Drakies win 70-65.

(dutl 2-2 on the season)

Who was this SIU-Edwardsville you speak of??? That was Clemson!

2009-12-05T07:39:00.005-06:00

That loss last night certainly left me reeling. Fortunately, Wayne's World was on when I got home, so I thought that would make me feel better (which it did, temporarily). However, I woke up this morning still trying to get that bad loss out of my head and I was having trouble doing so.

The following "Fuzzy Kevin Bacon Math" is my new approach. Through 16 or 17 degrees of separation, I'm basically going to take last nights' loss as one to either Illinois or Clemson. How? Consider that, using game results from this season, we can show the following:

SIU-Edwardsville beat Drake last night, 60-58
Drake beat Austin Peay, 78-72
Austin Peay beat Niagra, 69-67
Niagra beat Drexel, 76-69
Drexel beat Vermont, 74-61
Vermont beat Buffalo, 58-57
Buffalo beat Army, 74-67
Army beat Long Island, 63-56
Long Island beat St. Peter's, 77-71
St. Peter's beat Iona, 56-54
Iona beat Boston University, 82-73
Boston University beat Northeastern, 69-64
Northeastern beat Utah State, 64-61
Utah State beat BYU, 71-61
BYU beat Bradley, 70-60
Bradley beat Illinois, 72-68
Illinois beat Clemson, 76-74

Last night's loss was one for the ages. However, I'm just going to use my "Fuzzy Kevin Bacon Math" above to act like we lost to a Big 10 or ACC team.

Takeaways from Austin Peay and Thoughts for This Weekend

2009-12-03T21:08:00.005-06:00

I'm calling last Saturday's win against Austin Peay the biggest game of the year so far for us. With only six in our belt, that may not be that fascinating of a statement, but consider the following two takeaways that stuck out to me:

Takeaway #1: The potential to rebound is there

Probably the biggest takeaway from last Saturday's game is that we really do have the potential to hold our own on the boards.

It was the first game we outrebounded an opponent, 37-32. That is absolutely huge for this team, considering how much we struggled in our first few games.

Still, you might take the point of view that we’re such a great shooting team that we should be out-rebounding our opponent because we’re likely to give them less opportunities for defensive rebounds (which are far easier to get than offensive boards). To that accord, consider the four factor scorecard from the last game:

Adjusting for opportunities, we still won the offensive rebounding battle 35.5% to 31.6%. In addition, giving up 31.6% to the other team is pretty acceptable as far as I am concerned.

Think about how much we improve on the offensive end of the floor if we can start to consistently offensive rebound more effectively. We are such an exceptional shooting basketball team that if we combine that with the ability to get our fair share of offensive rebounds – we have the potential to really become a force on the offensive side of the basketball. Our chances greatly increase when Seth Van Deest or Adam Templeton get putbacks to go, or if they feed the ball to someone spotting up from behind the three, like Ben Simons or Ryan Wedel.

I don’t think we are going to rebound at a 35% clip for the remainder of the season, but now that they’ve shown us they can do it, it really makes me excited about the possibility of where this offense can go.

Takeaway #2: We really broke out of the nasty funk our offense was headed towards

This is a chart that shows adjusted offensive efficiency.

What is that? Well, think of it as how many points we score divided by the # of possessions we have. The higher that number is, the more we (or the opponent) score each time down the floor. The standard is to show this number per 100 possessions. In addition, the national average for 2009 is 99.6, so consider about one point per possession to be a good proxy for average.

Why is it adjusted? Well, we want to take into account how good or bad an opponent is. For instance, we did a fair job holding Georgia State to 58 points, but consider that they are the #306 offensive team according to Ken Pomeroy. There were a fairly low amount of possessions in that game, so in reality that’s not that much of a gold star for our defense.

Let me now clarify the chart. I have shown offensive efficiency in blue, and defensive efficiency in red. Recall that 100 is virtually average, so when we’re above 100 on offense – that’s a good thing (we're scoring more points in our possessions than the average). Conversely, when we’re over 100 on defense, that’s a bad thing (we're allowing more).

It shouldn’t surprise you that we haven’t been below 100 on defense on an adjusted basis this year. No example should illustrate this better than Iowa State dropping a 90-spot on us, then later in the season being held to 60 against UNI. At this particular point in the season, UNI is a far better defensive team then we are, and it shows (in case you’re wondering – Ken Pomeroy has their defensive efficiency at 96.7 – it’s probably not the exact same way I would calculate it but its in the same range).

The game by game results are the following:
Game 1 = IUPUI
Game 2 = Iowa State
Game 3 = Georgia State
Game 4 = Akron
Game 5 = UCF
Game 6 = Austin Peay

We started off the season REALLY hot on the offensive side of the ball, which is no shock. With three games in the 115+ adjusted offensive efficiency area, we were flat out clicking along – primarily due to exceptional shooting (our EFG% was 61.4% for the first three games. The national average is 48.8% so far this season… shows you how incredible this team can shoot the rock).

However, things really took a turn for the worse once that Daytona tournament got to Saturday and Sunday. Our offensive ratings dropped below 100 and then down to 80! In particular, that fifth game saw us shoot 18-58 (31%) from the field. You can chalk it up to a bad day or two, but clearly the way those bars were going was a clear cause for concern.

Our ability to really turn things up (on the road nonetheless) was absolutely huge. I think it suggests that we’re a young, inconsistent team – but when we’re on we can really be fantastic on the offensive side of things. That is a breath of fresh air as far as I am concerned.

LOOKING FORWARD

Switching gears, let’s look forward to this weekend. I have the following thoughts on our matchups:

(1) SIU Edwardsville is very bad

They’re 0-6 and many of those look pretty brutal. They were got dropped by 30 by Evansville.
On the road, they’re 0-3 with an average margin of “victory” of -22.3 points.
Mark Yelovich, #33, 6-6 So F, stands out to me. He’s averaging 13.3 PPG and 7.3 RPG in their six games. He’s only shooting 33% from the field, but to be fair their whole team is shooting 38.3% from the floor for the season. With two double digit rebounding games already under his belt this year, he could be pesky on the boards.

(2) I REALLY hope we play UT-Arlington in the Saturday game. They are a better team on paper than North Dakota (UTA is 3-2 so far with a narrow loss to North Texas, while NoDak is 1-6 with their only win over “Where’s” Waldorf).

Why do I care? Four of their five games have had at least 70 possessions, and they had an 80 possession game and a 95 possession game (granted, it was double OT). Initial thoughts are that they seem like a team that really likes to get the ball up and down the floor. I think our team would match up really well with an opponent like that.

In addition, UTA is among the worst rated defensive teams (when using adjusted defensive efficiency). With how well we shoot the ball, I am absolutely mystified at how a game like this would go. Assuming UTA keeps the tempo up this baby could be in the 80s or 90s – which would be an awesome treat. Long story short, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that UTA can take care of business against North Dakota so we can see some fireworks on Saturday Night.

My favorite part: Prediction Time

We should be way too much to handle for SIU-E, particularly on our own home floor. Might be close for part of the first half, but then I think we coast to a comfortable victory.

Drake 76, SIU-Edwardsville 59 (2-1 on season)

I don’t want to make any predictions for the other game or for Saturday, because I really want to see us play UTA. Like I said, I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Five Questions for Drake Bulldogs (1-4) @ Austin Peay (2-3)

2009-11-28T00:35:00.003-06:00

In STL for the weekend so a bit of a slimmed down post. Realize that has been the norm lately but am looking forward to making that not the case going forward.

(1) So who has AP played so far, and how have they fared?

AP is 2-3 so far, but their two wins were over Akron (who beat the Bulldogs 63-59 earlier this year) and Niagra (won 26 games last year in the MAAC). They lost a tight one to NC State, got beat down by Tennessee -- and lost fairly convincingly to IUPUI 77-63.

Fortunately, we've had a lot of shared opponents, so while it's very early in the year, it's tough to say that we don't match up well with this team given that we fared better against a team they lost convincingly to (IUPUI) and held our own against a team they narrowly beat (Akron). That doesn't tell us a whole lot about the specifics of this matchup, but at a 10,000 foot level it does indicate that we should be in this game.

(2) Who should we watch for?

Anthony Campbell. This 6-6 sophomore is a very efficient scorer, who averaged 7.8 PPG on 50% shooting as a freshmen last year. He has upped that to 15.0 PPG on 52% shooting this year, and seems poised to breakout as an inside/outside threat for AP. He already has 11 three pointers made and is shooting above 50% from the three this year, so is a threat from the outside, but certainly could blast us inside as well, where he did a lot of damage last year. His EFG% for THE YEAR last year was 60.6%.

Wes Channels. This senior split time as the lead scorer for AP last year, taking over 1/4 of their shots (splitting that duty with Drake Reed, who graduated). Averaged 16.5 PPG last year, and has started off real slow averaging 10.8 PPG, but shooting 30.2% from the field, and 20% from the three. With an EFG% of 51.1% last year, I'd expect him to pick things up and really offer another look away from Campbell to bring a two headed monster of scorers for AP.

(3) What do they do well?

Well, last year they could really shoot it (EFG% = 53%) and they return a lot of the same players. So that would indicate to me that we really need to step things up on the defensive end. That is the one number that really sticks out to me -- this team could really take it to us and pressure our defense early and often.

They have shown the ability to get offensive rebounds, claiming 31% of their opportunities (keep in mind this has been around 20% for Drake this year, that being a high number) -- so they'll likely give us fits on the boards.

(4) What can we exploit?

Shooting. This team struggled allowing a high EFG% last year, and that has continued into this year ('09 = 52.3%, '10 = 51.3%). We need to utilize our shooters to keep their defense honest and to open up driving opportunities for Wiseler, Young, Simons, & company.

They don't shoot a lot of threes. Campbell and Channels are two to keep in front of, but possibly a way to play that to our advantage on the defensive end.

Channels has struggled to shoot the ball right out of the gate this year, compared to his career numbers. It will be an interesting test for our defense to see if we can keep that trend going on, or if that was just a product of playing Akron, Tennessee, etc... producing tough matchups on the scoring end.

(5) What is your prediction?

This is a tough one to call. We're a more talented team, but we're young, inexperienced, struggling offensively, and on the road. I feel like we could honestly blow them out, but I wouldn't be surprised if we slip up as well. I think getting home and getting some practice time is going to pay dividends. Our depth is going to be clutch, and I think JY steps it up and we win a big one on the road:

Drake 72, Austin Peay 66

(dutl = 1-1 on the regular season in picks)

Trying to get all Bill James on the Bulldogs

2009-11-22T20:07:00.004-06:00

As you well know, this past week was fairly rough as far as blog postings. Work really picked up and I got a little snuck up on with the whole three games/three days thing. It's a good learning experience for the blog -- I'll have to proactively plan a little bit better last time.

Today I'd like to get my Bill James on and attempt to apply a sabermetrics concept to Drake basketball this season. Specifically VORP, or Value over Replacement Player. The idea is that it measures how much more productive a player is than someone at "replacement" level (essentially a AAA callup).

I'll freely admit that I wanted to come up with something that could be estimated purely from box score statistics, so to say that this possesses anywhere near the refinement of VORP is a flat out lie. Other than the idea behind it, we should really stop the comparisons there. As a result, I'll call it BSRVE (Box Score Replacement Value Exceeded).

My methodology was to consider the possessions "used" by a player (shots and turnovers). From there, I would apply average turnover rates and shooting percentages to determine how many points a "replacement player" would have generated with the same possessions. I then subtracted that value from the actual points generated from each player to get a base result.

Value was then added for rebounds (offensive = +0.7, defensive = +0.3), for assists (+1.0) and steals (+1.0), and then reduced for turnovers (-1.0). I made the simplifying assumption that a replacement player would commit enough turnovers to offset the value added from whatever steals/assists/rebounds they committed (a convienient, but likely less accurate assumption).

Why these figures? Well, on average, getting rebounds helps prevent opposing possessions or generate new offensive possessions. Assisting other players gives them easier scoring opportunities, and creating steals reduces the possessions of the opponent. These generate points on average for the team, or on average reduce points for the other team. Committing turnovers essentially reduces points for the team since you can't get any points out of the possession.

So, I applied my methodology to each player's game and summed up the overall results. Here are our players, sorted by "AVERAGE BSRVE":

I have made anything between 5-10 green, anything above that tan, and anything below 0 as red. Few thoughts:

Early on, Ben Simons really shot the ball exceptionally well and pulled down rebounds while really limiting turnovers. Overall, he's been extremely productive so far, although with a few recent poor shooting days he has slowed. (By the way, forgive that I have "Simmons" in here, as that is how they have the detail at the stat source I pulled these from).
Wedel generates some high values from his ridiculous 66.3% EFG% on the season. That said, his AST/TO for the season is 5/12. That's not so hot, and suggests to me that he might be better suited for the 2.
Despite the fact he is only averaging 4.6 PPG, Wiseler is an extremely valuable player. Consider that, as a point guard, he has a ridiculous 16/3 AST/TO ratio for the season. 8-17 is an admittedly small sample size, but if Frank keeps shooting well enough to make people respect him, he continues to be extremely dangerous as he has shown he can set up his teammates. His ballhandling has been exceptional so far, and I'd really like to see him get more time. He doesn't need to start, but he should be playing 20+MPG because we couldn't ask anything more out of a 1.
JY needs to get it going. We need more out of him than 1-8 days like today for us to be a good basketball team. I realize he's likely playing hurt and is critical as a vocal leader, but we need production as well. He needs to be in that top three.
After being somewhat invisible early on, David Smith did make some plays this weekend. He obviously needs to do better at the line, but I was glad to see him make plays and get in the open floor. He has the potential (which is my buzz word for this team) to really be a great player in some time.
Shouldn't be a surprise that we had such low returns vs. UCF. Simons essentially shot a bit below average but managed some assists to get positive. Wedel & JY were fairly invisible. Other than some Templeton treys early on, it was quite the poor showing for our offense.

Initial results seem fine enough to show, so that is the reason for this post. Using 68 possessions (national average) and applying the same formulas, we'd get roughly 40 something points if "replacement players" played all 200 minutes of a game. If you sum up the "AVG BSRVE" and add it to that value, we get 68.0 PPG using this metric. This is just slightly over our actual PPG of 65.2. But, this includes some defensive metrics and is admittedly rough, so it should really just be in the vicinity.

So, it's not busted yet, but it is admittedly a work in progress. Bucky would have annihilated this thing with his combination of rebounds and shooting, but I think we all thought he was an extremely valuable player so maybe that doesn't break this thing just yet. That said, there's more work to be done here. It would be nice to look at more games to get a better fit on my calculations. Also, I need to think about adjusting this for pace and for the strength of teams we're playing.

Some final random thoughts on a Sunday Night:

Templeton has really turned into a true 4 for us. He's our best screener and has 25 boards through five games. Couldn't ask anything more, especially when he's coming off of a 15 points, 6 boards performance against UCF.

I was able to sneak in the video streams on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, the package included audio from the Akron announcer, who was absolutely horrendous with Drake's roster. Don't get me wrong, there are some tough names on Drake's roster. I don't have a problem with an opposing broadcaster breaking out "WEH-del" as I made that same mistake myself. But here were the top three Bulldogs Name Butchers I heard on Saturday (counted down, Letterman style):

#3: "Seth VON Deest". Apparently Count Bettendorf was alive and well in Daytona Beach on Saturday as I heard this one numerous times.

#2: "Ray" Eaddy. Big Nasty earned yet another hilarious nickname as their broadcaster felt like pulling out a name nowhere present on our roster to make things interesting.

#1: Frank "VICE-ler". Apparently we had Dirk Nowitzki running the point on Saturday, because their announcer sure had the love for subbing in the "V" for the "W". I got a good kick out of this one, if you don't know the guys name, at least try to sound it out and use the letters that appear on the roster! If this game had taken place just a few hundred miles south, Frank would have been Miami Vice for the day.

Was that really a neutral site on Sunday? Apparently the horrendous coverage of Drake's roster on Saturday forced the streaming carrier to nix the audio feed. As a result, we only heard the PA and what went on in the gym -- essentially being present a the game. Between the "airball" chants for Templeton (who still was fantastic) and the clear moans/groans at the officials (who struggled on Sunday), it sure sounded like we were playing at UCF. Just something to keep in mind as we break this one down.

I liked seeing Ben Simons take the ball to the rim after he was struggling behind the three. While he ended up a rather pedestrian 4-11 from the field, he was 1-6 from the three. He pulled out some nifty floaters and drives and ended up 3-5 from inside the arc. As he continues to learn how to use that 6-8 frame at the college level, he's truly has the potential to develop into an elite scorer.

Stopping Brackins

2009-11-16T22:11:00.007-06:00

After a day of cooling down, I think in hindsight I took a fairly harsh tone in yesterday's post. Altogether, I think this team is going to be absolutely unpredictable due to the fact that there's just so little experience out there. We're going to learn some lessons the hard way, and in some cases, the painful way. After getting run out of the gym on Saturday, would you really be shocked if we turned around and beat ISU tomorrow night? I wouldn't, and it might just be that kind of a team we have here.

Given the knowledge of ISU in the Central Iowa area, I don't think a "five questions" post is going to really serve to be of much value, since many know ISU's team even better than I do.

Instead, my focus is on trying to gauge how Craig Brackins did throughout the season last year, particularly in an attempt to understand what kind of strategy should be enacted to prevent him from putting the same type of hurting on us that Robert Glenn did last weekend.

I focused on last years' numbers since they were so readily available, and I found a few interesting things:

Upon attempting to perform a regression on a few characteristics, I found that neither opposing team's height (in inches) nor opposing team's experience (in years) were statistically relevant when trying to predict Craig Brackins' poorest scoring games. With an R-square of 0.048, you could basically say that there was virtually no statistical relation between Craig Brackins' scoring games and shorter teams or inexperienced teams.

I was especially curious (and fearful) about this because we don't have a lot of experience in the front court, or overall for that matter. Some looking through the individual game results validated this observation -- it's not as simple as having a tall team and experience.

The next thing that jumped out at me was that Brackins seemed to struggle in games which he didn't get a bunch of shots. That's kind of a no brainer when you're trying to figure out how to stop a scorer, but it really got me thinking...

If you isolate the seven games last year where Craig Brackins got 12 or less shots, here was his line:

9.9 PPG, 6.6 RPG, 31-83 FG (0.373 shooting)

Compare this to games where he gets 13 or more shots:

23.6 PPG, 10.4 RPG, 212-429 FG (0.494 shooting)

That's obviously a lot more games and experience, but I think it does show that the guy really seems to ramp up both offensively and on the boards when he's heavily involved in the offense. This is likely the case for most players (and most big men especially), but it's really true with Brackins.

What would I do then?

(1) Pack the matchup zone in and deny as many entry passes as possible. Make sure I keep lengthy players in, like Ben Simons who can use those arms to tip passes and create steals (anyone notice his defensive stats from Saturday?).

(2) Make sure we always have at least two of Van Deest/Templeton/Uhlenhopp on the floor as well to quickly double Brackins when he touches the ball.

I know that IUPUI shot lights out against us from the three on Saturday, but I'd honestly prefer to try to take their best player out of the game and make them make jumpshots to beat us. I realize they have plenty of other players that can score, but so be it. Let's step up the press and force some turnovers and at least take away the first option in their offense. Pack that interior once the ball crosses the timeline.

Prediction Time

This is tough. I honestly don't know if Josh Young is playing tomorrow, and even if he is only 80% (my number, not anything factual), I still feel like he is such an asset to have on the court in games like these. We're benefited by the fact that ISU hasn't played a quality opponent yet, and that we're at home. I'm going to assume that JY is not playing in this game, and because of that, I have to put my ridiculous Drake fandom on hold and actually pick against the guys this week. Maybe the karma will help out:

Iowa State 72, Drake 63

IUPUI 88, Drake 82

2009-11-15T21:19:00.003-06:00

Well, that will teach me to leave DSM when Drake has a home game. Apparently while I was in AZ, Drake and IUPUI played one of the most offensively efficient games the Knapp Center has ever seen. I was only able to catch bits and pieces on the radio, but it seems like a shootout is an understatement for what I missed.

Since I did in fact miss the game, no real first hand feedback on how the guys looked. That said, here is the Four Factors Scorecard for Saturday's loss:IUPUI shot an unbelievable 33-49 (67.3%) from the field, and a sizzling 10-17 (58.8%) from three. That combines for a ridiculous 77.6% EFG% for the GAME. I have a hard time visualizing what that looks like in person, other than pretty much scoring at will, particularly inside the arc.

The thing about it is that Drake had a fantastic shooting day with an EFG% of 62.7%. A lot of that was driven by Ryan Wedel's line of 8-13 from the field and 4-6 from three, but there were others that had strong shooting days as well (Simons, Eaddy, Stanley). Tough to believe that we shoot that well and lose.

The offensive rebounding is clearly a determining factor here as well. IUPUI got an amazing 7 offensive rebounds considering they only missed 16 field goal attempts. With that, they won the battle of the boards and also managed to keep us off the boards fairly well with an OR% of 16.7%.

Drake did manage to force 17 turnovers, an effective rate of 25.8% -- which was above average. Looking through the numbers, it seems to me like the only way we were able to stop them from scoring was to get them to turn the ball over. If they got a shot up, it seems likely they were putting points on the board. We also took great care of the basketball in this game. In addition, with a 17/11 AST/TO ratio, we appeared to really set others up. Frank Wiseler had a fantastic 7/0 line of assists to turnovers.

Still, that win for DU combined with a push on getting to the line were not nearly enough to overcome the rebounding and shooting disparity that they put themselves into. By outshooting and outrebounding us, IUPUI took this game from us despite not managing to take care of the basketball as well as us.

TAKEAWAYS

With how well we shot the ball, I'm not even all that concerned with our offensive rebouding % being so low. I think that's always going to be a flaw with this team, and I'd consider it to be a success if we can get to the low to mid 20%s. In addition, the 36.8% doesn't bother me for the same reason. We shouldn't expect to be winning this battle given our roster makeup, but if we can close the gap (maybe target low 20%s for us and 30% for opponents) I think that puts us in a position we can overcome with our strengths in other areas.

The EFG% disparity absolutely shocks me. Drake should not ever trail in this by 15% to anyone, regardless of whether or not we're missing Josh Young. In addition, a team like IUPUI should not shoot 10-17 from beyond the arc, considering the two guys that drained 10 combined threes are career 42% and 30% three point shooters.

If Robert Glenn drops 37 points on 15-17 shooting, I am now absolutely fearing the type of line that Craig Brackins could drop on us. Hopefully this becomes a wake up call to our interior defense and we pick it up, or else this could become an even more exposable weakness for upcoming foes.

IUPUI Jaguars (0-0, 0-0) @ Drake Bulldogs (0-0, 0-0)

2009-11-13T14:16:00.004-06:00

I'm a bit behind on this one... we're heading to AZ for the weekend for a wedding and so unfortunately I'm missing out on the season opener (weak, I know). Still, had to work late and couldn't get the post out until now. To all of those in DSM, root hard, we need a win rolling into the ISU game!

-dutl

Five Questions for the Home Opener

(1) Why should I get rowdy on the Jaguars?

It’s the Drake season opener! If that’s not enough for you, let me try to find a reason that you should get rowdy.

Their home gym is called “The Jungle”. Actually, that’s not that bad. If done right, I think that would actually be pretty cool. Especially if they blared “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N Roses before games.

Okay, well try this. Their athletic website really pushes that George Hill went to school there. Hill was the 26th pick in the 2008 NBA Draft and grew up in Indiana with the “Magnificent Seven” of Greg Oden, Mike Conley Jr., Josh McRoberts, Rodney Carney, Eric Gordon, Courtney Lee, and Hill. So here’s a good reason for you to get rowdy on IUPUI: The player they claim (George Hill) grew up playing basketball with Courtney Lee. Since Lee was a member of the 2007-2008 Western Kentucky basketball team, as a Drake basketball fan, I’ve already given you enough reason.

(2) Getting serious now, who has IUPUI played so far, and how did they fare?

The Jaguars opened up by annihilating Anderson University, a Division III opponent, by 35 points. Final score was 95-60. They followed that up by handling St. Joseph’s College (no, not that St. Joseph’s – easy there, Jameer Nelson) by a score of 86-62.

It’s hard to put in perspective what that even tells us. I would almost just throw out the Anderson game and focus on St. Joseph’s College. Their conference is fairly comparable to (but doesn't look to be as deep as) Upper Iowa's, and it features Bellarmine which is ranked #2 in all of D-2. They’re also picked to finish third in their division (a five team division). Given that, it’s not outrageous to consider St. Joseph’s to be a fairly close proxy to what Upper Iowa was.

Let's look back to last year. IUPUI returns six of the seven players that received significant minutes on last year’s 16-14 squad that finished 9-9 in the Summit League and lost to Southern Utah in their first game of the Summit Conference Tournament. Last year’s squad had several close misses against quality teams (lost 59-58 against Arizona State, 55-52 against North Dakota State) or teams from higher conferences (60-57 @ Indiana, 64-57 @ UMass). Now all of these are not top notch squads, but there are two NCAA tournament teams in there and a few other teams from higher conferences. Lots of road games in there where they showed up and gave a higher conference team a really tough battle. Given their experiences from that, I’d be surprised if they get too rattled at Drake.

They didn't have just a bunch of close misses. They did win 67-65 at Seton Hall. Not a great team, but again, a notable win. Also, they beat down Indiana State 62-41.

To be honest, at that point in time last year, Indiana State was playing absolutely awful basketball. Still, they held Harry Marshall to 4-12 shooting for 8 points. In Marshall’s next game at UNI, he went off for 23 points in their 85-84 win. So I’m not ready to just quantify his poor game against IUPUI as being rusty in his third game back (he missed the first several games last year if you recall).

(3) Who do we need to keep tabs on?

Robert Glenn #23, Senior 6-7 F. Glenn posted a line of 13.9 PPG / 5.4 RPG. He doesn’t shoot the long ball (took only 8 threes last year and made none, hasn’t shot one this year) but he was ridiculously efficient as he shot 61% from the field. Blocked 50 shots last year, and had 5 in their exhibition against SJC. He also scored 19 in that game. Turned the ball over at a rate of 2.5 per game last year and had 9 combined in the two exhibition games this year.

Alex Young #5, Sophomore 6-5 F. Young posted 10.8 PPG, shooting 44% FG and 28.2% from three. He took nearly 1/3 of their shots, leading the team with 291 field goals attempted. Surprising that he took that many shots and still only scored 10 points a game. That said, he’s a consistent scorer (double figures in 18 games, high of 20 just once) that we need to keep tabs on.

Billy Pettiford #54, Senior 6-7 F AND Jon Avery #20, Senior 6-7 F. Averaged 5.2 RPG and 5.9 RPG, respectively last year. Both had double digit figures in combined rebounds in their exhibition games. They don’t seem to be stars of their team, but if we have our rebounding troubles, these guys could potentially wreak havoc on the interior.

(5) What’s your prediction?

Their other player with significant experience is Leroy Nobles, but he’s a 6-5 G-F tweener. All of the guys I mentioned above are forwards or guard-forward wings. To be honest, that just leaves returnee John Ashworth (limited contributor last year) and Greg Rice (freshmen) to run the point. That's a lot different of a story than last year, considering they lost significant contributor 5-10 Gary Patterson to graduation.

It is true that Ashworth has started off hot with 10 assists to 0 turnovers in their first two exhibition games. Still, despite Ashworth’s play, IUPUI struggled to take care of the basketball against SJC. Part of that was quoted in the press release to be careless play, but I question whether they’re going to be able to easily handle our press. If we can force another high turnover amount (maybe even in the 20s) that’s going to be critical to us speeding up the tempo and getting easy baskets.

I say speeding up the tempo, because I imagine that they’re going to want to slow things down. Look at all of the scores above from last year. On the road against quality teams, IUPUI wanted to grind it out and keep scores in the 50’s and 60’s. Given their lack of depth at three point shooting and experience at the 1, I don’t think they want to get into an up and down game. I think Phelps would probably like for it to get more in the open court with where the freshmen are more comfortable. However, given IUPUI’s team experience, I think they’re going to be fairly successful at keeping the game in the 60s, even on the road.

That said, I like our chances in a close one at home. This is going to be a tougher matchup than some think.

Drake 66, IUPUI 63

Drake Bulldogs 74, Upper Iowa Peacocks 58

2009-11-08T17:17:00.007-06:00

WOW, what a blast! It was so great to see the guys play live again. Hearing Larry and Dolph on 1350 on the way to the game got me all nostalgic and ramped up to go as well.

I wasn't the only one as well. The attendance figure I saw was just over 3,600. To me, that's fantastic given (a) it was an exhibition game and (b) we're still in College Football season. Maybe I'm looking at this wrong, but I feel like great turnouts before November are fantastic when you consider that lots of SportsNation still has its collective mindset on College Football.

Altogether, Drake took care of business and downed the Peacocks 74-58. The game was tight at points, but it just felt like Drake was going to go on a big run sooner or later and really put the game away. That came early in the second half where Ryan Wedel tried to relive his finest high school moment, draining two threes and a nifty reverse layup to pound out 8 quick points in a short time in the second half. After that, you knew it was pretty much over. Drake got up by as many as 22 points, and coasted to a victory.

I'm going to take this post in a direction that's a lot in tune with my analytical/statistical roots. In case you didn't see the Monte Carlo Simulation post from last season, I'm always interested in taking a look at things a different way -- even if that means breaking out some advanced statistics. While I'm not going to do anything crazy like that, I do want to break out some of Dean Oliver's stuff I have been reading recently, specifically the "Four Factors" of basketball.

His Four Factors essentially say that there are four key factors to winning in basketball, shooting being the most important. From there, the other three important factors are taking care of the basketball, giving yourself multiple opportunities, and getting to the foul line. When you apply my estimate of the posessions on Saturday night (which are fairly reasonable) with some rough formulas, below is the scorecard of the four factors from this particular game:

There should be enough here to talk yourself through the calculations, but I'll describe them at a high level for now. Let's walk through them in order:

1) Effective FG %. How well does a team shoot? This is the most important factor to a basketball game. This particular metric is similar to the field goal percentage that the typical basketball fan is used to looking at, with the one exception that three point makes are given extra credit in the numerator due to the fact that you receive three points instead of just two.

By my calculations, Drake shot an astounding 61.7% EFG for the game. This is primarily driven by the fact that we shot almost as well from three (50.0%) as we did for the game (51.1%) and both were very good. Upper Iowa shot a fairly average 49.1% EFG for the game -- solid but clearly not as great as the Bulldogs.

If you were there, early on you would have been surprised to see this. In the first few stretches of the game, Drake really took some time to find its stride and Upper Iowa was really drilling threes. But once we hit halfway through the first half, Drake really started consistently shooting the ball well and the long ball started slipping away for the Peacocks.

2) Turnover %. This pretty much tells you what % of the time a team turns the ball over.

With Drake's press giving the Peacocks fits (to the tune of an incredible 31 turnovers), Upper Iowa really struggled to take care of the basketball, turning it over about 40% of the time. Drake turned the ball over 21.3% of the time. If you're looking for a point of reference, we turned the ball over 20.2% of all of our posessions in the 2008-2009 season.

You couldn't be happier about the way the press worked for Drake, but you would certainly like to see them take care of the ball a bit better against an inferior opponent. We shouldn't have a game where we turn the ball over (on a percentage basis) more than our average last year, against a team we're so much more athletic than.

That said, I do think you have to give a bit of a pass because there were some clear situations where guys made passes expecting a guy to cut one way and they'd go the other way -- things where they just weren't familiar with one another. Those fix themselves over time. In addition, I couldn't have been happier with the way that Wedel and Wiseler played. Wedel was more of a scoring threat, but I liked how he pushed the ball in the second half. Wiseler showed exceptional ball handling in my opinion, and his fast break lead pass over the pack to Aaron Hawley in the first half was one of the better lead passes I have seen live in quite some time. I wasn't the only one giving him props. In the post game show, Ben Simons talked about how he has "crazy Euro moves" when describing Frank's handle.

3) Offensive Rebound %. Big stinker here from the guys, and it shouldn't be a huge revelation to anyone that was there on Saturday. Drake was outrebounded by 15 (36-21) and even failed to get more defensive rebounds than Upper Iowa offensive rebounds (15-16, also inferred by the OR% for Upper Iowa being above 50%).

This is significant cause for concern. To a certain extent, if opponents keep getting second (and third, and fourth, etc...) chances, it really drives the propensity for the posession to just keep extending until they do score. With Craig Brackins just a few weeks away (or, heck, IUPUI next week), if we rebound at this rate, we will significantly undermine our chances to win.

I think we all knew coming into this year that we weren't going to be a rebounding juggernaut. And I don't expect us to even be above average on the glass, but we can't lose the rebounding edge that poorly.

4) Getting to the Line. This is basically how many free throws we make over how many field goals we attempt. Do we get to the line and make them? We certainly pushed the issue and got to the line a lot more than the Peacocks, making more free throws (16) than they attempted (7). That said, we shot 64%, so there is certainly room for improvement there.

Overall -- The numbers back the story (DU wins 3-1), but surfaces the obvious issue of our rebounding. It will be interesting to see how we fare on that regard against a challenging opponent in IUPUI next weekend. Despite the downfalls, I'm real excited about our freshmen and how well this team can shoot the basketball. There will be plenty of growing pains, but I really think we'll be a fun team to watch.

Final Unrelated Thoughts:

Keith Steffeck (#45, Upper Iowa) was a treat to watch. Real tall, REAL skinny, but rangy and talented. Dropped 20 on 8-15 shooting and 4-8 from the three, tying Alex Kramer for lead rebounder with 6. Made a headsy backdoor cut but couldn't handle the alley-oop. Also made a pretty slick no-look feed to a cutter. Really gave us some fits, especially early on before he got into foul trouble.

Ben Simons showed some flashes of being downright dangerous with his feet set. They ran some double screen plays for him and he absolutely stroked two threes in a row. Too early to make comparisons, but seeing such a tall guy move and stroke it from three made me think glimpses of Adam Morrison. He's already my favorite player on this year's team.

My wife attended the game with me and provided the unintentional hilarious reaction of the night. For those of you that attend games frequently, you know that the PA announcer will sometimes get into it when he indicates the scorers name after big shots. Well, Bill Eaddy hit a pretty snazzy fadeaway from the top of the key to which he yelled "Bas-Ket! Billlll Eadddyyy!"... however my wife thought he yelled "Nass-Tay! Billlll Eaddddyyy!" instead. Absolutely hilarious. Going forward, I don't think I'll ever be able to refer to him in any other way than "Nasty" Bill Eaddy.

That zone defense is a lot more imposing when its full of 6-8 bodies. They're all so rangy it makes it real tough to make an entry feed. Now if we could only get a rebound...

Exhibition Game Thread

2009-11-03T18:27:00.002-06:00

Five Questions on Drake versus Upper Iowa:

(1) How good is Upper Iowa?

All signs point to ‘not good’. They were picked to finish 12th out of 14 teams in the pre-season Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference (NSIC), receiving 59 votes (the top 7 teams all had between 113 and 171 points).

Their conference appears to be pretty respectable though, as they had three teams make the Division II pre-season Coaches Poll. Since there’s 23 conferences that comprise DII, having three teams from one conference would indicate to me that they’re fairly respectable.

That said, I don’t think it helps much even if you're in the cellar of a decent conference. Last year, the Peacocks finished (5-22, 4-16 NSIC). That’s struggling pretty hard. While they added quite a few names to their roster for this year, it’s hard to see them being anywhere close to a DII juggernaut.

(2) Who should I keep tabs on?

Matt Lesan (#12, Junior). Lesan appears to be the returning leader from last years team, averaging 13.1 PPG last year while chipping in 2.5 APG and 2.4 RPG. In their first exhibition against UNI, Lesan had 7 points and 5 rebounds while shooting 2-4 from the floor. He is a 6-2 guard from Solon, IA.

Jake Hughes (#13, Freshmen). Hughes was an all 4A standout at Kennedy in Cedar Rapids, IA last year. He was inserted right into the starting lineup this year and had 9 points (3-6 shooting) and 3 rebounds against UNI. He’s a 5-11 guard.

(3) What’s the makeup of the rest of their team?

Other than Hughes, the juniors makeup the rest of the starting lineup. From there, they have four sophomores and the rest are newcomers (transfers or incoming freshmen).

It looks like they plan a ton of people – 14 people got into the game against UNI and 11 of them saw double digit minutes. While they all started, the juniors only accounted for 39% of the total 200 minutes played against UNI (5 players x 40 minutes = 200 minutes). Shows you that they definitely got all of the rest of the team involved.

(4) How did they do in their first game?

Upper Iowa lost to UNI 67-39. While the final score was very lopsided, UNI actually only led 38-31 with 15 minutes left. It’s tough to get a read on any of these early season games, but if they could keep it tight for a half against UNI, maybe they’ll give us a tight half as well.

(5) What’s your prediction?

We weren’t as good of a defensive ballclub as UNI was last year, tough to think that would continue into this season as well. We are probably more athletic, however, and that goes a long way when you’re mixing it up with someone from a lower conference. The speed of our newbies and a healthy Josh Young is really going to show on Saturday.

Drake 68, Upper Iowa 51.

Drake Media Day -- Five Questions

2009-11-01T16:03:00.008-06:00

Well, Drake basketball media day was a few weeks back, but I went ahead and took some time to compile the various sources to roll it all into one badass media summary for the 2009-2010 season.

As I see it, there are five questions that circle the Bulldogs as we approach the 2009-2010 season:

(1) Can Josh Young revert back to his 2007-2008 form?

The single biggest X-Factor of how far this team can go is which Josh Young shows up. I mentioned this several times throughout the season last year that JY just was not playing at the level that he was operating at in his sophomore season. Part of that has to be attributed to the fact that he no longer had an all-Valley point guard setting him up, but we also learned that maybe the bigger driving force is that he just wasn't that healthy last year:

"Josh is fully embracing his role as the leader on our team," said Phelps. "We've seen some terrific things out of Josh in the preseason. He has made significant improvement in his explosiveness and I feel he is back to where he was as a sophomore before he sufferedan ankle injury."

On Media Day, we all learned publicly that apparently JY was really fighting his ankle last year and it inhibited his explosiveness and scoring. We spent a lot of time last year chalking it up to opposing team defenses really gearing it up for JY -- apparently that was not the main factor (but still probably a big contributor).

The exciting part of this development is that we can easily fix the injury part. JY had a procedure done at the end of last year to clean up his ankle, and it sounds from the quotes that he's about right back to 100% and shouldn't have this hurting him throughout the year.

A JY that can score 20 per game in an efficient manner immediately makes us top half Valley team. That's already an improvement from the play-in finish from last year. It also makes our outside shooting significantly better, and we haven't even got to the part that covers the new guys. Simply put, if JY is truly back to his sophomore season form, the ceiling of how high this team can go immediately rises.

(2) Who's going to start for this team?

Well, Josh Young is the obvious no brainer for the 2 spot. From there, it's hard to tell. I got into this in my season 2 premiere post, but Phelps seems to be favoring experience at this point.

In the MVC Media Day Summary [Good detail if you have a ton of time: http://www.mvc-sports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?SPSID=36371&SPID=2901&DB_OEM_ID=7600&ATCLID=204819191], there was a press conference that Phelps participated in along with Dana Altman, Ben Jacobson, Kevin McKenna, and Greg Marshall.

Phelps specifically mentioned the backcourt as a strength and named JY, Craig Stanley and Ryan Wedel specifically in his remarks. I'm reading into it a bit, but I think he just showed us who is going to start at the 1-2-3 spots initially for us. This is obviously speculation, and it's bound to change as the season goes on -- but I find it hard to believe that he's going to specifically mention a player by name that's going to sit on the bench.

I think Adam Templeton is another obvious choice to start. This team only has a few players that have any significant MVC ballgame experience, Templeton is one of them. They need that on the floor, particularly with how young this team is. As a result, I wouldn't be surprised to see AT playing the 4. With his frame he can pull it off, and I think he showed last year that he can play at multiple positions.

Switching gears back to Phelps' comments in the press conference, he conveys how he is going to need to rely on the experience that has returned. When discussing leadership, he does mention Bill Eaddy -- but mentions him as a guy that won't necessarily always be on the floor but works hard and sets a great example. Again, reading into this, it leads me to believe that some of the freshmen have passed him on the depth chart and he's not going to be the starter. Who does start is the big question, but I think we've got some clear candidates:

Sean Jones
Reece Uhlenhopp
Seth Van Deest

My final guess on this is that I don't think this is going to be set in stone and Phelps is going to let them play it out.

Why might I think that? Well, I attended the 'Tip Off' breakfast last week with a friend from work, and we ended up sitting at a table with Reece and Seth. Brian (my work friend) asked Reece who was going to draw the fun duty of guarding Craig Brackins against ISU and Reece replied "I think there's going to be a lot of us taking turns doing that". Again, I'm reading into things, but judging what I have to work with, it leads me to believe that all of those guys listed above are going to play early and Phelps might use some early results to judge who starts. In addition, it seems like it might be a rotating job for quite some time.

So, using complete speculation, here's my guess at a starting five (but keeping in mind that I'm likely wrong in some of these guesses, and a lot of this will change as we get a look at these guys):

1 = Craig Stanley
2 = Josh Young
3 = Ryan Wedel
4 = Adam Templeton
5 = Seth Van Deest

(3) How good is this freshmen class?

Short answer: Early signs are pointing to AWESOME. They were ranked the #1 incoming recruiting class in the Missouri Valley Conference. In addition, some initial quotes from some Media Day reports are really showing that they will have some significant contributions:

From DSM Register:

"I forsee our freshmen getting lots of playing time," said Phelps. "They will have to be ready to hit the ground running. They have a lot of self-pride and have been high achievers across the board."

From the AP Writeup:

Drake basketball coach Mark Phelps knows exactly what he’s getting with freshman Ben Simons. “His habit is scoring,” Phelps said Wednesday during the team’s media day. “It’s kind of what he does.”

They're going to be pretty fun to watch.

(4) What will make this team exciting to watch?

Well, besides them being Drake, OUTSIDE SHOOTING. This team is going to run, and they're going to shoot the lights out. From the DSM Register:

"We will be a better shooting team," Phelps noted. "We can shoot the ball from more positions and we will continue to rely on our three-point shooting."

With Wedel, Young, Simons -- those are three absolute deadly gunners from distance. Rumor has it that Simons hit 45-50 at a practice.

I don't think it will be as crazy as the Emmenecker squad, but it's going to be exciting. Get ready for some discounts at the Drake Bookstore this year.

(5) How many wins will Drake have?

One thing we need to consider is that the Valley has SIGNIFICANTLY improved this year. UNI returns everyone. Creighton is right back at the top. Indiana State adds Jake Kelly. SIU adds Tony Freeman (which, while he's a great player, I don't think he deserves to be preseason all-MVC but thats another story). Illinois State returns Osiris and a cast of misfits. Bradley, Wichita, etc.. all will be taking steps forward. So, keep in mind that we need to get better just to maintain. That said...

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=PluckForum&plckForumPage=ForumDiscussion&plckDiscussionId=Cat%3aaa45da90-8519-4e2c-bfb9-b1afac248b71Forum%3aa0d79ae3-da5a-4f67-8117-183c45aff7a7Discussion%3a8d55ca4e-7125-453a-a95f-d0be22f36e30

Sean Keeler of the DSM register threw out 12.5. Given their non-conference schedule and a healthy JY, I think that's grossly too low.

Another poster threw out 18 wins, that feels a bit high to me. Let's keep in mind they play a lot of teams that played in one form or another of the postseason -- so to have this many freshmen relied on to conribute, 18 seems a bit rosy to me. But, it's certainly not out of the question, especially as the freshmen mature. I'll throw out three possible scenarios:

"The Homer Scenario". Ben Simons is the freshmen of the year, JY is back in form, and there are significant contributors all around. This team takes advantage of their outside shooting and is right at the top of the Valley in their use of the three pointer, running some teams right out of the gym. Drake wins 20 games.
"The Sky is falling Scenario". JY doesn't revert back to old form. The freshmen class is either not what was advertised (not likely) or needs time to develop (the more likely reason if it turns out they're not successful). With no tested big man, we get eaten up on the inside. We don't take care of the ball again and no one steps up to give us quality point guard play. We win 12 games and lose in the play-in round.
"The most likely scenario". JY brings it back, the freshmen contribute, Wedel gives us a good spot up threat, and we muscle enough down low to hold our own and end up .500 in conference play. We have some weaknesses that combine with inexperience to really hurt us on the road, but we are so talented that we knock off UNI or Creighton at their place, or possibly even take Iowa State at home.

As you can see, with the questions out there, it's tough to say how this is going to go down. But I'm sure as hell excited to get this party started.

Season 2 Premiere of Bulldogs Roundball!

2009-10-10T16:48:00.008-05:00

Well, with the first snow of the season dropping in DSM today, it's time to spend some focus to something that fits in with winter that is a lot cooler -- DRAKE BASKETBALL. The Tip Off Breakfast is just a few weeks away and season tickets are apparently being put in the mail momentarily. It's back, and I'm lovin it (sorry McDonalds).

It would be unfair to call last year's 17-16 season a disappointment, but there were sure some tough moments. The nationally televised blowout loss at home to UNI was tough. The skid we hit in MVC play (losing 8 of 10 in a row) was rough. Josh Parker transferring was a bitter pill to swallow. But as far as I see it, there were some incredible positives. We won the Big Four, AGAIN. We went to our second straight post-season appearance (CIT). We have what appears to be the best recruiting class in some time (until next year's class arrives, that is) coming in this year. Things are certainly going to improve from here.

With so much going on in this offseason, and so much change, I thought it would be useful to spend the first blog entry of the season taking a look at what we kept, added, and lost. Consider this to be a roster breakdown. I like to try to keep things simple, so I'll focus on point guards, wings, and bigs.

Well, I think it's clear that our point guard situation should be the same or get better. Altogether, "The Vet" is solid and can be a threat in transition, but I'd argue that he didn't put as much pressure on defenses in the half court sets than I'd prefer out of that position. Given Phelps' comfortability with him, I'd consider him to be our starter off the bat. But don't count out the "Mystery Man". It's tough to tell what he's going to bring -- he did play for Luxemborg's national team this year but who knows how that will translate. The "Sniper" could really be at the 2, but I put him on here based on his size and due to my own personal opinion that he could be real useful for us at the point. He would add the long range gunner threat that we haven't had at the 1 in a long, long time (let's keep in mind he was Mr. Basketball in Kansas). Overall, we lose Jake but I think we add some really healthy competition to a spot that needs it.

This is probably the most interesting transition of the team to me. We lose a lot here with the transfer of Josh Parker -- it's tough to avoid picturing how we look with JY/JP going 2 and 3 for us in the starting lineup. That's a lot of instant offense that is gone now, and somebody has to pick it up.

Fortunately, I think the "Franchise" is off to having himself quite the improved season from last year. I've heard rumors that he was hampered by his ankle last year... not sure whether that's true or not. Nevertheless, I have to think that another off-season with the system has to help him out. I expect him to be back in the running for all-Valley consideration.

The potential of the additions here are amazing. Ben Simons was runner up for Mr. Basketball in Michigan. The last person we recruited from a small school, who could score at will and led his state in overall scoring, turned out to be a pretty decent player. In fact, he's probably someone you know... I'll just refer to him as the "Franchise". Nevertheless, I'm excited to see how Simons' game transitions to the MVC. I don't expect him to start this year, but I expect him to be a significant contributor. Aaron Hawley seems to present incredible matchup problems. From what I read, it seems like he can play from the 2 to the 4 and is athletic for 6-7. Could be a matchup nightmare. Also, it sounds like David Smith is a combo guard, so if he doesn't crack into the rotation here, maybe he adds into the discussion on the backup point guard role.

Overall, I think the loss of JP is rough in the short term due to the fact that we lose someone that is a proven scorer at this level. But given that he only would be here for this year and next year, I like the long term potential that Simons, Hawley, and Smith offer.

This will be our biggest question in 2009-2010. Last year showed us that the Urban Legend could play at all positions on the floor, but he just didn't have quite the impact that we all expected. It was probably unfair to expect him to step right in and be Klayton Korver. You can even make the argument that he's more of a wing than a forward, but given the makeup of this team, I'm wondering if it's not that bad of an idea to start him at the 4. Likewise, while Bill has been one of my favorite players on the team, but he is better suited to excel in spot duty -- much like a platoon player in baseball. Matches up well in some situations but probably isn't suited well for full time duty.

Our additions are intruiging here. Seth Van Deest made a lot of noise in the state tournament last year, and I've read that he's pretty fundamentally sound and can score. I think we haven't seen a true post presence on the offensive side of the ball yet in Phelps' offense -- it will be interesting to see how the offense progresses once we do have that inside presence. Not sure if we can rely on freshmen to provide that. Uhlenhopp is the hometown boy, from Urbandale high school. Jones is the bonafide seven footer -- a project when he came in.

We're clearly worse off from last year in this area. We lost Bucky Cox, an all-MVC player for the past few years now. Not only are we losing his outside shot and scoring, but he was also at the top of the valley in rebounding. Bill and Adam are rather small for bigs, so we're going to have to rely on the freshmen to man the middle -- especially once we get into conference play. There's a possibility that we're better off in the long term, but that's quite arguable.

When it's all said and done, we're clearly shifting to a young team with little experience. Outside of Young, Stanley, and Templeton -- we don't have anyone else that has experience starting a significant amount of games on this level. There's a lot of buzz around this recruiting class and it will be interesting to see just how talented they really are. Altogether it appears that we are bound for rampant inconsistency, but I think we still have a high ceiling.

The Season Wrap Up

2009-04-04T14:45:00.003-05:00

Well, if you haven't heard by now, this happened:

http://www.godrakebulldogs.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=15700&ATCLID=3702136

Another rough break, as if we didn't have our fair share of those in the second half of the season.

Initially, I saw this as an absolute killer for our season next year. While that might be to a small extent, I think in the grand scheme of things its not as bad as initially thought, for the following reasons:

This was going to be an issue as long as Parker was at Drake. JP is most likely looking to develop at the "1" and get his game ready to go to the next level. While he's not an NBA-caliber talent -- he's surely talented enough to play at some level after school. Since he's barely touching six feet, his best shot to do so is at the point guard position. However, I'm in the group of people that prefer JP as an off-guard in the Drake system. While he's lightning quick, he turns the ball over way too much for me (look back to some previous posts this year where we saw his TOs creep up the more he played the 1), but he's absolutely dynamic with the ball in his hands and is instant offense. I like him more driving and dishing than running the O, and he certainly was best suited for that at the off-guard.
Given that, we're probably better off parting directions. For some reason, JP just doesn't fit in what Phelps is trying to do. While I surely don't want to give Phelps a pass for that, sometimes guys just don't fit, and it seems best for us to just turn the page and get the guys in that are built for what Phelps IS trying to do.
The more turnover we have, the more clock this guy is going to see next year. Last time we got a guy that averaged 30 a game in high school, he contributed significantly as a freshmen, was all-MVC as a sophomore, struggled (rumors of injury) as a junior, and we're still waiting on how he wraps up his career. Yes that's right, I'm talking about this guy. I think Simons can be the real deal (like, potential all-MVC), so the more we get him on the floor early, the more he will develop later.

Overall the whole Simons thing is what gets me through JP leaving. That and the fact that we're going to see some significant turnover, QUICK. This year was obviously a transition year, but next year is absolutely wide open. Consider our roster next year:

RETURNING

Craig Stanley, G, Senior
Josh Young, G, Senior
Adam Templeton, F, Senior
Bill Eaddy, F, Senior

INCOMING (TRANSFERS/REDSHIRTS)

Sean Jones, C, Freshmen (redshirt)
Ryan Wedel, G, Junior (redshirt)
Frank Wiseler, G, Sophomore (redshirt)

INCOMING (HIGH SCHOOLERS)

As you can see from the incoming class and the bottom two transfers, Phelps has brought in some pretty good talent. Altogether, we're going to be grossly inconsistent and are going to have our fair share of struggles. But don't be surprised if we don't improve as a basketball team. We're going to play a lot of young guys -- don't be surprised if Frank Wiseler becomes the PG over Stanley or if Simons sees time off the bench to spell Young/Wedel. Van Deest will most likely be a contributor next year (in minutes) as he develops.

We also have one open scholarship from this. Given what has been brought in, I'm interested to see what Phelps does with it. My guess is that he goes junior college or tries to bring in an upperclassmen or transfer, but we'll just have to see. Given that he has brought in the following...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lrXJf7MqIs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf3i9UgBbFg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0tdNhXUibA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBi4Y9JHPNA (VanDeest at 0:50)

...I'm confident that he'll know what to do with it.

-dutl 4/4/09

Drake (17-15) AT Idaho (16-15)

2009-03-18T08:49:00.002-05:00

Well, this is a surprise, isn't it? Despite their play down the stretch, Drake was able to back themselves into the CollegeInsider.com post-season tournament.

I still think this is a big deal for Drake. If you throw last year out of the equation, getting to a post-season tournament is a big deal for our program. Obviously, we've taken a step or two back down the stretch. But like in college football, it would be amazing how a good run in the post-season (similar to winning a bowl game) would help us keep things rolling in 2009-2010.

Their first round opponent is the Idaho Vandals, a team that finished fifth in the WAC with a 9-7 conference record and a 16-15 record overall. While they were fifth, they were really tied for third (with three teams at a 9-7 record) but appear to have lost the tie-breaker.

Overall they've played some great teams and have gotten hammered. Early in the year they lost 100-62 to Michigan State and 80-46 to Gonzaga. They also were beat 56-41 by Washington State -- so I think they've shown they have difficulty playing against high level teams. Fortunately for Idaho, Drake is not among those teams.

They appear to be a one man team, led by 6-2 Junior Guard Mac Hopson. Hopson averages 16.6 PPG (leader), 5.0 RPG (second), and 5.9 APG (leader). He also leads the team with 1.8 steals/game. Shoots 45% from the three. Really seems to be the spark plug for the Vandals.

Kashif Watson is his running mate, a 6-4 Junior Guard that averages 10.3 PPG and appears from the numbers to be more of a slasher as he doesn't shoot the three and still gets to the line very frequently.

Marvin Johnson is their 6-10 center who gets just over 9 a game and is one of their significant contributors. Surprisingly, for a guy that size, he averages only 4.4 rebounds/game -- seems to suggest to me that he's either slow or is soft. Possibly he's been playing injured, but I'd expect 6-10 guys to at least average 6-8 boards in 22 minutes of play, especially for a team that doesn't seem to shoot an inordinate amount of three pointers. Even Jordan Eglseder, the 7 footer for UNI, averages 6.5 RPG in just over 19 minutes of play per game. Should give you a feel for why I think this guy appears to be not pulling his weight on the boards.

Add in a few more gunners off the bench (Luciano de Souza and Trevor Morris) who shoot the three at 37% and 35%, and two other forwards who are in for rebounding and limited scoring roles (Brandon Wiley and Luis Augusto) and you've got yourself about 90% of all of the minutes played for Idaho.

Overall, the Vandals appear to have enough size to compete with us, and Mac Hopson appears to be dynamic enough offensively to give us some problems. Still, I feel like JY or JP should be able to keep speed on the perimeter of the 3-2 to present problems defensively for Idaho. Plus, a zone is going to limit the size of the 6-10 Johnson, who doesn't appear to be that dynamic of a scorer anyway. If Hopson goes lights off, we're in for some trouble. But if our D contains him, we're looking pretty good. That's probably the #1 key of the game from my perspective.

Other key notable items to me are that they don't appear to have anyone that can hang with Bucky on Drake's offensive possessions. I feel like he's going to be able to victimize a 6-10 or 6-8 guy from the WAC off the dribble or will get enough space to pop. Still concerned about JY's shot and game right now, but I'd imagine between him and Parker one of the two is going to present a matchup problem. Let's keep in mind that this team hasn't seen Josh Young twice a year for three years now, so I would not be surprised if he goes off for 25.

The fact that Idaho is playing at home is huge. Rough calculations of the numbers for this game come out to a wash, suggesting 65-62 for Idaho -- primarily driven by their homecourt advantage and the even numbers on their offensive and defensive efficiencies.

Given the matchups, I'd be a bit more apt to flip the two and predict a 64-58 victory for the Bulldogs. Be sure to catch it on 1350 KRNT or 1350KRNT.com if you are away from DSM. 10:05 ET start time.

End of the 2008-2009 Season & Adopting MVC Teams

2009-03-08T20:18:00.002-05:00

Well, the 2008-2009 regular season has officially come to a close with Drake's loss on Thursday night of the play-in round of the MVC tournament. At 17-15, with the poor stretch run that we saw, I think it's fair to say that the post-season is done as well. We have no shot at the NCAA, and I think about 50 teams would have to decline their NIT bids for us to get one. I don't even know if the CBI is going on again this year. So for them to be done is quite a disappointment. It was even more disappointing that they weren't even on TV. The MVC really needs to get that sorted out -- if they're going to be a "power mid-major" they can't be having rounds of their tournaments not televised, even if it is games from the bottom four of the conference.

The Mark Phelps era at Drake has taken quite the interesting turn. After a solid 9-3 start with wins over Iowa, ISU, and New Mexico, we limped to a 8-12 record in our final MVC (and bracket buster) games. Grading his performance takes into the following accord:

Pros:

We won our third straight Big Four championship going 3-1 and winning two games on the road.
We notched road victories against the two top teams in the Valley (Creighton and UNI).
We secured five great incoming freshmen. From the looks of it, Ben Simons could be something special, as could Aaron Hawley, Van Deest, and possibly even Uhlenhopp.

Cons:

We were downright awful in the MVC regular season.
We were blown out in several games.
The offense never really got on track and

Overall, I'd have to give Phelps a C+ in his first year. This was going to be a transition year no matter what, but I wish we could have had just a few more wins. Going 19-13 or 20-12 would have been so much more rewarding than 17-15. We got blown out way too many times.

But on the flip side, when you consider the SIU game and the Evansville games at home, if lady luck were on our side we could have easily just been 19-13 this year. It's amazing how just a few plays here and there can significantly change our season. Last year they all went our way. This year, it seems like karma swung back out of our favor.

The one other item I'd like to note is that I think I'll officially be adopting UNI as the team for the NCAA tournament, and most likely noting some items for the NIT tournament if possible. Check back for some of those matchups as I'll most likely try to highlight UNI's pod, wherever and whoever that entails.

Going forward, I'm probably going to post more in depth about UNI in the tournament, then the new recruiting class, and keys to next year. At some point, I'm probably going to officially hang it up for the year and wait until next October. We'll see how it goes. While I wish I could have held the frequency of posts throughout the year, I sure was pleased with the first year of BulldogsRoundball and am looking forward to continuing it again in upcoming years, ideally with even better and more frequent analysis. Maybe I'll even try to line up some guest writers as well for next year. Hollar at me if you have such interest. In the meantime, let's see how the rest of this field of 65 shakes out...

-dutl

A Simulation to show our chances of avoiding a Thursday play-in game

2009-02-05T22:11:00.004-06:00

Tonight's blog post is probably my most creative one I've ever had, tapping into a statistics background to assign probabilities to shit that won't happen for quite some time. Sounds like a guy with an actuarial background, huh? As a result, I'm actually pretty proud of it, and think it is an interesting look at where we stand. I encourage you to actually keep reading even if you disagree with my upcoming tangent...

Before I pull out my crystal ball, let me go on a tangent about how bad Creighton fans behavior bothers me. While I can't help but support how much they support their team, I still cannot stand them at all. Talking basketball with them is like trying to have a conversation with a drunken baby. They don't make a whole lot of sense and they're outrageously irritable at the instant you try to challenge anything about them.

I imagine what it is like with to work with these people. If they're anything like their personality at games, they're drunk all eight hours at work at least four days a week and they most likely verbally harass their boss whenever a new project is given or any questions are asked about their work. They most likely don't have phones at their desk because they're unable to carry on anything that resembles a productive conversation. Bottom line, I guess I am trying to say I think a mascot of "drunken hobos" would make more sense than "bluejays", but I guess it doesn't fit into as many cheers...

On to something productive:

Given our tough loss to Creighton, we're now in a three way tie for sixth, seventh, eighth in the Valley. My biggest concern is that we stay the hell OUT of the play in games on Thursday. While we can most likely beat any of those teams, we'd be guaranteed to play UNI, ISU, or Creighton -- which we want to avoid at all costs right now. Given some data that is available at Ken Pomeroy's website (specifically, probabilities of winning individual games), I conducted a Monte Carlo Simulation to determine our chances of finishing fifth or sixth and thus, staying out of the play in round.

Let me state a few assumptions:

I assumed that UNI, ISU, Creighton, and Bradley all made it in. While this is certainly not anywhere near 100%, it seemed reasonable, and it made my analysis a whole lot easier. I'm focusing on the 6-6, 5-7, 3-9, and 2-10 teams -- figuring that the teams that are above .500 are safe with only six games to play in the valley season.

I made some simplifying assumptions for tiebreakers. This could change the probabilities a decent amount in some of the scenarios -- but for the most part, I think the order of the results should be pretty solid.

There is no dependency on outcomes. For instance, if Drake loses three in a row, the remaining chances of winning are the same as what they were before the streak. This is the same for winning streaks as well. This is probably the one assumption that I'm not the most happy about, but it's a product of the methodology that I used. In all reality though, we're talking about six games, so I don't think this would affect results TOO much.

That said, here are my results:

As you can see from these results, the simulated probabilities of AVOIDING (i.e. finishing not 7th or below) are:

Evansville = 0.5834
Southern Illinois = 0.5650
Drake = 0.4276
Wichita State = 0.4215
Missouri State = 0.0384
Indiana State = 0.0002

This pretty much tells me that Indiana State has really paddled themselves up shit creek with a 2-10 Valley record. They need so much help it's virtually impossible. Due to the simplifying assumptions in my model, it might not even be possible.

Missouri State is not much better with just a near 4% chance. They are two wins behind the 5-7 bunch (which counts for a LOT) and they own no tiebreakers on anybody. We'll see them on Thursday.

Wichita State and Drake look to be the next two teams just over a 40% chance of staying out. WSU owns a tiebreaker over Indiana State (not very helpful) and possibly over Evansville -- but they're a full game behind Evansville and have nothing at this point over the rest. Drake is in a similar situation.

Southern has some help with tiebreakers over really everyone but us. If they win a few here or there, they should have the 2-0 tie breaker in the event of ties with some other teams. Finally, Evansville's 6-6 record and tiebreaker over Drake makes them sit pretty well right now.

Overall, the question I had was what our chances of staying out of the play-in game. Right now, I wouldn't bet on it. Evansville is sitting in a pretty solid seat right now, and SIU is not much further behind. If I had to put money on it, it looks like we'll be in there, playing MSU or Indiana State. Hopefully we can get on a roll though and turn the tables.

Creighton A-holes (17-6, 7-4) at Drake Bulldogs (14-9, 5-6)

2009-02-03T19:11:00.005-06:00

Well, Saturday was yet another step backwards. We now face a top tier Valley team and we've legitimately been blown out in three of our last five games.

There just seems to be a complete level of explosiveness on offense that we have been missing. Our defense has been relatively solid, sure strong enough to keep us from getting blown out. But other than in the Creighton game, we just have not had that touch, that something that is necessary to be an upper tier team?

Well, I think there are two main culprits:

(1) We are not getting ourselves enough easy baskets

I know by now you are saying to yourself, "well no shit", but it's the truth. If you look at our record this season -- when we have 12 or more assists we are 6-0. Conversely, when we fail to get at least 12 assists, we are 4-7.

I'm not completely looking at Craig Stanley on this one, because I honestly feel like his play has picked up considerably over the past few weeks. The problem lies in the guys that get the other minutes.

As much as I love Josh Parker, as he has seen more time on the floor, he has turned the ball over, and his assists per game has absolutely plateaued. While he's not spending all of his time as a point guard, I think that it should be more than one person's job on the floor to help get their teammates easy baskets. His scoring is huge, no doubt. But he's contributing to more turnovers and he's definitely not picking up finding others. This is seen by the fact that his TOPG is now at 2.0 (it was in the 1.2 range in December) whereas his assists have remained at 1.5 per game. You can actually argue that they've gotten worse since he's playing more time.

Meanwhile, guys like Baryenbruch, etc... are not chipping in at all. On top of that guys at other positions (JY, Templeton, etc...) either are not playing well or just are not good enough to create shots for others.

Overall, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this team misses Adam Emmenecker. Like, bad. While Craig is coming along -- he's still not playing at that level (and no one should expect him to) and we have nobody behind him that can help create shots for others (except JP at flashes).

(2) Our star is not playing like a star right now

It shouldn't surprise you to see that JY is not playing well. The fact that he had as many airballs as made field goals for a stretch of the Wichita State game should tell you as much. On top of that, he just has not been explosive for quite some time -- he's not getting by guys and he's certainly not hitting his shots when he pulls up. I actually wonder if there is some sort of injury that is going on with him, because he's just not playing JY basketball at this point.

Here's a look at his comparison of stats from last year to this year:

The red lines are this year, the blue lines are last year. Pretty much, you’re seeing that when he shoots the ball, he’s not hitting at nearly a similar rate as last year. When he drives, you can see he’s turning the ball over way more than he did last year.
Part of this is related to number one above, that we just are not creating as many easy shots and gravely miss Adam Emmenecker. And JY is being asked to do more, no doubt. However, I still think he’s missing a few more shots he would have hit last year. In all reality, I think his true 2008-2009 performance should be somewhere between the two lines.

Creighton is a tough, tough team. But, I think they actually match up with us very well. They play at a faster pace, which allows us to hopefully open it up and put the ball in Craig Stanley’s hands in the open floor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to go against the grain and force themselves to slow down tonight. How well we defend, get rebounds, and get the ball in the open court will be key to me on how we find easy baskets, get JY involved, and possibly win this game.

Magenta Unos 65, Drakies 62

2009-01-29T21:51:00.003-06:00

Well, if you haven't heard yet, one hell of a finish in todays game. Kaylon Williams of Evansville banked in a prayer from half court with no time left to help Evansville top the Bulldogs, 65-62.

What's with these Purple Aces? Not only can they not show up to a game on time (which, where I'm from, is called a 'forfeit'), but they don't even call glass when they throw vicious bricks up there. What an unfortunate end to the game.

To make it even worse, we were absolutely jobbed on the other end by the refs. Craig Stanley made a move to his right, but Holzinger anticipated it and totally jumped in his way. Good defensive instinct, but he wasn't there and was definitely moving as Stanley bowled him over. No call. Holzinger then took the ball and slid three feet on the ground. No call. Holzinger then called time out. Timeout, Evansville. I shit you not.

I sit two rows up in the corner and I could see Phelps get in the ear of the official:

HE FOULED HIM! HE FOULED HIM AND THEN HE TRAVELED!

Now, usually, I'm not one to bitch and moan about officiating. I can't stand it when fans blame a whole loss on the officials calls. Now, I'm not trying to do that here -- the real culprit of Drake's loss is that they let Evansville go on a 10-0 run (BS halfcourt shot included) to close the game. They got way too tentative and went into shutdown mode about one or two possessions before they should have.

That's the real culprit tonight. But it doesn't help to sit right in front of the worst call (well, technically, no call) I've witnessed this season. Makes this loss that much tougher.

I'm a baseball guy, huge St. Louis Cardinals fan. One thing you'll generally see when you follow a baseball team closely is that sometimes you run into a team that is much worse than yours on paper, worse record, etc... But, they tend to still sweep the series or beat you overall on the season. It comes down to the fact that you just don't matchup that well with them, despite the fact that you tend to match up to the rest of the league a lot better than they do.

Well, Evansville has been that team for several years now. I don't know what it is, but we NEVER match up well against them (except last year, which, come on, you have to disregard for this point). This year has definitely shown that. Hopefully we can finish strong against the Valley, and if we're lucky, avoid having to matchup against these guys for a third time in March.

The Bizarro Game -- Evansville (12-7, 4-5) AT Drake (14-7, 5-4)

2009-01-28T21:20:00.003-06:00

Tonight's game... TOMORROW? Well, that's the case due to a brutal ice storm that kept Evansville outside of DSM. Generally when a team doesn't show up to play they call that a "forfeit" where I'm from, but hey, I guess we feel the need to beat them down in person to make it official.

In all reality, this will be a tough test for Drake. This isn't your red-headed stepchild Evansville team from years past that you can slap around at will. Let's not forget this team handled us 76-65 @ Evansville back on 12/28.

What did they do so well last time?

The Purple Aces (you still have to be kidding me with that nickname. Come on Evansville) outrebounded us 42-29. That kind of disparity is enough in a tough valley game to add more possessions which are critical. I think we've seen in recent games that Drake has to avoid rebounding games like this. We seem to start jacking up threes and getting waaayyy to one dimensional when we are (1) NOT getting fast break opportunities from good defensive rebounds, and (2) NOT getting second chance points from offensive rebounds. This is absolutely critical to us.
The Magenta Unos outshot us 53.6% to 40.5% (I like to use effective fg%) . Unless we really get on a roll, we cannot sit back and just jack up threes. Evansville picked us apart and found high percentage shots. The one thing we can take a little bit of satisfaction in is that we forced 17 turnovers -- that will be critical. We need to pack the paint against Shy Ely. While Holzinger will be sitting there to snipe us, we need to keep the easy baskets to a minimum.

Simply put, we need to be the aggressor instead of just sleepwalking into the game. We sure did that in Creighton, and we beat a hell of a basketball team doing it. This is such a hard game to get a read on with how inconsistent we have been -- being that we have been SO bad and SO good in just a short amount of time.

Ken Pomeroy is calling a 67-61 win with Drake winning at a 77% clip. That seems about right to me. This is a game we have a great shot of winning -- and is one we need to win. A good goal is to finish in the top half of the Valley. It keeps us out of the play in games, and it assures we play a lower tier team first game in the tournament. If we're going to achieve that goal, these are MUST win games.

I'd like to see JY get it going tomorrow as well. One disturbing chart I saw on statsheet.com was the following: While I'm the first to say that we need to be a balanced team -- we do need our star to be just that. While he turned things in the right direction with 16 against Creighton, he was 5-11 from the line and still is just in an absolute funk. Despite more shots, his his PPG is plateaued from last year. Don't get me wrong, we're better when we're balanced. BUT, we do need a guy that can score tough points at a tough time. Right now, JY is just not in that position with the funk he's in.

Now that I've completely sidetracked, hopefully he can turn it on tomorrow. It's going to be an interesting atmosphere with a 4:00 game, but word on the street is that tickets are going to be $1. Sack up, block off your calendar and duck out of work early to enjoy a cheap game on the Bulldogs!

If you can make it to the game and still need a ticket, tickets are $1. They're GA tickets, but I'm guessing there will be lots of open lower bowl seats to sneak into.

http://www.drakenation.com/Topic34556-8-2.aspx

Drake 74, Creighton 62!

2009-01-24T15:14:00.004-06:00

What a game! It sure seemed like the same old story as Creighton hit their first four shots en route to an 11-2 lead at the start of the game. But Drake played scrappy, tough, and kept fighting -- pulling the game back to an even keel within the first half. They then had one of their best stretches of the season as they outscored Creighton 45-27 in the second half to cruise to a 74-62 victory.

Four Bulldogs scored in double figures, led by Josh Young and Craig Stanley, who both had 16. Stanley, in fact, dropped a monster 16/12/6 (points, boards, assists) game, by far his best of the year. Speaking of best games of the year, how about 15 points on 7/10 shooting from John Michael Hall? Finally Bucky had a smooth 14/13 double double. Altogether, pretty much everybody brought their A game.

dutl bits about Saturday's game:

Saturday the first time we have had four guys in double figures since we beat Wichita State back on the 11th. I'm beating a dead horse, but we're so much better when we don't have to lean on Josh Young and we can have multiple options.
We had 68 total possessions in the game (according to Ken Pomeroy). We haven't even been close to that since Wichita State (64 in that game) and haven't topped it since we had 74 @ Evansville on 12/28. I don't know if we're necessarily a team that is built to run others into the ground -- but it was great to see Stanley, Parker, and Young operate in transition and use their speed to get easy baskets. I'm kind of surprised that we haven't operated in transition as much given this fact, and given the fact that our bigs (esp. Bucky) can really run the floor. Sure seems like an advantage that we should be using to our favor.
We're ninth in the Valley in rebounding per game (34 total). That sure changed with a whopping 48 rebounds (forty-freaking-eight!) against Creighton, and outrebounding the Jays by 13. While part of that had to do with their poor shooting in the 2nd half -- there's no denying it was an excellent effort and led to both easy transition baskets and just better offensive sets in general.

Will it continue against Evansville? Who knows, but it sure is yet another big game for where we're going. One thing I do know is that theres a great chance we're going to get a huge effort from them after blowing a large lead late today against Wichita State. Doubt they'll be very happy on Wednesday when they come to Knapp.

______________________

UPDATE: I am watching the UNI/MoSt game on ESPNU, and I'll tell you that last weekend, while more of an ass-beating then it should have been, was no fluke. This UNI team has really stepped it up and is playing like a tournament team. It's a bold claim, but it's true. They are deep and they have plenty of shooters, and two excellent inside threats with Koch and Eglseder. Add in what Johnny Moran has done and this team is tough.

With their poor non-conference start and the way they play, I don't think they even have a MVC player of the year on this squad. But they just have so many pieces they are so tough. It's going to be a tough trip next time we go to Cedar Falls...

Drake (13-7, 4-4) AT Creighton (15-5, 5-3)

2009-01-24T12:25:00.003-06:00

Quick post today...

Boy what a difference two weeks makes? Creighton in that span has regained their form winning three out of four and look to be poised for the stretch run to get in the race for the regular season MVC title. Meanwhile, Drake has lost three in a row and collectively have taken about 12837 steps back. The regular season title seems to be now out of reach, and we're playing to keep ourselves out of the Thursday game in the MVC tournament.

I'm going to show a quick stat I built on statsheet, and it applies on many levels:

This is Drake's effective field goal % over the past several weeks, and you can see we've taken quite the nosedive. After a week of shooting in the 50%'s (and even as high as 60%), something happened and we hit an absolute brick wall. It's happened fast and has gotten worse and worse with each game.

Honestly, I think it's confidence, both in themselves and in what they're doing. You can see it on the court -- we just don't look very good and we're real beatable right now. On top of that, our shots just really aren't falling. You can pretty much portion this to everyone on the team -- nobody is really stepping it up right now.

But that can all change. Winning a game like the one we have today can completely turn our season around. To me, beating Creighton at Omaha totally makes up for the crap we've put on the court the last two games. Josh Young returned from an injury in this game last year, and I'm hoping he can return in form today as well. I think we can totally surprise them today. It's a crazy thought, but to tell you the truth, not a whole lot makes much sense in the MVC this year.

Go Dawgs! - dutl 1/24/09

Drake (13-6, 4-3) AT Missouri State (8-10, 1-6)

2009-01-20T19:56:00.001-06:00

After a game like Saturday, Missouri State is just what the doctor ordered. They are 1-6 in the Valley and have lost seven of their last eight. If there's one game we can use to put it back together, this is it. Still, this is a dangerous team with the spot we're in now.

While they're not guard heavy (which is needed to excel in the MVC, but that's another story), they do have a lot of interior pieces that can potentially give us fits. This list is headed by Chris Cooks, a quick 6-4 F that leads the Bears in scoring with 13.4 PPG. Other guys that can cause problems are two forwards -- Wade Knapp (9.2 PPG, 4.6 RPG) and Kyle Weems (9.1 PPG 3.9 RPG) who can get us on the boards and on easy second chance points. Finally, they also have a 6-9 big man, Will Creekmore, that chips in 9.7 PPG.

A few things scare me about this game:

MSU is dangerously close to having five guys who average double figures. Given that a lot of them are big men -- I have the concern that they could potentially just eat us up inside and on the boards.
Three point shooting has been a problem for us recently. CBSSportsline pointed out a great tidbit that I saw (http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/teams/report/DRA) that we have allowed 32/71 shooting over the past three games. That's a ridiculous 45.1% -- which is absolutely killer. For a while, it seemed like we had the three-point problem figured out on defense, but that has really surfaced over the past few weeks. While only Cooks and Spencer Laurie look to be formidable three point threats, we CANNOT allow them to both drop 5 threes on us. That's going to absolutely open up the interior, which will expose us even more.
Looking back to the one game they were recently successful on -- how exactly did MSU beat Wichita State? Turnovers and Rebounding. MSU won the turnover battle 19-7 and won the rebounding battle 30-24 (including 13-5 on the offensive glass). While Drake has taken reasonable care of the basketball lately, their rebounding has been nothing short of a disaster. We cannot sleepwalk through rebounding in this game, or we're going to give up waaaayyyy too many second chance points -- which is exactly how MSU can beat us.

Altogether, I think we're due a shakeup in the lineup. Saturday was so awful that I think it's fair to say that changes are due. The effort was bad and the execution was worse. Until we own the boards again and get some action going on on the offensive side, we're not going to be a strong team. Ken Pomeroy agrees, as he's projecting a 62-61 win by Drake. Altogether, I'm not happy about a Drake -1 line, but that's just the way it goes with our recent performances.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I expect to see either Instant Offense (i.e. Josh Parker) or the Incredible Hulk (i.e. Alex White) in the starting lineup tomorrow night. Parker's been the key spark off the bench all year and I think it's time that we lead off with him. White has been an unsung hero on the boards -- considering our poor rebounding -- maybe its time to get him some more minutes and tell Bucky and Brent that they've got to get more boards to keep their level of minutes.

Altogether, I just can't see us losing tomorrow, despite the closeness of the projections. I think it's about time they show some pride, Josh Young pimp slaps some Bears, and Alex White tears down at least one back board on a two handed thunder dunk.

GO DRAKE!!! dutl 1/20/09

The safety at 13:37

2009-01-19T12:35:00.004-06:00

For those of you who are not familiar with Bill James, he is widely considered to be the grandfather of modern baseball statistical analysis. Guys you have heard of (Billy Beane) or things you might have heard of (Moneyball) are present due to James' work. We're talking advanced statistics here, VORP, Win Shares, ERA+... not batting average.

Well, James has at some point ventured into the basketball forum as he came up with a statistic to tell when a lead is "safe". Thought being that, at some point, there is too many points to overcome how many possessions would theoretically be left in the ballgame. Or, simply put, the combination of plays for a team to come back either takes more time than is left on the clock or would occur with a 0% probability.

I ran into this statistic at the following link [http://www.slate.com/id/2185975/]. Unfortunately, when I use the game data from Saturday [http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/recap?gameId=290172181], I find that at 13:37 left in the second half, the 33 point lead that existed (61-28) was so much given the time left it statistically was insurmountable.

While it seems like I'm trying to pour salt in our wounds here, I thought this was too cool of a tool to not use for the recent situation. I think results seem about right. With about 10 minutes left in the game, I remember thinking it was definitely already out of hand.

A few other tidbits I noticed that I'm going to use for future reference:

Technically, a 10 point lead with 1:00 to go is not insurmountable. In fact, it is only 70% safe according to James (which I find that to be a little bit low). If there is a minute left, 12 points is the bogey to use for calling the game.
Got a 20 point lead? Need to get it within five minutes left. Technically, you need to get it to about 4:30.
Up by 39 or more at half? Tell the teams to not come back out. That's 100% safe, which I think would be fair to say. If we're talking about a 58-19 halftime score, I think in that instance the home team is responsible for starting to file out the attending fans early to save the traffic pattern.

Maybe this would have saved Billy Packer from looking like such an idiot last year.

UNI 81923, Drake 59

2009-01-18T12:02:00.009-06:00

What an absolute embarassment of a game yesterday. UNI dominated Drake at both ends of the floor, building an insurmountable 47-25 halftime lead. They absolutely had the Drake 3-2 zone figured out and found open 3 after open 3 -- draining pretty much all of them. On the defensive end of the floor, they played physical, cut down driving lanes, and frustrated our guys into completely losing their focus. I saw Drake players (and fans) spending their time complaining calls when we were down 30. It was easily the top 3 ugliest games I've ever seen as a Drake fan. To make matters worse, it was our only appearance on ESPN2 this year -- very damaging to the program.

Let's just say it's intentional that I took a day before adding this post.

As far as attitudes are concerned, I've been on DrakeNation and they are absolute garbage. While it's reasonable to be pissed at an ass whoping, there is a "Fire Phelps" thread that is absolutely despicable. I've discussed expectations at varying points this year. To recap, I have little patience or respect for someone who believes that one year of success entitles us to be a top tier program year over year. The problem is that many of these people are bandwagon fans that know nothing other than 28-5 and 21 game winning streaks. To those people I say get the cojones to support a team in its ups and downs and stop making ridiculous statements only a quitter would say. In his first year as a head coach Mark Phelps is 13-6 (4-3). I want to win as bad as the next guy. But, to overreact to one game and claim the guy should be fired shows that one is nothing less than the pinnacle of ignorance.

We have a variety of things to work on. Given that this team has taken strides (until yesterday), I have no doubt that they will rebound and put together a strong performance at MSU.

Yesterday I gave a rough projection of how I expect the remainder of the season to go. Well, I had a chance to actually put some numbers behind that. If you look at Drake's record against certain splits in the RPI, you have the following:

RPI____W L Avg
0-50___0 2 29
51-150_5 4 96
151+___8 0 260

So, we are 0-2 against "great" teams (Butler, ISU), roughly .500 against "good" teams, and about undefeated against "bad" teams. To me, that's about exactly what I would have expected from this team, and they're looking to deliver.

So what do we have down the stretch? Well, for MVC play -- we have 1 "great" team, 7 "good" teams, and 3 "bad" teams (using the same criteria). That should give us about 6 more wins if you give us the three bad teams and say we go 3-4 against the good teams. That still puts us at 19-11 (10-8) and outside of the play-in game. We also have the ESPN Bracketbuster that I'm not counting that could get us to 20 wins.

So, give we still have a realistic shot if we get back to playing good basketball -- I think it's time to start breathing again and maybe collectively backing the entire men's basketball fanbase away from the ledge.

UNI @ Drake (1/17, 11:00 AM, ESPN2)

2009-01-16T14:54:00.000-06:00

Tough loss to ISU. Both teams absolutely limped to a poor start but then found their rhythm, on the way to an exciting second half. However, Illinois State (and specifically Champ Oguchi) had too many shots in them as they fought their way to a 65-61 win in Normal. Great game out of the Bulldogs, just a few too many plays short.
However, I think it’s realistic to expect Drake to come up short on the road against a Valley leader. Tomorrow, rather than Wednesday, is a real key for how the remainder of this Valley season transpires for Drake. Honestly, 13-5 is going to win the Valley this year, and it’s quite possible that 12-6 could win it as well with how deep the teams are.

After tomorrow I like to chop our schedule into two sections. MO State, @ Creighton, Evansville, @ Wichita as one. We should go 3-1 in that span – most likely losing on the road to a good Creighton team. The problem is that the other games are not gimmes as well. The remaining seven games get even rougher: Creighton, Bradley, @ Indiana State, Illinois State, @ UNI, SIU, @ Bradley. 4-3 in that span is an absolute victory for this team. Put that 3-1 and 4-3 together and I’d say a great goal for the stretch run (after tomorrow’s game) is 7-4. Given that we’re already 4-2 in the MVC, that a great stretch would put us at 11-6 in the conference (not counting tomorrow’s game against UNI). You can see how this game is a must win. If we don’t win tomorrow – in addition to just getting the one loss, now instead of the 3-1 and 4-3 I talked about earlier, maybe its 2-2 and 3-4. That makes us 9-9 and probably not even sniffing an NIT bid.

I might be out of my mind, but we can see what momentum does to a team in this league. Just look at SIU and how bad they are in the dumps. Meanwhile, look at Bradley, atop the conference right now. If we can win the big games this team is going to do great things. It all starts with tomorrow.

My biggest concern? Size. I’m most worried about the duo of Adam Koch and Jordan Eglseder, the 6-8 and 7-0 combo that combines for 21.2 PPG and 11.5 RPG. These guys are going to be rough down low, and they are going to try to expose our lack of interior depth. How Brent deals with Eglseder is going to be huge. Alex White might need to have some significant minutes to beat some sense into this guy. I’m not worried at all about their outside shooting – sure they can go on a run here and there, but they don’t have Champ Oguchi’s and Osiris Eldridge’s that are just going to annihilate us with the long ball. Even if they do get on a run, I just don’t think that’s something they can sustain for 40 minutes.

Altogether, I think Drake feels like they missed a golden opportunity to steal one at ISU. Josh Young hasn’t shot well in many games. I expect them to come out firing, a great game for about 30 minutes and then the Bulldogs to just bury them by 15 towards the end. Go Dawgs!

Garbage

2009-01-14T16:40:00.001-06:00

That’s my take on tonight’s game not being televised. You’ve got a program at home (Illinois State) who has received Top 25 votes and is reeling after a few bad losses but looking to regain a stranglehold on the MVC. You’ve got a veteran visiting team (Drake) who is one of the most talented mid-major programs in the country coming in, and is rolling with a 13-4 record and a 4-1 start in the Valley. Both teams need this game – ISU has to get back on track to keep their at large NCAA tournament berth alive, and Drake is the defending conference champion who desparately wants to show that last season wasn’t a fluke. Not good enough for FSN or ESPNU? CBS College Sports even? Please.

Ken Pomeroy is projecting this game to be a ISU win, 71-65 using his method that basically tracks how many points a team scores and gives up over 100 posessions, compares it to the other team and then scales it to the rough amount of possessions that each team plays at. I totally respect his method, and I am one of his biggest proponents. However, he’s projecting that Drake only has a 24% chance of winning. That seems a bit low to me – not extreme – but low.

I’m so excited for this game. In addition to the major storyline I listed above – this is a matchup between two guys that you don’t hear a ton about but were pretty much the two choices for MVC player of the year (Josh Young v. Osiris Eldridge).
In all reality, neither guy is their whole team, which speaks volumes to how talented and deep each team is. A secondary matchup that I think is just as critical is the aforementioned is the matchup between Josh Parker vs. Champ Oguchi. While it’s certainly not a heads up matchup – both really seem to be big pick me ups for their teams. It’s obvious how much more energy Drake has when Parker is on the floor, and heck, Oguchi is ISU’s leading scorer this year. Whoever provides a big charge really will tip the scales for that team.

I think a key for Drake has to be rebounding, particularly on the offensive glass. They sure have not shown that well in the past few games at home, but I’d have to think they come out with more energy tonight. ISU holds teams off the boards, but they’re not particularly huge. If Drake can win the offensive rebounding battle, that will be clutch.

Probably the other key is how Drake’s team defense plays tonight. ISU is so talented Drake can’t just focus on Big O – they’re going to get absolutely burned if they do. This ISU attack on paper looks to be one of the most balanced among all mid-majors. If they are hitting on all cylinders, I’d have to say that we are absolutely screwed.

We also need an unexpected contributor. His name could be Adam Templeton, John Michael Hall, Bill Eaddy, or even Brent Heemskerk. We can’t just get 45 out of Young, Parker, and Bucky and expect to be okay.

Altogether, this is a huge game for us. At this point, this Valley season is shaping up to be absolute bananas (yes I said it, B-A-N-A-N-A-S). The top 5 teams are all separated by just one game and we’re already five games into the conference season. Plus, you know that some of the bottom dwellers (SIU, I’m looking at you) are going to have a guy like Kevin Dilard put the team on their back and start winning some tough games.

Bringing in the New Year by Getting the Hell out of Here

2009-01-01T18:29:00.006-06:00

In case you haven't noticed, the posts have been pretty thin over the past few weeks. Between work and holidays (i.e. traveling) there has been limited amounts of time to really keep up with the blog. This will continue for the next few weeks as I will be heading to Aruba to regroup and continue the celebration of the new year.

Two thoughts about the past week:

Evansville is a solid team. They're a bit better than I'd give them credit for, but I am still not sold on them being a Valley leader yet. We are much more talented and it would have been a great game to have. Given our horrendous shooting, it's fair to say that we probably deserved to lose -- but I think it gives us a feel for how strong our talent level is when we actually led in the second half of that game before totally collapsing. We NEED to take care of business against them when we see them again at Knapp at the end of January.
We absolutely handled Missouri State. It was evident that we were a much more talented team inside and out, and once we found our rythym it was surely something that wasn't going to be in doubt. Great to see 6,000 fans make it during the week. While it was a holiday and $1 day (2 bucks for a hot dog and popcorn was unreal) I still think it was a great showing for us. Taking care of business against teams like Missouri State is exactly what we need to be doing.

Since I'm going to be out for the next week and a half, there are three games coming up:

We play at Carbondale against Southern Illinois this Sunday. Southern Illinois is a very talented but young team -- unfortunately for them, they're learning basketball at the college level in a very hard way this year. While they have beat UMass and SLU (both at home, mind you), they're 5-8 (0-2) and are struggling bad with a poor loss just in their last game against UNI. Looks like they scheduled themselves into a bit of a disaster as their non-conference SOS is #51 according to Ken Pomeroy. For a team that relies on a lot of young kids to do important things, it's understandable to see the predicament they are in. Yet, this is a team that might grow up quick and cause trouble in the Valley. While Drake is surely talented enough to sleep through the first 10 minutes against Missouri State (evidenced by 5 points in that span), they should not think they can do the same against SIU. One glaring weakness I see in SIU is that they don't have those on-ball defenders like they did in years past. You recall Jamal Tatum being one of the top dogs in the valley, but its easy to forget how strong he and his teammates were at pushing and defending other guards. Mullins is solid, and the kid Kevin Dilard looks to be up to task, but they are just so uncharacteristically insignificant on defense (Steal% is 295 in the nation, hard to believe) that they have quite some work to do to get back into shape. Still, this is a danger game for the Bulldogs, one that SIU easily just sneaks up and wins at home.
Indiana State comes into town on 1/7. They are awful, currently 3-10 (1-1) with a big win over UNI. They are basically bad in all facets of the game this year and look to be heading to the bottom of the Valley for the remainder of the year. There are some shooters (4 players have made 10+ threes and they shoot 40.7%, 38.5%, 35.5%, and 38.7%) so they might be able to exploit Drake's zone to get some open looks beyond the arc. But, in reality, this is an area that Drake has improved on over the past few games. I am not concerned with a home game versus Indiana State, and will be extremely disappointed if we do not win by 20+.
Wichita State comes into town on 1/11. Their season has taken a very bad turn for the worse. They beat a solid Siena team earlier in the year and played the GTown Hoyas tough, but they've also lost to UMKC (who I didn't even know was Division I). Their MVC season is off to a rough note at 0-2, but mostly due to the fact that they've played Creighton and Bradley. Looking at their roster, size seems to be a strength for them, they've got a 7 footer in Garrett Stutz, two 6-7's and a 6-6 that see significant time. Again, as with SIU they are extremely young. Even younger than SIU. They have a nine man rotation, and only three of them are upperclassmen (two juniors, one senior). It will be of help that they are a young team on the road, but we're going to have to force the pace and tempo. As seen with Missouri State, our zone defense allows a lot of easy layups and can be solved by patient teams that find the right seams and have multiple threats to penetrate. Not seeing them play it's tough to tell who on their team can do that, but it is fair to say that their size poses issues. They are a Top 10 team in the country, statitistically, in keeping their opponents off of the boards - so it seems to come down to how well we can get into our offensive flow and knock down shots. If we come out laying a stinker on the offensive end, they'll rebound enough to keep in this game.

For me, the following are huge keys for how we deal with the upcoming stretch of games:

Interior Defense. We have been allowing way too much wheeling and dealing on our matchup zone -- almost at the cost of trying to limit opposing teams three's. Our guys are doing what they can, but there is a bit of a dropoff in how well we can defend their big men. This will be a legitimate issue against SIU, who has solid bigs and two point guards that can break us down. The size of WSU scares me in this regard as well.
Wake Up At Tip Off. I'd say that our ghost walk through the first 10 minutes of games has been a real big issue for us this year. We'll be fine, except when we matchup against marquee teams (Creighton) or teams that have enough talent to just step on our throat when we do it (SIU). I'd like this to not continue on the road at SIU, but to be honest, I just don't know if we're there yet.
Ball Movement/Other Options. Our assists were up (16) against MizzSt., mostly attributable to better ball movement and penetration. Phelps mentioned on the post game interview that we're a better team when guys (and the ball) are moving around more on the offensive end. I couldn't agree any more with him, and I think this is something we're still feeling out that can be partially responsible for some of the lulls we go into. Likewise, we need other players to start stepping up and shooting the ball better. Bucky just did this with a monster game. If we can get to the point that numerous players are shooting the three, and we're actually moving the ball around all the time -- we are probably the best team in the Valley on the offensive side of the floor. But, if we continue our inconsistency and lean on Josh Young too much, that's certainly not the case. Josh will come up big in big games (Iowa, ISU, etc...), but I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that him averaging 20+ PPG is a good thing -- we NEED other guys to step up because a one sided attack is pretty easy to defend.

We're 10-4 (1-1) right now. Hopefully if we can win two of those three games we'd be 12-5 (3-2) and I'd sure take that as an early 2009 present. Go Dawgs!

Drake (9-3, 0-0) AT Evansville (7-2, 0-0)

2008-12-26T23:48:00.003-06:00

I have only briefly seen Evansville play this year, most of which was against North Carolina on ESPN. However, I do have a few key thoughts on them:

They are a team led by their defense. Using Ken Pomeroy's statistical breakdowns, they are a Top 50 defense in the country, even when you adjust for # of possessions. This is no surprise, as they have only allowed three opponents to score more than 66 points, and they held Western Kentucky to an astonishing 40 points.
Their key? Limit teams to one posession. They are a top 25 team in how few offensive rebounds they allow the opposition, at 27.7% of opposing shots. By keeping other teams off the boards, they will allow some shots to fall obviously, but they greatly benefit by keeping teams from getting numerous chances.
On offense, nobody really stands out in the statistics as an extremely efficient offensive player. Shy Ely is definitely the go to guy on their offense, scoring 17.3 PPG. But he really only shoots 43% from the field and is not much of a threat from beyond the arc. But he's consistent, and a leader for this team.
Overall, they are not much of a three point shooting team. That bodes well for us, who struggle against snipers and great ball movement. They really aren't that deep as well but they do have some great rebounders and a solid defensive squad to say the least.

Overall, Evansville is legitimate. They have played Butler, UNC, WKU, etc... While there are a number of cupcakes in their schedule, I don't think you can necessarily disprove their statistics. This is a quality defensive team.

Still, I'm not the most worried about them. We appear to be able to match up with them. While they might keep Bucky and company off the boards, they don't appear to have the greatest numbers against shooting ballclubs, so that bodes well for us. Meanwhile, I don't think they are going to expose our 3-2 matchup zone and force us to respect the three, unless Holzinger just shoots lights out (which we have seen from recent years to be the case). Drake is an experienced enough ballclub to win a game like this on the road, and should not be fazed. The fact that it is over the holidays helps us as well.

I think that 66 point margin I mentioned earlier is key to us winning. I think we'll get there, and will take this game. Go Dawgs!

Prediction: Drake 69, Evansville 61

Progress Report Time (and Merry Christmas!)

2008-12-25T12:53:00.002-06:00

Merry Christmas!

Quick followup to Saturday's win over the Hawykeyes: I've heard a lot of talk from Iowa fans about how bad they were screwed by the officials. Why I do not deny that it was one of the poorest officiated games I've seen in the last few years, I get mad at their lack of perspective. I haven't heard about the five minute stretch in the second half where they swallowed their whistles and refused to call a foul on Iowa, the poor handling of the Cox/Givens situation that put Bucky in foul trouble all game, or the explanation for why they expect equal amounts of foul shots when they are jump shooting nearly twice as much (29 3PT attempts versus Drake's 16 gives you a clue for how many jumpshots they settled for). Let's get real with ourselves.

Saturday calls a trip to Evansville, which will be previewed tomorrow. For now, we are 1/3 of the way into the season, which I feel calls for a progress report time. Here is what I submitted to Coach Phelps:

Dear Mr. Phelps:

With 1/3 of the season complete, it is now progress report time. Please review the reports of your sons performance at BulldogsRoundball school through the first few months and sign your name and send it back with one of the kids. For those that are failing, please consider working with them at home on their action steps so that their performance can improve and they do not have to be held back a year.

Josh Young = A-
Josh has shown endless potential in class, especially on 11/19 when he scored 34 points on 7/11 shooting from beyond the arc in a hands on project with Morehead State. While he had a bit of a lull for a few games, his performance in class has been excellent lately, as he has averaged 21.2 PPG on 49% shooting in his last five classes. He really led the group in a great day against Iowa and is one of the best students in his conference, a sure 99%ile kid.

Bucky Cox = B-
Bucky has shown his potential at times but has been very inconsistent in class. He is one kid on one day and will be a completely different kid the next. Overall, he has been excellent at picking up all of the classes garbage with 8.1 RPG and two games of 14 rebounds (@NM, @ISU), but I feel that he has not had enough opportunities to shoot his garbage at the can from behind the three point arc, and when he has - he has not seem as accurate in past years. He is still a leader in class but I would like to see him pick up his productivity.

Josh Parker = A+
Josh has been nothing short of a delight in class this year. While I did not expect to hear too much from him, he really has stepped up and made the most of his opportunities and has contributed quite a bit (10.1 PPG) in limited class time (16.9 minutes per game). I would like for you to stop calling in sick for Josh so much and get him into class more often because he is very important to our work and makes his classmates so much better. He is one of the best so far this year at making shots from behind the arc (50% from the three!) so I would like you to make it a point to get him in here more often.

Craig Stanley = B
Craig had a rocky start to the schoolyear but has seen his play pick up quite a bit. He is the best in the class at sharing (4.3 assists/game) and I have appreciated him sharing with his classmates so much and not confusing them with other students from other classes (1.59 Assist/Turnover ratio). I see that you have been working with Craig to be a bit more selfish and try to create his own points, which I think is much appreciated and makes him much more of a contributor. I hope for Craig to continue to catch up to the class and be a leader for the rest of the season.

Adam Templeton = D+
Adam has been a disappointment in class so far this year. He appears confused at times and has been very inconsistent. He does not appear to understand when to shoot or drive or pass and has really not fit in very well with the kids. I hope they are not stealing his lunch money. You might want to talk to him about this. He was appearing to really turn the corner averaging 10 PPG and 6 RPG in three tough classes (NCC, @ISU, GSO) but has really regressed in his last few classes shooting 0-8, averaging 3 PPG. Please work with Adam on finding his offense, or he might be in danger of having to be held back or sent to the bench.

Brent Heemskerk = B
Brent has been a solid contributor in class so far. While he is admittedly not as talented as some of his other classmates, he has offered a great inside threat (5.6 PPG) and has been great at cleaning up the trash (6.2 RPG). I would like to see his free throw percentage continue to increase and he will possibly earn a letter higher on his grade. Please tell him to stop shooting three pointers. It appears ugly and he is not good at it. We have had a few discussions after class about focusing on doing what you are good at and I don't know if he is listening. I will offer to move this to a B+ if he immediately promises to stop shooting threes.

Bill Eaddy = C
Is Bill okay? We need to talk about him. He has not been in class in quite some time, after a great start to the season, including 17 points in our 11/19 project with Morehead State. His shooting has gotten worse to the point that I just have not seen him. Hopefully he does not have strep throat or chicken pox -- please get him vaccinated before returning him to class. Let him know we miss him and his awesome ability to take charges at opportune moments in class.

Jacob Baryenbruch = C-
Please stop sending Jacob to point guard class each day. He is not suited for it and makes questionable decisions on tests. It is clear he should go to off guard class during the day and really just fill in to let Josh Young and Josh Parker go to recess for a few minutes. He is not very talented and has added little value to the class. Had it not been for a clutch three pointer against Iowa, he would be at a D level grade.

Alex White = A-
Alex might be the most improved kid in class this year. It is easy to get caught up in ballhandling and shooting drills and we forget how important defense and rebounding is to the class. Alex has come a long way and is one of our leaders in both defense and rebounding. He makes kids from our rival grade schools cry when he flexes his muscles, which makes me laugh. He has had 4.9 RPG in his last 9 games. Off the bench, he is a great asset and I look forward to seeing him continue to improve in Valley season.

Using minutes per game to weight your kids scores it comes out to roughly a B grade for the first 1/3 of the season. I would even be willing to consider your great parenting/coaching skills to bump it up to a B+. With a 9-3 record and wins over NM, Iowa, and Iowa State, the class has been extremely excited. Sure there were setbacks against SFA and quite a few creampuffs in the early going, but I am excited at how far this class has come and I am looking forward to our work with other classes in the Missouri Valley Conference.

Parent/Teacher Conferences are a week from today. Please come ready to discuss the comments in this report and potential things you can do at home to improve your kids performance.

x_____________________
Mr. Phelps

dutl
Dean of BulldogsRoundball School

Iowa Hawkeyes (9-2, 0-0) AT Drake Bulldogs (8-3, 0-0)

2008-12-19T13:57:00.003-06:00

Wow, I'm real late with getting this post up. Well, I'll take some comfort in the fact that the Des Moines Register is taking the point of view that this game is not really happening. How is there not a huge preview and buildup? 3:05 PM today marks a big game for BOTH teams. This is the chance for Drake to show that Stephen F. Austin was merely an abberation, more than trumped by three non-conference wins against solid teams (IA, ISU, NM). For Iowa, they have the chance for retribution for two straight losses to the Drakies. Plus, it would definitely give them yet another decent win to build their NCAA tournament resume.

I'm not going to quote RPI figures, because I personally don' t believe they're any good until we are significantly into conference season and there are a fair amount of in-conference matchups. But I think Iowa has a real good shot to be a tournament team this year. They have an impressive neutral court win over Kansas State, a strong showing at BC, and they have more than taken care of business in state against ISU and UNI. It's tough to tell how the Big10 will go, but this team is playing much older than they are and they're playing Lickliter ball

What do I expect today? Well a few things:

Pace. I expect Iowa to slow down the tempo. Iowa plays at a raw pace of 57.5 posessions per 40 minutes. This is virtually at the bottom of D1. Their recipe is to be patient, yet calculated and playing towards their strength (good shots) on the offensive end. Drake has been pretty similar playing at a slower pace -- but it seems like more of that was due to some slower games at the earlier portion of the season when everyone was still feeling things out on the offensive end. I fully expect Drake to try to force the tempo and get Iowa playing an up and down game -- it fits JY and Bucky's strengths and might get the Hawkeyes into something they're not used to.
Tucker. I expect him to play today. I don't know if there's been the most amount of backlash from Lickliter's decision to announce that he "might" play. While it's surely possible that he's just trying to confuse Drake with his announcement, I just feel like once you start hearing that players might return from suspensions, they generally do unless they screw up again. Barring some sort of meltdown at practice on Friday, I'd expect him to be in uniform -- and most likely coming off the bench. This bodes well for the Hawkeyes because he's been their leading scorer this year, and he provides another outside scoring threat that can tackle Drake's 3-2 matchup zone.
JY goes off. Josh has found his shot recently, averaging 22.3 PPG over his last three games, shooting 53% over that span. Seems like he's definitely getting out of that funk that he was in, and the Bulldogs will need him to continue that pace. It will be key for him to shoot well and score 20+ today.
Off Day. Drake needs either an off day or to force Iowa to poorer shooting. Over their last three wins, they've been hovering near the 50% FG% range as a team, which is incredible. If you look back to the BC game, they were shooting more at the 42% range. Either way, this team is going to make shots, but if we can force some more misses than usual, it opens up a lot more opportunities for Drake to push tempo and play their style of game.

Prediction: Drake 63, Iowa 59. I think they're going to pull off a shocker today -- in a bit of a chess match they just make more plays down the stretch. I do think Tucker will get in off the bench but will be a bit off, and Iowa will have a few runs but not be consistent. Meanwhile, JY and Bucky Cox will come up big, as well as an unexpected contributor (Josh Parker, anyone?) to just make more plays. Man, I am excited, could be a great game.

MVC Preseason Conference Preview

2008-12-16T21:30:00.001-06:00

With one final game before the Valley season, I figured it was a great time to throw out some conference predictions. Ken Pomeroy (www.kenpom.com) has posted his initial projections for all of the NCAA. Given what is projected, I put together final standings for the Missouri Valley. First is current record, then projected record (MO Valley in parenthesis) and then a few comments on them:

1. Evansville
Current: 7-1
Finish: 23-5 (15-3)
Features a 16 game winning streak starting after their loss to North Carolina on 12/20 and lasting through 2/17. They will win the valley, apparently.

2. Creighton
Current: 8-2
Finish: 23-6 (14-4)
Projection loves the Bluejays at home in the valley, and for good reason as they have dominated in the Qwest Center. Big home win versus Dayton has boosted this, but this actually seems like a realistic projection for them.

3. Illinois State
Current: 9-0
Finish: 22-7 (12-6)
Not high on their undefeated record, and for good reason when the best teams you have played are UC-Santa Barbara and Bowling Green.

4. Missouri State
Current: 5-3
Finish: 17-12 (10-8)
Lost to good teams, beat nobody good. Same story as a lot of teams in the valley.

5. Wichita State
Current: 4-5
Finish: 16-13 (10-8)
Not sure why it is so high on Wichita State… my guess is their Neutral court win over Siena. Must have missed that loss at home to UMKC.

6. Drake
Current: 8-3
Finish: 16-14 (8-10)
Up and down conference season projected, pulled down by a projected five game losing streak from 1/21 – 2-4 (MizzSt, CU, Evan, WichSt, CU)

7. Bradley
Current: 5-4
Finish: 15-14 (8-10)
To be fair, they’ve beaten nobody and lost to UMKC (What the hell is going on with UMKC and Valley teams?!?!?!) and missing some chances against Michigan and Butler really hurt.

8. Southern Illinois
Current: 3-5
Finish: 12-17 (7-11)
No more than two wins in a row all season, punished by lots of early season losses to quality teams (Duke, UCLA, WKU, NV…)

9. Northern Iowa
Current: 5-5
Finish: 10-19 (4-14)
The projection HATES Northern Iowa. Apparently they will be favored in their next two games (at home, SDSU and then against Indiana State) and then not again for the rest of the season, but managing a few upsets along the way. Wow.

10. Indiana State
Current: 1-8
Finish: 6-23 (3-15)
They have lost some close ones, but 1-8 is 1-8. Outlook not good for these guys (but keep in mind they’re only projected to win one less game than Ken Pomeroy stepchild UNI)

This projection is extremely unrealistic, which has virtually been admitted by Ken Pomeroy himself. Right now, it uses current year statistics/results to forecast these things. Since we’re not even through December, it’s obviously incomplete and subject to some horrendous projections.

Given that, I still have a few comments:
* I am NOT high on Evansville at all. They have only one player rated high offensively (Fr. James Haarsma – who appears to be a rebounding machine by the way) and a lot of their success appears to just be defensively shutting down bad teams. I need to see them do it against some Valley teams before I buy them.
* Creighton appears exactly as I’d expect. 14-4 appears spot on, and exactly what I think the best record in the Valley will be this year.
* Illinois State will be dangerous. They have multiple guys that can really score the rock – everyone knows about Osiris Eldridge (who is arguably the best player in the MVC), but they also have Champ Oguchi, Lloyd Phillips, and Emmanuel Holloway who all add serious problems. Add in some serviceable bigs and this team is absolutely trouble.
* Missouri State… please. This team is bad. Not sure why they’re that high. All I need to write is Spencer Laurie. I’ll be seriously pissed off at the world if they win 7 valley games because they suck.
I’m not very high on Wichita State either, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they won 7 or so games. Team is young and starting to have the chance to turn over after the whole Turgeon/housecleaning fiasco.
* Bradley – Dodie Dunson and Theron Wilson are solid players, but I just wonder if there’s anything past those two.
* Southern Illinois – talk about a team that has struggled with some injuries and to get their rythym. They have probably the best two point guards in the valley in Brian Mullins and newcomer Kevin Dillard. Add in how Carlton Fay can score and Tony Boyle and this team is physical and dangerous. Once the scoring comes they are going to be absolutely impossible to matchup with (sound familiar?)
* UNI – They have a big man that will cause matchup problems and Koch, and I guess Travis Brown can kind of shoot. But their defense is awful and I really think Ben Jacobsen was a mistake.
* Indiana State – dude, they are 1-8.
* Drake – we on paper have one of the most talented squads offensively in the valley, even with our initial struggles. Cox and Young are two of the greatest players in the Valley, Heemskerk is developing, and Parker is an absolute stud off the bench. Add in that Stanley is settling into the PG role and that Alex White is showing promise on the boards and it’s easy to see that we are extremely talented.

So, given those comments, here’s my take:

1. Creighton
2. Southern Illinois
3. Drake
4. Illinois State
5. Bradley
6. Evansville
7. Wichita State
8. Missouri State
9. Northern Iowa
10. Indiana State

One last thing I wanted to discuss about the Pomeroy projections – I really think they do show that the Valley has really struggled against quality non-conference competition. The only team, Creighton, to have a quality non-conf. win (Dayton) is among the top of the Valley and I think we’ve seen that we have missed a lot of opportunities to knock off good opponents (Butler, Duke, WKU, Michigan, etc…). While I don’t think it’s anywhere near realistic to think we should have won one of those games, if the MVC is going to be a multi bid conference, we definitely needed one or two of those wins. Right now, Creighton is in if they play solid. If they win big this year and also take down the tournament, I think we’re going to have trouble getting more than them in. Just a thought at this point, hopefully I’m way wrong come March. Either way, let’s hope that Drake can fetch a big one by beating Iowa… more on that later this week.

The Epic opening round of the HyVee Tournament

2008-12-13T11:47:00.003-06:00

I'm in Texas this week, so I'm not able to make HyVee tournament at Knapp this weekend. Sounds like I'm missing one hell of a time, as Ben Woodside set school records with 60 points and 30 free throws! Unbelievable! It took three overtimes until Stephen F. Austin just edged North Dakota State 112-111. Drake managed to put a dangerous Georgia Southern team away, and will now match up with SFA in the championship game. Hopefully you were able to catch some of the action and I hope plenty more is in order for tonight...

Drake 66, Iowa State 63 and the Achilles Heel

2008-12-10T22:11:00.002-06:00

Wow, what a heck of a game. After seemingly digging themselves into an insurmountable deficit, Drake kept pounding away and away only to be answered by the Cyclones. But then, Drake managed to score 16 of the final 19 points to come back from 10 down to win 66-63. Josh Young led the Bulldogs with 19 points on 5-12 shooting and Bucky Cox added an enormous 14 and 14. Adam Templeton had his best game of the year by far by chipping in 13 points, 10 boards, and 4 assists.

Overall, this was a great win for the Dogs. This was their first true road game of the season, and it couldn't have started any worse as Iowa State bolted out to a quick 22-9 lead as Lucca Staiger was lighting it up from the three on his way to a season high 24 points. But Drake was able to finally find their rythym on the offensive end, and they at least limited the Iowa State shooting that had been previously knocking them down at a torrid pace.

Next on tap is this weekends tournament, which features a Friday matchup against Georgia Southern. While they're from the Southern conference, they've proven to be a formidable foe in the past. They are coming into the game 3-3 on the season with a win over Houston, but they were blown out by a strong Duke team in Cameron Indoor. They seem outrageously deep with 10 players averaging 13+ minutes per game, and their scoring is spread out amongst them. In fact, only one player averages more than 10 shots per game (Willie Powers, who scores 12.7 PPG on 10.2 shots per game). Altogether, if they're anything like they've been in the past, they're a scrappy team that relies on a different person each night to step up (sound familiar?).

Winner of our game plays the winner of North Dakota State / Stephen F. Austin in a true battle of the northmen (The Bison versus the Lumberjacks!). Stephen F. Austin is 4-2 with a tough close loss to Texas A&M. They are led by the two man combo of F Josh Alexander (16.7 PPG 6.5 RPG) and 6-9 C Matt Kingsley (16.3 PPG 4.3 RPG). More impressively, they've allowed only an average of 49.3 PPG to all of their opponents, so their defense against NDSU will be key to watch.

For the Bison, senior G Ben Woodside leads the way with 20.7 PPG and just over seven assists per game. Other key players are F Brett Winkleman (18/8 per game) and 14.5 PPG from Mike Nelson. The Bison appear to be a tremendous shooting team at 51.4% FG and 45% from the three point line. It truly appears to be the showdown of the shooting against strong defense... we'll see who sticks it out.

Speaking of shooting, anyone else notice that teams shoot consistently better against our zone than they do on average? I took a look through and overall, all of our opponents are shooting a full two points better against us (69/195, 35.4%) than against all other teams they play (361/1080, 33.4%). On top of that, they both make (8.6 makes against us, 6.1 makes against others) and take (24.4 takes against us, 18.0 takes against others) more three pointers as well. In short, I think the numbers back up what you're seeing on the court -- teams are certainly finding the weaknesses of our 3-2 zone and exploiting it with ball movement and the three point shot. Just when it started to improve, Iowa State dropped a 13/33 three point shooting night on us.

Fortunately, Phelps made an excellent halftime adjustment and started mixing in some man-to-man in the second half. It was a great move that definitely got the Cyclones out of their comfort zone on the offensive end, as they really struggled to score down the stretch. More importantly, hopefully moves like these can help us with our defensive three point woes as we attempt to take away something that has been plaguing us all season.

The Jekyll/Hide Invitational and What's wrong with Josh

2008-12-07T21:40:00.004-06:00

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, if that's true, here's a 2,000 word post about this weekends tournament:

Courtesy of ESPN.com, you can see that we had two incredibly different games against roughly equivalent teams. Friday night (left side, against UT Pan Am) saw arguably the sloppiest performance of the year. There were numerous lead changes, and we never really could get on track and get the offense rolling. You can tell by the flat line for UT Pan Am over the last few minutes that they actually panicked when they realized they had enough of a lead to win the game. Josh Young at that point ceased his Charles Barkley like Space Jam problem that had been plaguing him most of the season. By getting his mad roundball skills back, he was able to drill a three and then hit a pull up jumper to win it. Fortunately, thanks to some help from our friends at Pan Am, we got an absolute gift at the end and we were able to pull it out.

To follow that insanity up, we started Sunday's game (right side above) against NC-Central appearing to throw down a repeat performance, and then subsequently decided out of nowhere it was time for the real Drake Bulldogs to suit up. We absolutely hammered down the pedal and made it rain from three en route to a blowout win that virtually doubled up NC-Central's score. We shot 15-29 from three as a team, and had seven different Bulldogs hit one. It was quite an impressive display from the outside.

So what's the deal with this team? Well, it's obvious that consistency is an issue. We're still feeling out our identity and trying to get better with each game. With so much lost from last team, leadership is an issue as well.

But that wasn't good enough for me. For me, while I see that 15.1 PPG average from Josh Young, I think we're absolutely kidding ourselves if we think he's been playing at the same level as he did last year. I keep wondering, "What's wrong with Josh?" Why is he just not as dominant as he was last year?

After digging through the numbers, I think one breakdown I looked at spoke for itself. Below is a breakdown of Josh's shooting when we look at games when Drake has either 0-19 or 20+ team assists:

	FGM	FGA	3PM	3PA	PTS
20+ Team Assists	6.3	11.3	4.0	7.0	20.3
0-19 Team Assists	2.8	9.8	1.2	5.8	12.0

It should clearly stand out that he's both getting more shots and hitting them at a much higher rate when our offense (and the point guard especially) is generating more assists. When we get 20+ team assists, Josh shoots 56% from the field and 57% from the three. When we don't have all of those assists, Josh shoots 29% from the field and 21% from the three.

I think this is a pretty easy point to visualize. When other people are causing the defense to collapse, Josh gets more shots and he nails them. When he has the ball in his hands for 10 seconds at a time and has to force a shot, it's just not going to be as good of one.

Another interesting look that helps explain this:

	FTM	FTA	AST	TO
20+ Team Assists	3.7	4.0	1.3	1.3
0-19 Team Assists	5.2	5.6	1.6	3.2

To me, I think it makes sense that the more we force Josh to create the offense, the more he's getting to the line. That's fine and all, but it's taking away from more of his set shots that he is better at.

Even more noticeable is that, his assist to turnover ratio is right at about 1.0 (roughly his career average) when we are getting great point guard and offensive play. When we don't, you can clearly see that he's forcing things and that ratio drops to about 0.50 - which is brutal. Comparing that with the stats above, you can see when we have to force our offense, Josh is averaging more turnovers per game than field goals.

To me, I think it's clear that (a) JY should never EVER play the point guard position (b) Stanley/Parker need to continue to develop at the one, and (c) the offense and the flow on that end need to continue to improve. We need more consistency and production out of this team.

Overall, Josh is just not the type of player that can score points in a Kobe Bryant type fashion. It's not meant to be a knock - he is absolutely a dynamic player - but you have to use him the right way. I think we saw how that works when he has an Adam Emmenecker at his side, and how much he can struggle when you take that away.

For me, this team is going to continue to improve. As that continues to improve, I'd not be surprised if we don't see Josh's scoring average start creeping back towards that 20 PPG mark.

Team Three and the Iowa Realty Tune Up... err... Tournament

2008-12-05T10:30:00.003-06:00

Not too much you can say about Wednesday’s game except a great job by the Bulldogs putting away a much inferior opponent, with a 75-50 win over Lincoln. I’m not going to comment much on the game because it was honestly not a competition for much of the time. Lincoln did pull within 8 in the second half, but to me, it was much more due to the Bulldogs letting up and having too many mental lapses than anything else. Once they hammered their foot back down on the accelerator, Lincoln scored something like one field goal in just about the last ten minutes and the Bulldogs pulled away quickly.

Josh Parker led the way with 22 points – showing quite a bit of maturity and growth since last year. If this year is going to be the year of someone stepping up, he surely looks to be a prime candidate. Over his past three games now, JP has averaged 15.3 points per game and has shown a very nice touch from beyond the arc, shooting 6-9. Meanwhile, Craig Stanley took another step forward with 11 assists to just two turnovers. While we were admittedly playing a DII school, 11 assists is impressive regardless.

I also realized why Coach Phelps might be a pretty smart guy – he saw from the beginning that the lineup of Young, Stanley, and Parker on the floor at the same time has the potential to be special. I’ll admit that I was surely one that was critical of Parker not playing enough, but I think I’ve caught on to Phelps’ plan. It appears that, all along, he was attempting to move Parker to the 2 – while also bringing Stanley along at the same time at the 1. The result is that you end up with a lightning quick lineup that, coupled with Bucky on the perimeter, can shoot the heck out of the ball but still get to the basket at will AND can pass the ball exceptionally.

We saw quite a bit of Parker with the ball in the open court in transition – and I think that’s where he is exceptionally talented as a point guard. It appears that those opportunities are still going to exist for him, and at the same time he can now continue to grow into a role that he can be relied upon to score as well. This is significant – I think it’s been discussed at length why a one-option offense does not work – having another solid option (Parker) that can score on his own makes us considerably more dynamic and incredibly difficult to defend.

On top of that, it appears that the guys have really taken to it as well. JP mentioned on the radio last night that those three have been especially working together in practice, and that they call themselves “Team Three”. For a team that is searching for its identity offensively, I think the lightning quickness of team three certainly offers a glimpse of what this team’s identity can be, and even more exciting, the potential that this team has as those three continue to develop. We continue to see one or two of them step up every game. If they can continue to develop, and Josh Young can get his shot back – Team Three could be pretty dangerous heading into Ames.

Until then, we have the Iowa Realty tournament tonight against Texas Pan American (2-5) and North Carolina Central (0-7). Both teams are in the 320-340 range of the RPI. While it’s not always the most reliable metric at this time of year, it’s fair to say that any team that is that low is bad. In fact, that might be too nice of a description. I’ll hold the low blows until after we play this weekend and finish the tune up for Ames.

Cupcake U AT Drake Bulldogs (3-2, 0-0)

2008-12-02T17:27:00.002-06:00

Where has Josh Young gone in the last week? On the surface, you might see his 17.4 PPG average on the season and think that he’s really improved from last year. But, at this point, I think that’s far from the case. In the past three games, Josh has shot 20% (6/30) overall and an awful 15% (3/20) from 3PT range. On top of the cold shooting, he’s turning the ball over nearly twice as much as he has the entire rest of his career (3 TO per game versus 1.6 his freshman/sophomore years).

About the only silver lining is that he’s getting to the line a lot more (7.2 FT per game versus 3.3 FT per game his first two years). Plus, when he is getting there, he’s shooting them considerably better (91% FT% this year versus 77% his first two years).

While he was clearly forcing his offense against Butler (not his fault, we had absolutely none in that game), I don’t think that has necessarily been the case the past few games. I have had the chance to watch all three games since his 30 PT explosion against Morehead, and it simply seems like his shot is off. While all of those shot attempts I listed above weren’t wide open – he has had a number of decent looks and just hasn’t been able to bury them the past few games.

Bottom line, I’m hoping that this is just a small funk that he is in that he can shoot his way out of. No reason to sound the alarms at this point, but if he gets through tomorrow and this weekends games and is still shooting at or below 30% from 3PT on the season, I’m going to start getting worried. While we were able to still beat New Mexico with Josh having another off game, he is so important to this team’s success that I think we need him to get back to form.

Next up comes Lincoln, a Division II team from Missouri. I took a look through and they appear to be the cupcake of all cupcakes. They were absolutely housed by Missouri earlier in the year, and in their “regular season” games, they are 3-3. I can’t see who their third win is over but two of their wins are over smaller regional Missouri colleges. Doesn't appear they've beaten anyone that is in our ballpark.

Right now, I think it’s fair to say that there are two quick bright line tests we can do to determine whether we should be scared of an opponent at this point:

Can they shoot the three? For Lincoln, all signs point to no. While again, I can’t dig up all of their statistics, of the games I did locate, they are shooting in the 28% range, and it appears that only one guy has had just one game where he shot the three well (6-8 from 3PT). I have no concern that they’re going to be able to handle our zone.
Can they take advantage with size? The tournament in Cancun surely showed we are susceptible to an inside post presence, particularly when we are on the defensive end. Looking through who has received the majority of Lincoln's minutes, we’re looking at guys that are from 6-0 to 6-5. There do appear to be a few 6-7 guys, but they definitely look to be off the bench and not prominent roles.

To me, I don’t even think there’s much cause for concern at all with this team. I’d be disappointed if we don’t win by 30 points, and absolutely rock the house as we drop the championship banner during halftime. Hopefully we can coast to an easy 80-50 win and Josh Young can smell that 30 point range again.

The Live Blog

2008-11-30T21:43:00.002-06:00

Tough loss to Vanderbilt last night. For those who missed it, we ended up getting beat 72-57. All I can say is that they outrebounded and outshot us, and were in control pretty much the whole way. Overall Drake shot 37.2% to Vandy's 46.2%. Tough loss and hopefully we can rebound against NM.

I spent most of the day on the road, so I obviously don't have much of a followup on yesterday's game and no time to research New Mexico. But, I'd like to post so I'm going to try something new -- tonight I'm going to live blog the game with updates throughout. So here it goes.

Drake (2-2, 0-0) versus New Mexico (3-3, 0-0) LIVE blog:

Gametime -- Trying to see if KRNT online and CBS College Sports will sync together -- I'd much rather listen to Larry Cotler and Dolph than the jokers on The Junior Circuit sports channel any day. I will admit, I've been on the road all day and haven't had a chance to research NM so I'm going into this blind. Let's see what happens. All I know from the pre-game interview is that they are athletic and young (dangerously, sounds like Vandy). One reassurring fact is that Steve Alford is definitely no Kevin Stallings. Let's get this baby started!
19:30 -- We won the tip and Craig Stanley has already airballed a three 30 seconds into the game. Meanwhile, KRNT streaming online hasn't even announced the tipoff. Pissed at the lag and that I will not be able to hear the KRNT crew while watching the video on CBSC. Dammit. Back to the jokers.
18:30 -- NM has already nailed two threes and we are looking slow on the offensive end. Rough start for the Drakies, down 6-1.
17:30 -- Templeton drills a three... the color guy says how he is the guy that needs to step it up for us to have a good year... maybe this guy isn't so bad after all.
16:45 -- Stanley is looking aggressive and is driving early and often. Craig just dropped a no look bounce pass to Brent, but he keeps Cordoving his free throws (see the last post), going 1-2 on two separate trips to the line early. We're down 8-5 now.
16:00 -- We are getting busted up inside by Ferris, a 6-10 guy. This is reminding me of Ogilvy (big man on Vanderbilt) that had his way against us last night. We can't keep giving up easy post points if we're also going to give up open threes. 10-5 at the first timeout. Already starting to miss Dolph's awesome voice...
14:30 -- Color guy mentions how we are moving a lot on offense (which we are) but have absolutely no backdoor action going on so they're extending their defense. It's a good point, but I think it might have to do with us being matched up against taller, more athletic teams that can cover more space quickly. Toppert on NM throws an inbounds pass, steps right into the corner to get it back and buries a three... Josh gets two free throws to shave it to 13-7.
14:00 -- Danridge on NM gets a steal and 1 on 1 against Templeton... refs completely miss a travel and blow the whistle on Templeton. He fouled him, but after the guy took four steps. Tough break.
12:00 -- After the first timeout, they show a floor level wideshot of the gym, wish all Drake fans could see how absolutely ridiculous this place is. If you missed Andrew Logue's blog from the DSM Register, he mentioned how this is seriously in a hotel ballroom -- they brought a gym floor, baskets, and a set of bleachers into. You can see the chandeliers. Wow. After a great offensive rebound by Brent, Stanley rives and dishes to an open layup for Brent. Great move... followed up by a turnover by NM... let's get on a scoring run here!
10:00 -- Brent takes a guy on the post for a sweet reverse layup. Now down to 15-13 them, which is followed by another turnover by NM.
9:00 -- Alex White comes on and is described by the play-by-play man as a "well built gentleman". Didn't think of this until now, but White does not move an INCH when setting picks... realize it is fun to watch opposing team members run into the equivalent of a brick wall. We get an offensive rebound and they call a foul on Alex White for essentially being too enormous while fighting for post position... Color guy tells them to let them play... liking the color guy even more... realize that he is still not Dolph... he's cool for now I guess...
8:00 -- Bucky for three!!!! Got it from the corner after he was set up from the dribble drive from Parker. 19-17 Bulldogs!
6:30 -- Ferris gets an and-1 on a strong posession from NM. We have to keep them from making those interior passes. Stanley follows up with a great drive and gets to the line. I'm very impressed tonight with their aggressiveness and ability to get to the line tonight. Craig hits both and we are up 25-20.
4:30 -- Realized that Josh Young has not shot well in three games (he is 0-4 already, was 1-9 last night, and struggled against SDSU)... getting more worried about Drake's offense... NM nails threes from both corners to cut it to 28-26 good guys going into a timeout. We have given them wayyy too many open threes.
2:30 -- Alex White gets a foul while setting a pick... I think the officials are so scared of him they are trying to foul him out of the game... Hoping that Alex will flex at one of the refs to freak them out...
1:00 -- Comeback from NM capped off by a drive/dish to one of their big men who strokes it from 15. This came after two missed free throws by Stanley. At this point I am attempting to summon the ghost of Josh Young to see if we can get some shots to fall. We're down 31-29.

20:00 -- All nodded up at 31 at the half. I feel like we've been outplayed but have managed to get to the line enough to stay in it. Let's see if we can get something going in the second half...
19:00 -- Five straight points from Ferris coming out of half. He is eating us up inside. Meanwhile, Stanley is having a hell of a game with a great dish to Brent (layup) and a great floater. 36-35 NM.
17:00 -- Stanley in transition sets up Josh Young for THREE!!! Great to see Josh stroke it from three, hopefully he can get it going. Templeton answers on his own from the corner!!! 42-36 Drake.
16:00 -- Bucky Cox joins the parade and hits another three. Good to see some threes go in after shooting 2-12 in the first half. Drake up by seven 45-38.
13:00 -- Some sloppy play for a few minutes ends when Craig Stanley dribbles around, creates confusion, and hits Heemskerk for a trey from the corner. Been quite some time since I've seen him hit a three (the announcer soon gives me stats to back it up -- last one was in 2006)... either way, we are ow 4-6 from three in this half, and now up 50-40.
11:30 -- Timeout. Braylon Edwards is starring in a 5-hour-energy in a commercial. I wish he would promote 5-hour-stop-being-such-a-shitty-fantasy-football-player and start scoring my team some points. Holy Cow, WAY off topic, back to the Bulldogs...
11:00 -- Alex White comes out of nowhere and man-blocks a dunk attempt into the front row... I think the officials were too scared of the beast to whistle a foul. Meanwhile, Drake has got sloppy and NM has gotten back into it via the three. It's now 53-47.
8:00 -- Stanley misses a long three, but Heemskerk keeps it alive and Cox tips in Brent's miss. Play-by-play man on CBSC mentions how the bench and Drake's radio crew are going crazy getting into the game. I am then reminded that I am not listening to KRNT and proceed to get mad... but then get over it when I realize we are up 58-48 and are showing fire.
6:00 -- Heemskerk beats Ferris twice with two impressive moves to his left, one a scoop and the other a fadeaway. He now has 13 points and 4 boards. I'm extremely impressed how he is playing against quality competition tonight and am fired up for the potential of this offense if he can offer a true post presence to complement the outside shooting. We're up 62-48.
5:00 -- Play-by-Play announcer mentions how Baryenbruch is a Dean's list student and how Cox is a Presidential Scholar. Don't know about you, but I absolutely love whenever any media figure talks about how great Drake's players excel in the classroom. Makes Drake a better school and makes me a proud alum. Important point, but while on my soapbox, Drake has been very careless with the basketball and NM is making a run. Stanley checks back in -- excellent move coach -- we need a ballhandler! Lead gets down to 8.
1:30 -- Drake can't put them away. Josh misses an open three and NM answers with a three by Garth (no, not Wayne's World). Have to say, I'm both impressed by the lack of quit in NM and am disappointed in Drake's inability to put them away. The 16 point lead that existed is now down to five as NM has gone on an 11-0 run.
0:33 -- Baryenbruch misses a three, NM gets the rebound and brings it down and runs a play that gets one of their gunners open in the corner. Fortunately, he misses and Baryenbruch gets put on the line. He drains both, big shots by Jacob. 66-59 good guys.
0:21 -- Toppert buries a three after a great shot fake to make it a four point game, 66-62. Timeout Alford.
0:10 -- Josh Parker buries two clutch free throws and NM misses a corner three, well defended by Drake. Timeout Drake, and it looks like we have this game in hand. 68-62.

That's how it ended, Drake winning 68-62. While we are surely a work in progress, I have to say I'm impressed with the run that Drake put together in the second half and the pure fact that they beat a solid team. We took a step forward tonight, regrouped after a rocky start, and beat an athletic team from a solid conference in the MWC.

Bulldogs 75, SDSU 65 AND Vanderbilt (3-1, 0-0) vs. Drake (2-1, 0-0) Preview

2008-11-29T10:11:00.005-06:00

Been AWOL recently with the holiday week. Have had a few long days at work, some holidays with the family, and an illness that has been rocking my world. I've been fighting whatever this is for about a week now, and it has been nothing short of an epic showdown between my immune system and the mystery illness. Momentum has shifted back and forth on some clutch baskets, I think we've had about 15 lead changes, and we are just getting set for triple overtime.

Quick recap on Drake 75, South Dakota State 65:

It was an absolute treat to see Josh Parker play more. 19 minutes allowed him to provide a spark off the bench and show exactly why he should be in the starting lineup. He continued his ridiculously productive streak with 12 points, and defensively, he really helped create a spark. While he was only credited with 1 steal in the final boxscore -- he was sure on the ball and helped create several more.

Even more exciting was a heavy dose of the lineup of Stanley-Young-Parker (with two bigs). At any point in time with that combo, you have three guys that can act as a point guard and can break their man off of the dribble and dish. Plus you have two legit three point shooters. It's an incredibly tough lineup to defend and sure was a heck of an exciting one to watch in the second half of the SDSU game.

While the final score might not be too encouraging, let me show you why I wasn't too worried about it:

This game flow (courtesy of ESPN.com) shows that Drake was absolutely in the driver seat the entire game. You can tell they jumped on top of SDSU and really kept that gap the entire game. While we surely didn't end up winning by 20 or so, I'd rather see Drake in a game where they control it the whole time and just can't land one of their knockout blows than see them in a game where they struggle but then pull away by 15-20 in the last five minutes.

Even more encouraging was the fact that we had five guys score in double digits. Despite a tough shooting day (3-11) Josh Young still somehow managed to drop 14 points. Bucky Cox had a solid 15 points and 9 rebounds, and we saw double digit scoring from Parker (12), Heemskerk (12), and Templeton (13). Overall, Josh Young is going to get his points -- but I'd much rather see him average 17.5 points a game and see two or three other guys average 10+ PPG than see Josh average 22.5 a game and see everyone else average 5. We are so much more incredibly difficult to defend when we have multiple options and move the ball so well. It was great to see that on Sunday.

Overall, I have to say that I'm impressed with Coach Phelps as well. Bucky Cox mentioned in his postgame interview with Larry Cotler that Phelps made some adjustments on offense, moving to more of a motion offense. This is considerably different than the post-oriented offense we were trying to implement early in the season that just wasn't working. Many were on Phelps (myself included) for the lack of offense in the Butler game. It's encouraging to see that he sees something not working and takes steps to improve it. That's the sign of a good coach, and while Phelps is only two games into his head coaching career, it is definitely a great early sign. Lots of young (and old) coaches have their ego and "my way or the highway" mentality with things, particularly with x's and o's. I am very impressed with Phelps' ability to check his ego and do what is best for the team and maximizes the talent at hand. Keep it up coach.

A few concerns of this game were the fact that the Jackrabbits really only had three or four D1 caliber players, and two of them (Sargent, Callahan) really opened it up and kept SDSU in the game in the second half. Combined between the two, they shot 8-15 from 3PT range and scored a total of 35 points. We left them way too open on defense, and against better teams, that is going to be a significant issue.

Another issue was that we allowed Anthony Cordova, one of their big men, to get 5 offensive boards. Overall, this was a very small team that we had a definitive size advantage on -- as evidenced by Heemskerk's 12 and 10 (some posessions on offense were not even fair... they let him catch the ball virtually under the basket). We're not going to be playing a lineup of 6-2 and 6-5 guys when we get to Valley play, so you can certainly see cause for concern if we allow smaller teams to keep in the rebouding battle overall (we only outrebounded them 32-25) and certain players to get significant amounts of offensive boards.

While we are talking about Cordova, I have to say that, in this game, he had maybe the worst trip to the line I've ever seen in Division 1 basketball. In addition to horrendously airballing the first one, he followed that up with a shot attempt that even Shaquille O'Neal would have called awkward. Basically, it was some sort of line drive that nearly missed the rim completely, but just managed to clip enough of it and the backboard to somehow rocket off towards the corner of the court for an easy Drake rebound. I really hate to be so critical of the guy's shooting since I know he's trying out there... but all I can say is that when this occurred, somewhere in the midwest, Blake Ahearn simultaneously felt a piece of himself die.

Anyway, back to business and Vanderbilt. I was able to dig up the following breakdown from Chris Low of ESPN.com (http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/notebook?page=notebook/shootaround/sec):

Kevin Stallings has been so consistent at Vanderbilt that it's easy to take the
Commodores' success for granted. They've been to two Sweet 16s in the past five
years and won 26 games last season. Most of all, Stallings has taken the
recruiting to another level, which is why it's not a stretch to think that
Vanderbilt will be just fine next season despite losing SEC Player of the Year
Shan Foster. Joining 6-11 sophomore A.J. Ogilvy in the middle will be 6-11
redshirt freshman Festus Ezeli, who has a 7-5 wingspan and possesses the
capability to change the way teams try to attack the Commodores inside. That's
important because Vanderbilt could never sustain the kind of defensive
consistency that Stallings was looking for last season. Junior Jermaine Beal
returns at point guard and will need to take his game to another level. One of
Stallings' key recruiting pickups was 6-3 guard Brad Tinsley, who got out of
his letter-of-intent with Pepperdine and picked Vanderbilt over Oregon and Wake
Forest. This might not be Stallings' deepest team, but it shapes up as
potentially one of his most talented.

So far, 6-7 G/F Jeffery Taylor, another freshmen, is leading the Commodores in scoring at 14 a game, and is also chipping in 7 boards a game. Ogilvy, their sophomore stud, has been at 13.5/7.0 through the first four games. Ezeli, the huge beast that Low discussed, has seen lots of clock and has already had four blocks off the bench. Beal has been excellent so far… looking through the numbers he has been at 10 PPG, 4 RPG, and has had 15 assists to 9 turnovers in just their first four games. In addition, let’s not forget about freshmen Brad Tinsley who averages 11.0 PPG and has been in double figures in all four games, shooting 45.5% from the three.

I think you get my drift. Thinking about this team, they are young (I think their average age is about 13.5), enormous (two listed at 6-11 that actually play and at least four that play at 6-7), talented (see the statistics above), and deep (five players AVERAGE in double figures).

One potential weakness I see, however, is that it appears that Tinsley is their only reliable three point shooter. They have only had two other players take 10+ attempts (Beal and George “I Love the” Drake), and they are only a combined 8-25 (32%) on them. If this sounds like not enough of a sample size, I looked at their career statistics (since, outside of Ogilvy, it seems like Beal and Drake are the only two non-freshmen on this team) and they are definitely career 30%ish shooters. Not too much concern from me.

Vandy's only loss on the year came against Illinois. While we are definitely not Illinois, a few things stick out from the analysis above and from that game in particular that I think help drive keys to tonights game:

Tempo/Three Point Shooting. Given the disparity between size between us and the Commodores, I think this is an area that we might be able to leverage. We’ve seen Drake struggle defensively with some outside shooting (I’m thinking of the Butler game and the second half of Sunday’s SDSU game). But, given that this is Drake’s mantra and Vandy looks to struggle from behind the arc – I’d sure love to see Drake push the tempo and get into a three point shooting contest. Stallings is a good coach, so he’s probably going to keep that from happening. Nonetheless, if we can pack the paint on defense, limit the inside opportunities, and force them to shoot the three all day, I have to say I like our chances. Illinois forced Vandy to take 15 three point attempts. I’d like to see at least that many, maybe more closer to 20.
Rebounding. Vandy has outrebounded their opponents 149-113 through four games. This definitely plays into their size strength, and I think is a key to our matchup. We’re not going to grossly outrebound them – just not going to happen. But, if we can keep pace with them, I think that gives us a distinct advantage. Despite the statistic I quoted above, Vandy was outrebounded by Illinois 37-30. I don’t know if we have the personnel to do that, but if we end up in the 32-32 or 33-29ish range, that might help us out considerably in the flow of the game.

If we can do those two things well tonight, and keep the offense going, I’ll have to tell you, I absolutely love our chances. What do you say dawgs!?!?!?!? Let’s go get ‘em!!!!!

South Dakota State Jackrabbits (0-2, 0-0) @ Drake Bulldogs (1-1, 0-0)

2008-11-22T15:39:00.003-06:00

Tomorrow's game is an important one. While it's against a lesser quality opponent -- it is important, nonetheless. Tomorrow tells us whether Drake can continue their offensive breakout from last Wednesday, or whether it was really just Josh Young putting us on his shoulders for 30 minutes. We have Vanderbilt just down the horizon. This tune-up game completely drives the perspective of our ability to knockoff the Commodores. If we struggle, well we're back to square one. If we hang an 80-spot -- I don't know about you, but I feel real good against Vandy.

Here's a quick scouting report on the South Dakota State Jackrabbits:

SD State is 0-2 on the season (I refuse to recognize their 92-61 win over NAIA Mayville State as a regular season game). Last year they were pretty rough, going 8-21 overall and 3-15 in the Summit League, to the tune of a 330 RPI. Overall they were pretty awful, but their season did feature a big win over MVC rival Northern Iowa. Plus, as I look through the numbers, they are young and their players look to be consistently improving.

I'll admit, I have never seen the Jackrabbits play, but here are the sentiments I have after thumbing through their statistics:

Clint Sargent looks to be their most dynamic player. Sargent is a sophomore guard who appears to be an interesting scoring/rebounding combo threat (he had 20 points/10 boards against VCU). In additon, he looks to have a pretty solid stroke as he was 5/9 from behind the arc against VCU, and he can dish as he averaged 2.8 assists last year. On the season, Sargent is averaging 17.3 a game (counting their creampuff NAIA game) -- certainly strong numbers so far, certainly suggests he can score the rock.
Their other interesting guard I noticed is junior guard Garrett Callahan. He had 21 against VCU and has seen his scoring go from 8.2 PPG his freshmen year to 12.3 PPG his sophomore year to now 16.3 PPG through the first three games of his junior year.

Both of these guys showed they can score against quality competition with good games against VCU -- so we definitely cannot lose them in the 3-2 zone or take them lightly at all. If they can put up strong games against VCU (which is a solid team) they can certainly create some problems for us. On top of that, they both appear to continually be developing as shooters, and if they are both on their game, they might see some opportunities to burn us from deep. I'd say the JackRabbits definitely need to lean on these guys if they want to force the upset.

Junior Kai Williams is a 6-6 207lb forward that can score and hit the boards, averaging 14.0 PPG and 7.8 RPG as a sophomore. In addition to shooting 49% from the floor last year, he made 41 three pointers (shooting 37%). He has had a rough first few games as his rebounding is way down and he is 2/14 from behind the arc. I honestly don't know if he's just slumping or is playing through an injury, but the first few games suggest he is struggling.

Bottom line, these guys look to overall be improving from last years squad. While they were pretty poor last year, they have shown that they have the capability to knock off an MVC level team by upsetting UNI. Let's get real, this is not a MVC quality team by any means, but that doesn't mean they should be taken lightly. If we can defend them like VCU did -- keeping the entire team outside of Sargent/Callahan to 15 total points -- I'd feel confident we are going to knock these guys off tomorrow afternoon by a hefty margin.

Drake Bulldogs (1-1, 0-0) 86, Morehead State Eagles (0-3, 0-0) 70

2008-11-20T17:01:00.004-06:00

So last night was a big STFU from the Drakies to all of the naysayers out there that think this will be a boring year. Josh Young led Drake with 34 points and also added 6 boards as Drake took down MoHead State 86-70. Josh shot 10-17 from the field, but more remarkably, he was 7-11 from behind the arc. The 34 points shattered his previous career high (he scored 25 at Butler last year). Bill Eaddy came off the bench to pour in 17 points in 22 minutes, and Bucky Cox quietly added a solid 10 and 6. Overall, as a team, Drake shot 51.0% from the field and an sizzling 55.6% from three point range. It’s hazy but for some reason I recall late in the second half that Josh Young was even 1-3 on punting the ball, Sean Landetta style, from 35 feet – having one soar through the air and hit nothing but the bottom, that’s how great the shooting was going for us. For MoHead, Maze Stallworth dropped a team high 26 points and snagged a game high 8 rebounds. When Drake went on their run in the second half, Stallworth was pretty much the guy that kept MoHead in the game, shooting 7-16 from the three for the game.

Most importantly, we saw one heck of an exciting half from Drake basketball. While it surely wasn’t against the most top notch of competition (Morehead State finished 233 in the RPI last year and is already in the 300s this year), you have to be kidding yourself if you don’t think fifteen threes (and twenty-five combined between the two teams) is fun to watch. In a flash, we went from a slow, awkward offensive unit to a long range sniping unit – led by some great shooting. Ball movement was much improved, shooting was much improved, offense was much improved.

The most exciting part of the game was the fact that for about a twenty minute stretch, Josh Young looked like a man amongst boys. It’s not meant as an insult to any of our guys or to any of MoHeads guys – there just was honestly nobody on the court playing anywhere near the level Josh was for a good stretch of the game. I had flashbacks to the Dave Chappelle show with the “Charlie Murphy story” about playing Prince in basketball. Everything Josh threw up I just wanted to yell “Good” and stare into Charlie Murphy’s face, just like Prince did when he was dominating Charlie Murphy and his friends. I guess the least we could do is offer MoHead State some pancakes before they leave town…

There still sure are things to work on (we gave up some easy baskets on defense, did not score enough points in the, and we can’t rely on 34 from Young every game [or can we?!?!?]), but we sure had a step forward from the first game and the potential is there. Phelps pretty much said the same in the post game interview on Mediacom.

And that brings me to a brand new segment of the blog, Play Him!!!

Bill Eaddy. Bill has always been somewhat of a thankless player on the team, getting little clock, doing the things that you need guys to do (jump in for loose balls, take a charge, grab a timely board, etc…). He really broke out last night with a huge game. While I think it’s unreasonable to expect double digit scoring from Bill consistently, I do think it fair to realize that he can do one thing pretty well (shoot the three) and a bunch of things okay (rebound, play reasonably solid defense, pass the basketball, etc…). He’s not another Josh Young, he’s not Bucky Cox, but is it that unrealistic to think he can fill in for Korver while Templeton gets more comfortable on the offensive end of the floor? As far as I’m concerned, Templeton is supposed to be the better player -- and he definitely showed some flashes in the pre-season. But until he settles down and plays consistently during the season, why wouldn’t you play Bill 25-30 minutes each game? We need another guy who can stretch defenses and open up penetration for Stanley or space for Bucky/Heems… Bill can do that. Play Him!!!
Josh Parker. While Stanley’s numbers were strong last night (9 points, 7 assistisses), Josh’s were just as efficient (7 points, 4 assistisses) when you consider that he played 13 minutes to Stanley’s 31. Overall, I think it’s just easy to see that Josh Parker adds an element Stanley does not have. He looks like a more confident shooter and has an extra gear to get around players that Stanley hasn’t showed against D1 competition. I’ve said this a number of times, but he reminds me of a shorter Leonard Houston in that he’s extremely athletic and you have to respect his drive – if he can take the step Leonard did and get the ability to consistently shoot the three, I think you have someone in a similar mold. Regardless, Play Him!!!

Besides random bitching, I do have to give props to Coach Phelps for really getting the guys out and running and opening it up. I like how the confidence sure seemed to turn around in the game and it seems like he got this team to take a step forward. While we can’t expect fifteen threes every single night, I think we are definitely seeing the potential of this team. There's going to be some growing pains, it might take time, but this team is absolutely dangerous when they are hitting on all cylinders.

Get fired up for South Dakota State, preview to coming up tomorrow or Saturday…

Butler Baddogs 58, Drake Gooddogs 48 + Some Mo’Head Preview

2008-11-17T21:56:00.002-06:00

My goal of this post is to not spend the entire thing discussing the absolute ineptness of our offense on Saturday night. Let’s see how this goes…

For those that need a recap of Saturday night’s game, the Bulldogs struggled early and often on the offensive end of the ball. Drake shot 22% in the first half en route to a 25-14 deficit to Butler – with the 14 split between Josh Young and Bucky Cox. Drake picked it up in the second half, but Butler was able to answer every “run” (if you can even call it that) Drake put together as they ended up taking down the Bulldogs 58-48. Zach Hahn led Butler with 13, and Matt Howard chipped in 12 points and 7 rebounds.

Probably the most notable event of Saturday was the inability of Drake to create any sort of a shot from their offensive sets. Other than a slick backdoor cut by John Michael Hall which led to two free throws at the line, I can’t really recall anytime our offensive sets created an easy shot. In general, it was focused around entering the ball into the post to either Brent Heemskerk, Adam Templeton, or Bucky Cox – which put them in a spot to play to more of their weaknesses than their strengths. I need not explain anymore than a simple relay of the fact that Drake had 17 turnovers compared to 6 assists – you can obviously see the poor flow there.

To be fair, I think you do have to credit Butler. While they’re not at the talent level they were just last year when they won 30 games, they sure look at the early stages of a possible post-season team. They were patient, deliberate, and played very smart – exactly what a young team has to do to be successful on the road so early in the season. Brad Stevens seems to have a well coached team that can attack defenses in a variety of ways. They have a sure fire stud in the middle with Matt Howard, and a solid shooting ballclub that can hit the three point shot from plus distance. Defensively, they’re quick enough to challenge just about anyone they’ll face man-to-man, and they’re well enough coached that they can zone up to confuse.

Related to the offensive issues, I think the biggest note was that the story of the game was how teams took advantage of the opportunities presented. I was surprised to see that Butler had 16 turnovers – which I think is mostly due to the fact that Drake really had trouble cashing in on any opportunities. Butler, on the other hand, seemed to have a response for just about everything. I don’t readily have a statistic on points off of turnovers, but numerous examples seem to illustrate my point:

Late in the first half, Josh Young had back to back turnovers which led to two easy fast break layups. This helped drive the 25-14 deficit going into half.
Later in the game, as Drake made their run, Matt Howard got an outlet pass on a fast break and went up for the saddest dunk attempt I’ve seen in some time. Bucky Cox came out of nowhere and hammered it off the glass, waking up the crowd in the process. Unfortunately, Drake turned the ball over on the next possession and started to fade.

I really think the whole game would have changed had we been able to cash in that opportunity and build momentum, but well, that’s just the nature of the beast I guess.

While many are going to spend their time second guessing Phelps, I will point out (a) the defense played excellent. While they did give up some open threes, they held what appeared to be a average (at worst) to above-average team to 58 points and one of the best players not in a BCS conference down below his averages, and (b) they’ve been at it for four weeks. It’s going to take some time before this offense is running on all cylinders (let’s keep in mind it took the Tom/Keno Davis era multiple years before we were an offensive juggernaut).

Fortunately, we have what appears to be just what the doctor ordered with Morehead State coming into town on Wednesday night. They were picked to finish third in the Ohio Valley conference, but I’d expect that has been tempered somewhat by an 0-2 rocky start featuring a blown 15 point lead to Louisiana-Monroe and a blowout loss to Vanderbilt. Their 6-5 Senior Forward Leon Buchanan and their 6-8 center Kenneth Faried were pre-season all league selections, so they look to have some of the better talent from their conference. The Ohio Valley, however, is a pretty subpar conference at best. While it’s not as horrendous as the SWAC (sweet molasses, what a shitty conference that one is), let’s just say that if you were to start up a dynasty in one of the newer college basketball video games, you’d probably have your choice of a few OVC teams.

That said, let’s get the ball rolling fellas and put up a 70+ effort on Wednesday. Breakdown later in the week…

Butler Bulldogs 0-0 (0-0) AT Drake Bulldogs 0-0 (0-0)

2008-11-13T10:45:00.002-06:00

Are you ready!?!?!??!? How many times do we get the opportunity to watch a big program come into the Knapp Center that is not from the state of Iowa? Thanks to ESPN Bracketbusters and a hell of a season by Drake last year, we got an automatic followup at our house with (after Gonzaga of course) probably the strongest mid-major program of this decade. This is a landmark game for the program.

If you recall from last year, Drake traveled to Hinkle Fieldhouse, and edged Butler by 7 on national TV. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, just pop in the movie “Hoosiers” and watch the last twenty minutes... but, just imagine that there’s a three point line on the court, Jimmy Chitwood is a lot more tan and goes by the name “Josh Young”, and Gene Hackman is somehow the son of Tom Davis. That's pretty much how it went down.

To bring us back to earth, the timing of this game could actually be no worse. In addition to merely being the first regular season game of the year, we’re barely three weeks into the Phelps regime and we already have to match up against a team that is most definitely going to see post-season play. I discussed the quality of play we’ve seen from Drake this year in previous posts, so you can see the cause for concern.

Still, I am absolutely jacked about this game. Drake is not going to be close to favored, but I see a real opportunity if they can do the following:

Rattle the Newbies. Since Butler graduated nearly their whole starting lineup, they’ve got a lot of diaper dandies as Dickie V would say. But they’re all extremely talented and they were able to recruit them away from bigger schools. A key I see that has to work Drake’s way is that some of their youngsters are going to have to have trouble dealing with the pressure environment. The Knapp has to be loud and if some of Butler’s freshmen get rattled because of it, they lose a lot of that significant edge they hold over the Drakies.
Hold Our Own Inside. Matt Howard is an absolute beast inside, both offering a great scoring threat and dominating both sets of boards. He is going to make the interior very tough for us, and in all reality, we’re overmatched against him. Bucky Cox and Heemskerk have to make him work to get his points and they have to rebound the basketball well. Keeping Howard (and even Willie Veasley) off the glass will be critical. If Cox can get some matchups where he can face up on him – a big opportunity exists for him to use his quicks to get Howard in foul trouble. Unless Howard plays grossly unlike himself, I think he’s going to pose a significant threat all game long.
Extend the 3-2. The other end of the defense the Bulldogs have been playing is critical as well. While Butler graduated all of their 3 PT shooters from last year, they still have a significant amount of sharpshooters, headed by freshmen sensation Shelvin Mack (averaged 13.5 in their exhibition games and went 4-6 from 3PT in the last game). They hit 15 threes in their first exhibition game. While that was against Oakland City, if we leave them open, they will hit their shots.

That’s what I think. I don’t even think how Drake does on offense is as significant as how they defend Butler. I’m fully expecting them to struggle on O… they have already this year, and Butler has always been a strong defensive team, so I don’t expect Drake to go out and score in the high 70’s. It’s going to come down to how well they play defensively and what kind of easy opportunities they give themselves. Butler is real young, hopefully that works against them. If Josh Young, Bucky Cox, and company can step up and make some big shots, I think we could have a heck of a game on our hands. If not, well… expect a 20+ point victory for the bad guys.

Then again, I could be completely wrong. Either way, hoping to see a big crowd at West End...

Slipping by the WonderBoys

2008-11-10T17:34:00.005-06:00

Well that was interesting, now wasn’t it? For those that missed it, Drake won a tight one at the Knapp yesterday, 57-51, over Arkansas……… Tech. No, we’re not talking about the Razorbacks of the SEC, we’re talking about the Wonderboys of the Gulf South Conference. I’m pretty sure their mascot is named after a late 90’s Tenacious D song.

To put it lightly, Drake looked bad. The offense did not generate anything, they shot the ball poorly (35.6% overall for the game, 2-11 from 3PT in the first half), they gave up too many easy buckets on the other end, and at numerous times during the game they just flat out didn’t look like the better team. This is against a D-2 team picked to finish sixth in their division.

Now, while I’m sure many people are ready to light buildings on fire and start looting liquor stores, I’m going to maintain a bit of an even keel here. Drake obviously looked bad, as Phelps said such in his post-game comments:

"We need improvement across the board for Butler," Phelps added. "We really didn't play well today.”

But, here’s why I’m not ready to throw a sweet Molotov right through the front window of Drugtown:

Josh Young looked quick, and he showed his inside/outside abilities both driving and pulling up. He scored 14 points on 6-14 shooting.
Templeton looks like he could be the real deal. I missed the first game, but my buddy Ben (with whom I decided to get season tix with this year) was less than impressed with his performance against Truman. He certainly improved on that by showing some ability to put the ball on the floor (8 free throw attempts) and some long range shooting (2-4 from 3PT). This is exactly what we need to replace Korver.
We have options. While I’m not sold on Stanley, he looked like he offers quickness and penetration, exactly what this team needs. Parker and Baryenbruch could step up as viable options if Stanley can’t get it done. Bill Eaddy and John Michael Hall can step in if Templeton struggles. There are numerous options on this team… it might take time to find the right combo, but they are there.

Most importantly, sometimes it takes good coaches in new situations to get their team playing right, particularly when they make a big change. Two great examples come to mind from last year. Billie Gillespie’s Kentucky Wildcats lost very early in the season to a bad Gardner-Webb team, and they were an afterthought in the SEC until they pulled it together down the stretch and received a tournament berth. Todd Lickliter and the Iowa Hawkeyes had some embarrassing losses early last year but pulled it together to be reasonably competitive in the Big 10, despite a roster devoid of Big 10 talent. Both of these squads were awful at the beginning of the season, but got it together and turned their season around. I think Phelps can do the exact same, as once he can actually get his system installed and the players buying into it – there’s just too much talent to be playing like this all year.

You could tell at the game – the players looked tentative and are still learning the system. For me, I’m going to let them get better and not rush to make any rash judgements until the guy has worked here for more than just three weeks. If they can get some of those shots going Saturday night, there’s no telling what might hit Butler. Breakdown of that game to come later in the week…

Bulldogs Roundball Has Begun!

2008-11-07T16:01:00.003-06:00

After tossing around the idea for a while, I have decided that I would dedicate myself to blogging the 2008-2009 Drake Bulldogs Men’s Basketball season. I’ve been a fan of the team since I was a young buck at Drake seven years ago. Other than my unflappable allegiance (formed practically at birth) to the St. Louis Cardinals, no sports team is as important to me. Still, why would I start a blog?

As you well know, it has been quite fulfilling to finally change the recurring theme of “What a tough game… we are a hell of a ways away…” over and over to “Man, what a hell of a game! We can beat anyone in the country!”, particularly with the last half of the latter occurring in the last year. I don’t think we’re going to go 28-5 again. I don’t think we’re going to necessarily get an NCAA berth again this year. But I am confident that we’re much closer to the latter theme than the former. With the roster we have and what appears to be a head coach that can recruit, times have never looked so good for Drake men’s basketball. Drake basketball is interesting. The season ahead of us looks like it will be interesting. As a fan and a new season ticket holder, I guess I’d just like to do something that gets me even more involved… so, Bulldogs Roundball has begun.

A few quick notes:

Arkansas Tech comes to town on Sunday (11/9). Game starts at the Knapp @ 2:05 PM
If you haven’t heard, there is going to be a pre-game warmup at West End before the Butler Game next Saturday (11/15). Pre-game is 4:30 – 6:30 PM. Game time is 7:05 PM. Get out, get ready, get fired up. We got a heck of a season opener coming in just a week!
If you’re going to the Iowa game, better get on the horn for tickets. I purchased season tickets, but heard that they’re already almost out of chairbacks. That one is going to be sold out well in advance.