Due to various leisure-related activities, I’ll be posting game previews–but not game recaps–for the next three MSU games. I’ll put up a UW-Green Bay preview later tonight, but will then depart the blogosphere until next Tuesday or Wednesday. I’ll try to get a couple posts up late next week, including a conference preview of some sort. (Example: MSU/IU good; Iowa/Northwestern bad; not sure about other teams.)
I’ll be out of the country the first week of conference play. My goal is to post at least minimal game previews for the Minnesota and Purdue games before I leave US soil.
All this leisure should leave me fully charged for nonstop blogging down the stretch as our Spartans make a run for the Big Ten crown. In the meantime, though, I leave the game recapping in your capable hands, Spartans Weblog Nation. Have at it.
Here’s another blog, just discovered today, to tide you over in my absence: Happy Valley Hoops. It’s a Penn State blog, but it’s also an attempt to fill a portion of the crater left by the Big Ten Wonk’s departure. The content includes statistical ratings of Big Ten players/teams and statistically-based score predictions for Big Ten games. The number crunching going on there puts this supposedly-statistically-minded blogger to shame.
A few posts of particular interest to Spartan fans:
- An excellent summary of the four statistical factors of tempo-free basketball analysis.
- Wisconsin currently ranks above both MSU and IU in the HVH power rankings, on the strength of giving up just 0.76 points per possession on defense.
- The HVH individual player rating system identifies our own Raymar Morgan as the best all-around player in the conference.
Enjoy.
Interesting read from Happy Valley. Any idea on the specifics of those calculations?
How about Dayton? They’ve shown that they’re for friggin’ real. They’ve only had two real opponents, both ranked 11 or better, and have won them both (Louisville, who’s dropped off the face of the Earth, and then over Pitt, BADLY). Their lone loss was to George Mason in mid-November, but they’ve looked quite strong since then.
Michigan announced that Jerret Smith’s been removed from the team. He wasn’t a big minute-getter, but that sad team just got a little thinner.
Before I ever found this blog, I claimed that Bruce Weber was not that impressive of a coach and that his early success was merely run-off from Bill Self’s tenure in Champaign. Having Illini friends, I was politely assured that I had my head where the sun doesn’t shine. Since this group has dwindled by attrition, he’s failed to build any success or momentum of his own variety. Illinois has rolled over to all three halfway decent teams they’ve played this year, and dropped a couple of head-scratchers to boot — most recently to Tennessee State, yesterday. I’ll be interested to see where their 8-5 record ends up now that the conference gauntlet is set.