Richmond's Efficiency vs. Experience Under Moony

[fan2011]

I have uploaded a very dense plot which shows the relationship between experience and efficiency margin for Richmond basketball teams under Mooney. I will explain what parts of the plot mean, but I am going to leave my interpretation of the data for later.

The efficiency margin for each Richmond team was taken from kenpom. It is the difference between the team's adjusted offensive efficiency and adjusted defensive efficiency. Efficiency margin is an incredible predictor of team performance, and is part of the new NET metric used by the NCAA. Higher values are better.

The experience for each Richmond team was also taken from kenpom, and is the weighted average of the classes for players on the team. The average is weighted by minutes played. Freshmen count as 0, sophomores 1, etc.

For Richmond teams under Mooney, experience and efficiency margin are highly correlated, with r2 = 0.78.

For the NCAA zone and NIT zone, the average of the efficiency margin of the worst 11 seed for the NCAA, and worst 5 seed for the NIT, were used to define the lower bound of the zones. Not every team which falls into these zones is guaranteed an at large bid to the NCAA or NIT, but being within these zones is almost a necessity to receive an at large bid for the respective tournament.

The teams KA was on are blue, all other teams are red. Teams before KA's freshman year are not included.

With Sherod out for the rest of the season, I have estimated where I expect this years team to end up in terms of experience (slightly less than 1.0), and indicated this position with an open circle.

 

[nathanw19]

Wow, this is some great stuff!

And at the same time, depressing.

 

[MolivaManiac]

Interesting stuff. A couple questions:

1- Can you please plot the mean for the entire tenure?
2- This would imply that, without Sherod, we are slightly more experience and slightly less efficient that last year, right? Scary.
3- Which one is the season where Ced Lindsay got injured? Any guess where we were pre and post injury that year?

 

[spiderstudent17]

2 interesting points I gathered from this.

1. Outside of KA JR/SR year there was only 1 time Mooney had an NCAA efficient team of the other 11 years plotted. Other then that, we were at best barely an NIT team. Plus, those 2 NCAA years with KA were with our most experienced teams too.

2. Even more interesting, out of the 13 years plotted only 3 of those years had an experience > 2 years meaning a more upperclassmen team was playing more minutes in those games. Of those 3 teams, 2 were NCAA and 1 was NIT. There’s a clear positive correlation between experience and NCAA level efficiency.

Fan2011, could you put another plot with the specific years next to the data points? Would be interesting to see the trajectory Mooney has had as of late.

 

[AnnapSpider]

Please stop- I’m depressed enough. I want to wake up from this nightmare.

 

[fatherspider]

View embedded media

I have uploaded a very dense plot which shows the relationship between experience and efficiency margin for Richmond basketball teams under Mooney. I will explain what parts of the plot mean, but I am going to leave my interpretation of the data for later.

The efficiency margin for each Richmond team was taken from kenpom. It is the difference between the team's adjusted offensive efficiency and adjusted defensive efficiency. Efficiency margin is an incredible predictor of team performance, and is part of the new NET metric used by the NCAA. Higher values are better.

The experience for each Richmond team was also taken from kenpom, and is the weighted average of the classes for players on the team. The average is weighted by minutes played. Freshmen count as 0, sophomores 1, etc.

For Richmond teams under Mooney, experience and efficiency margin are highly correlated, with r2 = 0.78.

For the NCAA zone and NIT zone, the average of the efficiency margin of the worst 11 seed for the NCAA, and worst 5 seed for the NIT, were used to define the lower bound of the zones. Not every team which falls into these zones is guaranteed an at large bid to the NCAA or NIT, but being within these zones is almost a necessity to receive an at large bid for the respective tournament.

The teams KA was on are blue, all other teams are red. Teams before KA's freshman year are not included.

With Sherod out for the rest of the season, I have estimated where I expect this years team to end up in terms of experience (slightly less than 1.0), and indicated this position with an open circle.

I do appreciate this info very much but I disagree about any extra relevance placed on “First 4 out” year. In actuality, that was one of Mooney’s worst coaching years because we had awesome talent and should have been dancing no problem. As many will remember, we lost a bunch of games that year we had no business losing, with some big leads late like the Wake game.

 

[ChoppinBroccoli]

2- This would imply that, without Sherod, we are slightly more experience and slightly less efficient that last year, right? Scary.

The plot moves over to the left without Sherod, so we're less experienced without him - which makes sense, because he was the only upperclassman getting significant minutes.

 

[fan2011]

Here is an update with some suggestions from the thread. Mooney's average performance is almost exactly on top of the 2017 team, just on the edge of the NIT zone with 1.6 years of experience (D1 average is 1.7 years of experience). Also, while I am fairly confident that after losing Sherod we will end up with less than 1 year of experience this season, it is early and our efficiency margin could change significantly. I would not be surprised if we end up closer to the best fit line.

 

[spiderstudent17]

Looks like Mooney has us at a steady decline of efficiency since 2015.

 

[MolivaManiac]

I am very impressed you could pull off that 2014 request. Thank you.

 

[MolivaManiac]

What i find interesting is that it could be argued that 2016 was our most under performing team.

 

[fan2011]

What i find interesting is that it could be argued that 2016 was our most under performing team.

2016 was also our first year without an ANO/Garret type interior defender since 2009, and the beginning of our current stretch of horrific defense. The offense in 2016 was where it "should be" for a team of that experience, ranked 41st in the country according to kenpom which is tied with the 2011 team for best under Mooney. The defense was just bad though.

 

[Spiders05]

Great stuff, thanks for the analysis.

 

[SpiderRick]

so if I'm reading this right, to sum it up:

mooney bad coach
Richmond bad team

 

[nathanw19]

View embedded media

Here is an update with some suggestions from the thread. Mooney's average performance is almost exactly on top of the 2017 team, just on the edge of the NIT zone with 1.6 years of experience (D1 average is 1.7 years of experience). Also, while I am fairly confident that after losing Sherod we will end up with less than 1 year of experience this season, it is early and our efficiency margin could change significantly. I would not be surprised if we end up closer to the best fit line.

In all seriousness, someone send this to Hardt. This is some of the most succinct evidence that Mooney is not only living up to the standards we all desire, but also the ones he set originally. He’s regressing, and outside of the KA year’s, plateau’d barely in the NIT level.