078: Can't win the league unless you win on the road
ACC regular season champions and road records, plus trying to plot possessions.
The home team has won around 59 percent of games in ACC play this season. In order to win the regular season title, a team needs to earn at least some road victories. This should be obvious.
In fact, the team with the best road record has won at least a share of the regular season title in 14 of the last 16 regular seasons. The only seasons in which that didn’t occur were the 2011-12 and the 2019-20 regular seasons.
Duke won all eight road games in ACC play in 2011-12, but lost three home games in that same season to finish a game behind North Carolina.
Virginia went 7-3 on the road in league play during the 2019-20 season, and finished a game behind league champion Florida State. The Seminoles were 6-3 on the road, playing one fewer game due to COVID.
Here is a list of all other regular season champions and the best road records by win percentage since the 2007-08 season:
You can find the current ACC standings and point differentials, along with any conference, over at CBB Conference Index.
Both Duke and North Carolina own the top road records in league play thus far at 6-2. The Tar Heels and Blue Devils each have two contests away from home remaining this season.
UNC: at Virginia, at Duke
Duke: at Wake Forest, at NC State
Speaking of playing games at Virginia
Did you know North Carolina hasn’t won in Charlottesville since 2012?
The Cavaliers have won eight in a row against Carolina at home. UNC is 62-48 on the road in ACC play since the 2012-13 season, which means about ~17 percent of its road losses have come in Charlottesville.
# UNC road record by opponent in ACC Play
# since 2012-13 season
opp W L win_pct
1 Virginia 0 8 0.000
2 Duke 4 7 0.364
3 Wake Forest 3 4 0.429
4 Notre Dame 3 3 0.500
5 Virginia Tech 3 3 0.500
6 Louisville 4 3 0.571
7 Miami FL 4 3 0.571
8 Pittsburgh 4 3 0.571
9 Syracuse 4 3 0.571
10 Florida St. 5 3 0.625
11 Georgia Tech 5 3 0.625
12 Clemson 6 2 0.750
13 North Carolina St. 9 3 0.750
14 Boston College 7 0 1.000
15 Maryland 1 0 1.000 Plotting possessions!
An idea I’ve been chewing on is trying to plot consecutive scoring or empty possessions in a game. Here is an example from the UNC loss at Syracuse last week.
You can see that Carolina stacked several empty possessions at inopportune times, including in the games final minutes.
This plot is only at a surface level. It can improve by adding annotations on points per possession, ways to add number of points per trip (3, 2, 1), and add in the type of possession (transition, offensive rebound, etc.) too.
I’m continuing to workshop some ideas with Ryan Campbell (Fifth Factor). We’re looking at surfacing shorter scoring runs (7-0) from the play-by-play data, so stay tuned.
Appreciate you reading this far, and please subscribe if you haven’t already. And here are two tools that might find useful this basketball season:
CBB Conference Index: standings, head-to-head records, and fun with quadrants
WABStick: compare the résumés of two teams using wins-above-bubble