121: Lineups

A look at lineup data for Carolina hoops, surfacing some early NET data, and politicking season for football.

North Carolina lost two out of three games in the Maui Invitational last week. Carolina trailed by double-digits in all three games.

The Heels acquired three players this offseason via the transfer portal. Those three players - Ven Allen Lubin, Cade Tyson, and Tyzhaun Claude - have all played under 35 percent of possible minutes this season.

While fans can bemoan who Carolina didn’t acquire in the offseason or the lack of an experienced big man, it’s not like UNC can make a deal at the trade deadline. The roster is what it is at this point.

The coaching staff put together the roster, and anything we put together, we should expect to break at some point. In Hubert Davis’ first season as head coach, Dawson Garcia left the program in January and Carolina’s iron five lineup was born.

UNC was outscored by a combined 50 points in back-to-back games at Miami and Wake Forest in mid-January. The iron-five lineup did improve though and found itself up 15 points at half time in the 2022 National Championship.

In short, building a team and learning how to best utilize a roster can take time in this new era of college athletics.

The starting lineup of Elliot Cadeau, RJ Davis, Seth Trimble, Jae’Lyn Withers, and Jalen Washington played a combined 18 minutes together in Maui. This lineup recorded a negative 33.4 net rating in those minutes, outscored by nine total points.

Here is a look at the seven lineups that played at least five or more minutes together over the three game stretch in Maui, note the starting lineup is highlighted.

Defense was optional in the majority of these lineups.

Before making sweeping conclusions on a sample size of only three games, consider some of these lineups likely benefited from a rubber band effect¹ or a dominant start by an opponent is not going to be sustained as the game goes on.

Either way, those dominant starts by the opponent begin with Carolina’s starting lineup. Here is a look at the four factors of Carolina’s quintet over these three games:

Turnovers and rebounds are important

The turnover and rebounding rates are highlighted. In 15 offensive possessions against Dayton, Carolina turned the ball over on five of those possessions. And in 13 defensive possessions, Dayton snagged 50 percent of the rebounds on its missed shots.

That is a not an appetizing recipe for shot volume.

All three opponents recorded an effective field goal percentage of 50 or better against this starting lineup. If Carolina is unable to string together stops on the defensive end, it puts a premium on avoiding turnovers and grabbing rebounds.

It’s clear UNC’s lineup is smaller than in seasons past. This has its advantages in pace and offensive output, but it comes with trade offs in rebounding and defense.

The current starting five has played ~58 minutes together through seven games. That’s 36 more minutes the next lineup.

Rather than focusing on what isn’t on its roster, it’s more useful to embrace what is already on the roster and how that might come together.

Perhaps, that starts tomorrow with UNC’s starting lineup against Alabama.

Oh my quad

The first iteration of the NET ratings were released yesterday for men’s and women’s basketball. The season is only about 20 percent complete, so the numbers are going to be wonky.

A few data points I’m starting to surface:

• head-to-head conference records with records by quadrant

• quadrant summary by conference with win percentages

• non-conference game results

As of now, the ACC has played 34 quadrant 1 games or the most of any given conference. The league has only won ~27 percent of those games though.

What is more concerning is the ACC has lost 12 out of 13 games against the Southeastern conference. 11 of those games are in the first quadrant.

This is before the ACC-SEC challenge that starts tonight too. How many of the 16 games in the challenge will the ACC win?

Vegas suggests not many. The SEC team is favored in seven of the eight games slated for tonight².

As the season progresses, my plan is to start surfacing more and more college hoops data. It’s curious to see the WAB (wins-above-bubble) ranking in the NET ratings, but also confusing to note it’s derived from the NET ranking. It’s past time to try and reverse engineer the actual rating of the NET alongside its ranking.

Politicking football season

Another edition of the college football playoff rankings will be released tonight before the finale on Sunday.

These rankings will spark more talking points for conference commissioners to campaign for their teams to be part of the playoff.

What I find more curious are the stakes of this weekend’s conference championship games, especially after last season when Florida State won the ACC title to go undefeated, then got compared to Sesame Street and missed the playoff.

All nine conference championship games have a point spread under a touchdown. Four of the title games - ACC, MAC, Big 12, and SEC - have a point spread under a field goal.

As Seth Burn points out, the ACC probably has a better shot at two bids if SMU were to lose to Clemson³ than if SMU wins the conference championship.

So many hypotheticals, but here is hoping the games over the weekend deliver.

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Thanks for reading this far, check out the code for the lineup tables in the post here, and please subscribe if you so choose.

1. This might be why Drake Powell’s numbers in Maui were so encouraging: +10 with Powell on the floor and -28 when off the floor. And while the starting lineup is the point of this post, Powell ranks fifth on the team in minutes this season and played 24 more minutes than Jalen Washington.

2. Louisville, yes the team that went 8-24 last season, is actually the lone ACC team favored tonight hosting Ole Miss.

3. Imagine Clemson beating SMU and the two teams coming together to plant the ACC flag at midfield.