Transition Defense

After the basketball team's loss to Boston College yesterday, I am concerned. I still believe that we will make the NCAA tournament, and we can completely cement that with one win in our next three games (four, if you count the ACC tournament). What concerns me, is our defense. Our defensive efficiency on the year is an exceptional 88.6 (this is in points per possession, adjusted for quality of opponent). Over the past four games, though, our defensive efficiency has been 109.9 (Wake), 100.0 (Miami), 104.1 (VT), and 108.9, (BC). Previously, we haven't had two consecutive outings with defensive efficiency over 100 (higher numbers are bad).

In the Miami game, I thought we actually played very well (the DE of our first meeting in Miami was a season high 110.3), and I didn't get to watch the Virginia Tech game. But one thing that I noticed against both Wake Forest and Boston College was that they were able to push the pace and get easy transition baskets against us. Boston College even fastbreaked on us after a couple made baskets. With my view tethered to the TV cameras, I wasn't able to see why Wake and BC were having such success. We certainly don't lack for athleticism, and versus UNC (a notoriously fast team) we were able to hold them to only one transition basket. This is something to pay attention to going forward.

Spray Chart

Here's a spray chart for when FSU was on defense over the first weekend of games. You can click on the picture to see the full size. Sorry if the color's aren't that pretty, or the dots are too small. I'm still working on the aesthetics. My hope is that by the end of the season we'll be able to see some nice groupings and draw conclusions about what types of balls in play the 'Noles field well, and what types they have trouble with. We don't have data for the 3rd game (we were late getting there). If anyone would like to help with the in-game charting, just let me know and I'll get you a drawing of the stadium.



Note: Midway through the blowout second game, FSU basically subbed off the entire starting team. I stopped plotting balls in play at that point, because the defense was pretty terrible, and (hopefully) not representative of what we can expect from the usual position players.

Defensive Rebounds: Epilogue?

For anyone out there who, like me, has become obsessed with the Seminole basketball team's rebounding patterns, here's a heads up. Boston College, who we play tomorrow (Feb. 24) , also displays the out of balance offense/defense rebounding splits. Their players to watch are Joe Trapani, who's stats say he is a solid defensive rebounder but uninspiring offensive rebounder, and Corey Raji, who looks to be a beastly offensive rebounder but a lacking defensive rebounder.

Lineups: Part 3

So could the Noles have gotten a little more out of their lineup last year? My answer is yes, definitely. How much more, you ask? That's a little bit harder to pin down. I'm basically applying major league criteria to college baseball in order to optimize our batting order. While certain aspects of the game are always the same, it's entirely possible that players in college are placed into the lineup in order to mould them into the types of players they ought to be. For example, if you see a guy that might make a good leadoff hitter, maybe you put him in the 1 spot in order to teach him to develop his innate plate discipline. College baseball can afford to be an "instructional league" of sorts- in fact it has to be. Even your most grizzled college veteran has only been with the team 4 or 5 years. Development is key.

Players can improve a tremendous amount in just one year, but they've got to get playing time in order to make those leaps. Unlike the Major Leagues (which produce much larger samples sizes with typically older players), a college player's numbers from one year aren't all that indicative of his future production. With that said, I still think that there are trends and tendencies that should not be ignored when constructing a lineup.

Anyway, here's last year's typical batting order:
1. Tyler Holt .324/.471/.416
2. Jason Stidham .322/.430/.518
3. Buster Posey .463/.566/.879!
4. Jack Rye .371/.478/.526
5. Dennis Guinn .322/.430/.641
6. Tony Delmonico .374/.455/.529
7. Tommy Oravetz .361/.456/.550
8. Mike McGee .344/.427/.544
9. Stuart Tapley .383/.472/.592

Going by the tenets laid out in "The Book" (and statistcal knowledge in general), I probably wouldn't have batted Tyler as the leadoff guy. Our 4th best OBP'er without much power, he probably should have been down toward the bottom of the order. We've already discussed how batting Buster 3rd was a waste of a phenomenal hitter. The following might have been a better balance of OBP and Power in the appropriate places:
1. Jack Rye (Great OBP, good power)
2. Stuart Tapley (I still have no idea why this man batted 9th)
3. Mike McGee
4. Buster Posey (On Base a lot, ungodly power)
5. Dennis Guinn is fine here
6. Oravetz (still great numbers, just less power)
7. Delmonico
8. Stidham
9. Holt

For more quantifiable results, I used Cyril Morong's "Lineup Analysis" tool, which generated this lineup as optimal.
1. Rye
2. Posey
3. Delmonico
4. Guinn
5. Tapley
6. McGee
7. Oravetz
8. Stidham
9. Holt

I ultimately disagree with Buster batting 2nd because of his power, although maybe such a great hitter deserves as many plate appearances as possible. The calculator says that the above lineup would score 8.888 runs per game (RPG), as opposed to the 8.569 it estimates for the real lineup (actual values would be higher in the more offensive college run environment). That's a difference of .319 wins per game, which comes out to a ridiculous 18 more runs over an almost 60 game regular season. Would the gains be this great in practice? Probably not. Again we're not generating this with NCAA Run Expectancy numbers (although if someone knows where to find this information, by all means send it my way), and there can be a psychological effect to moving hitters around. But I feel that in terms of optimization, .319 RPG is just too big a number to ignore.

So, now that we've gone through all that, what would be an optimal lineup for the 2009 FSU baseball team? After seeing the first four games of the season, here's my take.
1. Tyler Holt (who has matured and may now be well suited to this role)
2. Oravetz or Cardullo
3. McGee
4. Danesh or Tapley (I know it's early, but Danesh has been beastly good so far)
5. Tapley or Danesh
6. Stidham
7. Cardullo/Oravetz
8. D'Vontrey Richardson
9. Rafael Lopez

Now, immediately after writing this, I realize that I am a world class fool for making such predictions this early, and with so many young players to boot. Maybe Stidham can become an offensive leader and produce enough to warrant the cleanup billing he's been receiving. Lopez seems to have great offensive potential and should maybe be much higher. Plus, I still no clue about what kind of player D'Vo will be this year. There are so many players on this roster with unknown potential that it is difficult to accurately assign batting positions at this point. I'll hopefully return to the question of optimal lineup once we've gotten a little bit better idea of our player's tendencies and current abilities.

P.S. I'm curious to know what Whelk and anyone else has to say about the Noles and batting order.

Defensive Rebounds: Uche Echefu and the Rest, Part II

Before I get to the conclusion of the defensive rebounding series, I have to admit that I had great difficulty watching the battle in the paint for the first half. I was completely transfixed by the show Toney Douglas put up guarding Jack McClinton, Miami's star scorer. In FSU's first meeting with Miami, Leonard Hamilton elected to guard the 6-1 McClinton with the 6-7 Jordan Demercy. This strategy made perfect sense, as it should be difficult for even the best of shooters to get off clean shots against athletic freaks half a foot taller than them. McClinton, however, was able to create just enough space to bomb away from well beyond the NBA three point line. It was a learning experience for DeMercy, and a reminder that sometimes elite scorers appear completely unstoppable.

In the second meeting, Hamilton adopted a different strategy. Sometimes the Noles trapped McClinton as he was bringing the ball up the court, just to get it out of his hands. Other times, Toney simply pressured McClinton man to man till he gave the ball up. After the ball was out of McClinton's hands, Toney stuck to him like a Venus fly trap sticks to a bug it has already digested. By my count, McClinton took only one shot in the first half while Toney was guarding him, and that was a brick. In the second half, Devidas Dulkys and Demercy each spent time on McClinton to give Toney a rest, with acceptable results, and Toney was able to martial enough energy for his usual late game excellence, but for my money, the whole first half was "Toney Douglas Time."

Now for the rebounding. When I payed more attention in the second half, I found that FSU's help line is not as aggressive as Clemson's. We seem to place it right about at the center of the paint (Clemson's was on the strong side of the paint). I don't think that aspect of our scheme is as instrumental in our rebounding woes as it is for Clemson. As for Singleton, he does watch the ball too much and lose his man occasionally. Alabi does lack some strength, most noticeable in the fact that Hamilton often tries to protect him by placing Uche or Reid on the opponent's most bullish player. Reid, though, is a complete mystery. Everything that I previously noted Trevor Booker doing well and Raymond Sykes doing poorly, Ryan Reid excels at. Reid never loses his man, he never lets him take up position near the basket, and he always puts a strong body on him when the shot goes up. Reid may not be pulling down a ton of defensive rebounds, but he most definitely is not letting his man get to them either. Perhaps he is too disciplined and doesn't go after the ball soon enough on defense. Perhaps his style of play helps the team without showing up in his personal stat line. For a great read about +/- statistics and their use in analyzing the true contribution of a player, read this Michael Lewis article in the New York Times Magazine. As far as I know, no one keeps +/- stats for college basketball, and I don't feel able to hazard a qualitative guess at what Reid's true rebounding contribution is.

So here are my concluding facts:
1) The Seminoles are good at offensive rebounding but bad at defensive rebounding.
2) The Seminoles are the tallest team in the nation.
3) Uche Echefu's individual stats say that he is a good defensive rebounder. My eyes agree.
4) Solomon Alabi's individual stats say that he is a decent defensive rebounder, but a comparison to other centers of his considerable talent (and to Uche last year) reveals that he should be better than he is. My eyes and Leonard Hamilton's mouth say that he lacks lower body strength due to his recent stress fracture, and that he will improve.
5) Chris Singleton's individual stats say that he is an underperforming defensive rebounder. My eyes agree, because he often fails to get a dominating boxout on his assigned man.
6) Ryan Reid's individual stats say that he is an underperforming defensive rebounder. My eyes disagree, and say that he rarely misses his assignment.

Extras:
7) Xavior Gibson has a long way to go before he isn't a defensive liability in ACC play.
8) Jordan Demercy's stats say that he is a valuable rebounder in the context that he usually plays defense against a perimeter player.

Lineups: Part 2

(In Part 1, we talked about the basic theory behind lineup optimization. A lot of what follows comes from the excellent "The Book" by Tango, Lichtman, and Dolphin. You can also read more detailed discussions of lineup analysis here and here. Now let's take a closer look and evaluate what FSU did in 2008)

So aside from putting your power hitters in the appropriate places, what are other factors to consider while constructing a batting order? Here's a brief synopsis of each spot in the lineup

1. "OBP machine": He can be a great all around hitter, but OBP is more important than power here. This guy isn't going to see many batters on base in front of him, but he's also going to get more plate appearances than anyone else on the team, so why not make the most of them by getting on base a lot? The 'Noles played Tyler Holt here in 2008, most likely because he seems like a traditional lead0ff hitter. Basically, he's fast without a lot of pop (plus massive levels of the ever tangible qualities of "scrappy-ness" and "get's his uniform dirty"). However, putting our 4th best OBP'er in this spot is probably not ultimately wise. He did, however, walk more than anybody else (albeit with more plate appearance), so he could potentially grow into a better OBP down the road.
2. "Balance": Extra base hits are not valued quite as much here as they would be in the 4 spot, but this player is still a fine batsman. The #2 and #4 hitters should be about the same quality, with the one who walks more getting the nod for the two hole (walks are more valuable toward the top of the order). Jason Stidham played here last year. He's an OK choice- he walks a fair amount, but is balanced over all. However, there are guys who walk about the same amount and are arguably better hitters. We'll get to that in Part 3...
3. "Mr. Not as Good at Hitting a Baseball as the 1,2,4, and 5 hitters": Why? Context. He's going to encounter more situations with no men on and 2 outs than the other batters in the top 5. He's sadly deprived of leverage- even if he does something awesome, chances are it's going to be worth less. Some suggest putting one of your "leftover" players here- Sabermetrician David Pinto says that spreading out your easy outs in this manner is not such a bad idea. However, this spot sees a ton of potential double plays too, so if this guy has a saving grace it should be a relatively low propensity to hit into to DP's. You may recall that FSU played one Buster Posey in this slot. Remember him? I seem to recall him going .463/.566/.879 with 26 HR in 2008. Hmmmm, perhaps this was not the ideal usage of his many talents.
4. "His divine awesomeness knows no bounds": Well, some managers do get this one right. This is where your best hitter goes. This where you ought to put your Barry Bonds, A-Rod, Willie Mays, or in our case- Buster Posey. Coach Martin played Jack Rye here. If not for Buster, I'd say that this was a good choice.
5. "Hey, I'm still pretty darn good": The #5 hitter is going to get some nice opportunities with runners on base, so he should be almost as good as the guys in the 2 and 4 spots. He's here because his slight shortcomings are mitigated some by fewer plate appearances. We played Dennis Guinn here. I'm fine with that. Good power plus so-so OBP compared to his teammates...I'll bite. But that doesn't mean Dennis might not have been able to contribute more in another spot.
6-9. "We're still here. We're actually much better at baseball than the average American." In general, these guys will descend in quality due to the dearth of opportunities to score runs down here. You'll probably want to slot in a powerful player without OBP prowess to bat sixth He can potentially drive in leftover runners from this spot. #7 can be a generally mediocre hitter with a little more emphasis on OBP than SLG. If you've got somebody who can hit singles and not much else, 7th is a fine place in the order. #8 is hanging in there with servicable OBP but no punch. The 9 spot should be your worst batter if you're playing in a league that uses a designated hitter. In the 6, 7, 8, and 9 spots FSU played (respectively) Tony Delmonico, Tommy Oravetz, Mike McGee, and Stuart Tapley. I can't really argue with any of this, except to say that Holt should maybe be down here somewhere. (Feel free to disagree with that if you don't like what I say next, I'm not entirely sure I want to discount Tyler's speed either.)

A note on speedsters: The best way to leverage a good basestealer is to put him in front of somebody who hits consistently but with little power. The fast man will probably end up 5th or 6th in the order. If your speedster steals second in front of a slugger, then he's going to be driven in anyway by a powerful hit without making the most of his speed. You're wasting his talent. The fast runner is leveraged more when he gets to use those wheels to score from second on a lowly single. Tyler Holt was probably our best stealing threat, going 15-24, but in the offensive environment the Seminoles play in, stealing is less valuable than straight up hitting, so I'm going to disregard this aspect of lineup analysis.

In Part 3 we'll see what the 'Noles could have done differently last year and how it might have helped. I'll also throw out some reckless, loosey goosey speculation about what lineup we should employ this season- so there's always that to look forward to as well.

Part I-B-a in the "I'm Still Avoiding Rewatching the Wake Game" series

So I went and watched the Clemson-Virginia OT game, and here's what I decided:

1) It's inaccurate to call Trevor Booker a center and Raymond Sykes a forward. When they're both in, Booker sticks to the paint and Sykes roams, but each of them spends significant time as Clemson's defensive post presence. This makes the difference in their rebounding splits more significant.

2) Clemson full court presses after every made basket. What's more, they usually use a big man as one of the pressers. Sykes does this more than Booker, but they both do it some. When the press is broken, they do not have a half court defense set up, which leads to offensive players getting better position and more rebounds. I believe that this is part of the reason why Clemson defensively rebounds poorly. However, FSU doesn't press, so we don't have this excuse.

3) Clemson uses an aggressive help line on defense. For example, picture the following situation. Clemson's opponent has the ball on one of the wings (call this side the strong side). The man that Sykes (or Booker) is guarding stands on the other side of the court (the weak side), just outside of the paint. To prevent the man with the ball from driving, Clemson will have Sykes leave his man, and come all the way to the edge of the paint on the strong side. This ensures that if the man with the ball does drive, Sykes will be in a perfect position to block his shot. If, however, a shot is taken before Sykes can get back to his man, that man (usually a good rebounder) will become the responsibility of another (smaller) Clemson defender. What's more, he will have perfect position on the weak side. All teams use help defense, but many teams only have the help man come to the middle of the paint, putting him in less good position to block a shot but closer to his original man. This is one of the trade-offs coaches make which can have a large effect on their team's statistics. I'm slightly ashamed to admit this, but I've never taken note of where FSU puts their help line. I don't know if the Noles' help line positioning is relevant to their defensive rebounding problems.

4) There is indeed a noticeable difference between the way Booker (the good defensive rebounder) and Sykes (the bad defensive rebounder) position themselves. With Booker, his boxout begins the moment his man gets within ten feet of his basket. He makes contact, diagnosis where his man wants to go (it's pretty obvious: near the basket), and continuously gets in his way. When a shot goes up, Booker already knows where his man is (he's very often touching him), and is able to immediately box him out, a good distance from the basket - he never even lets him get close. Sykes on the other hand always plays slightly off his man. He stands half facing him, perhaps two feet away, and follows both his man and the ball out of the corners of his eyes. He does a good job (at least in this game) of diagnosing play, and preventing the ball from ever coming in to the man he is defending, but he doesn't really use his body. He allows his man to take up any position he wants as long as he doesn't have the ball. He only moves to box out once the ball is in the air, so ends up in many more situations where both he and his man have equal position, and it is merely an athletic contest for the ball. He approaches offensive and defensive rebounds essentially the same way, and collects them at almost identical rates.

The differences that I noted between Booker and Sykes are essentially what I expect to find between Uche Echefu and Chris Singleton, an inexperienced but athletic player who excels at getting offensive rebounds. However, I don't think that Solomon will fall into the same category. I expect his problems (I use the word very relatively) to have more to do with leg strength. He has decent technique and gives good effort, but he's simply not strong enough at this point to dominate the same way that Uche or Booker do. As for Ryan Reid, I really have not a clue why he fails to dominate the defensive boards, while performing well on the offensive ones. He's not the active athlete Sykes or Singleton is (which allows them to get offensive boards), but he is experienced (a junior) as well as strong. I am sure he doesn't shy away from contact.

Miami comes to the Tucker Center tomorrow. Barring another blowout, I'll pay special attention to our help line and all of our bigs, especially Reid.

Defensive Rebounds: Part I-B

Just one note. Clemson also displays the weird offensive/defensive rebounding splits I was talking about earlier. I've often thought that Clemson is a very similar team to us. They aren't as tall, but they are long and athletic. Their potential is not as high, but they've reached more of it. They don't have as dynamic a scorer as we do in Toney Douglas, but they spread points around their lineup better, and crash the offensive boards like fiends. Their offensive efficiency has an abnormally high correlation with their offensive rebounding percentage. They serve as an optimistic model for Life After Douglas.

But why are they a poor defensive rebounding team? Well, they aren't actually that tall for one, but Trevor Booker is a solid offensive rebounder (265th) and an outstanding defensive one (81st). The culprit appears to be my favorite player on their team, Raymond Sykes. Mostly playing forward, he's the nation's 39th best offensive rebounder, but is outside the top 500 defensively. Actually, he collects defensive rebounds at a worse rate than he does offensive rebounds, which is extremely unusual.

I'm not saying that watching Clemson can solve our problems, but pay attention to what's happening in the paint the next time you happen to see them play.

Lineups: Part 1

Constructing baseball lineups seems to be an area of optimization that is often neglected at both the major league and college levels. In Parts 1 and 2, I'm going to take a look at the prevailing wisdom concerning batting order (note: wisdom, not tradition). In Part 3, I'll speculate on what an ideal Seminole lineup might have looked like last year and project what kind of optimized lineup the 'Noles could (but probably won't) trot out come opening day. Let's start by looking at the most frequently deployed lineup from the 2008 season.

Batter AVG/OBP/ SLG
1. Tyler Holt .324/.471/.416
2. Jason Stidham .322/.430/.518
3. Buster Posey .463/.566/.879!
4. Jack Rye .371/.478/.526
5. Dennis Guinn .322/.430/.641
6. Tony Delmonico .374/.455/.529
7. Tommy Oravetz .361/.456/.550
8. Mike McGee .344/.427/.544
9. Stuart Tapley .383/.472/.592

Now, this is not a bad collection of hitters. It scored an obscene amount of runs last year (663 in 68 games). It won games with monster homeruns and it won them with "small ball" and timely hitting. But could it be better? Could the performance of the batting order be maximized? Well, there are 24 possible base/out states in the game of baseball- ranging from no men on base, no men out to bases loaded with two outs. By tracking the scoring outcomes of each base/out state, we can come up with a Run Expectancy (RE) for each of them. By comparing the RE before and after any event, we can assign the event itself a value in runs. An out leads to a lower Run Expectancy for the inning, but putting men on base or moving batters over leads to a greater RE. Of course it's actually more complicated than that (which is why people can argue about whether bunts are stupid or not until they're blue in the face), but there you have the basics.

So how is this useful? Well, each spot in the order sees certain base/out states more than others. It follows that certain events (causing a change in run expectancy) are more valuable to one batting spot than the other. On the simplest level, this is why you don't want your most powerful hitter batting last in the order behind your typically worst batters. Your slugger won't see many situations with men on base here if the aformentioned men kinda stink at getting on base. His homeruns and extra base hits just don't mean nearly as much here as they would in the 4 or 5 spot. Well, it looks like Coach Martin had the right idea, we've got our 3 most powerful hitters in the 3, 4, and 5 spots. But is there something being left on the table? Could we have made better use of all the great hitters on this team?

I'll provide some more details and simple critical analysis in Part 2...

Defensive Rebounds: Uche Echefu and the Rest, Part I-A

I became far too upset watching the Wake Forest game to actually analyze much of anything, and I don't think that I will be able to bring myself to go back and watch it again. Wake is really good at running the break off missed baskets, maybe better than UNC. Aminu is exceptional. We had very little answer for his offensive skill (though I thought that we could have been successful isolating Uche on him to try and get him into foul trouble). Toney handled Teague well enough, but the rest of their team was able to hurt us, even without being able to shoot the three. The most frustrating part was the refs. I won't say that they weren't consistent (though they did miss a few obvious calls that went against us). However, the game was called so tickey-tack that a team that plays aggressive man defense like we do really had very little chance. We couldn't stop their transition game, the refs kept us from being effective defending in the half court, and we never were able to build any energy offensively. Once Solomon was ejected, we were done. This game reminded me what a razors edge FSU walks between being able to beat anyone, and not even being competitive. A couple momentum swings against us can tip the balance way too far.

Anyway, back to defensive rebounding. The one play I did notice occurred in the first half when Solomon had perfect inside position on his man, but was unable to keep him sealed long enough, and his man managed to slide around him for the offensive rebound. Leonard Hamilton has often stated in his interviews that the stress fracture Solomon had last year kept him from working out his lower body at all, and that he's still suffering from a lack of strength. Now my original plan to determine why we have trouble with defensive rebounding was to compare Uche with Reid and Singleton, because the three of them spend most of their time at the forward position, while Solomon, who is our best overall rebounder, sticks more to the middle, as a true center. However, recall that Uche grabbed defensive rebounds last year (when he was our primary center) at a higher rate than Solomon does this year, and while our team last year had far less height overall, they ranked significantly better on the defensive boards. What I'm beginning to wonder is if our problem has more to do with Solomon's emergence pushing Uche out of the paint than it does with the rebounding skills of our forwards. When we next play a game that I can watch with a cool head, I will both compare Uche to Reid and Singleton, and also compare our rebounding prowess as a team with Solomon in the game to when he takes a seat.

Deffensive Rebounds: Uche Echefu and the Rest, Part I

This year, the FSU men's basketball team has emerged as a true tournament contender, and as of right now they are nationally ranked for the first time in over a decade. Their success has been a product of great offensive play from senior guard Toney Douglas and outstanding all-around team defense, highlighted by the shot blocking powers of redshirt freshman center, Solomon Alabi. The two main weaknesses this season have been turnovers and defensive rebounding. Recently, with the maturation of Alabi, Luke Louks, and Derwin Kitchen, I think that the Noles may have gotten over their turnover bugaboo. However, defensive rebounds continue to be a problem, which is both worrisome and puzzling, being that they are the tallest team in the nation, and are pretty good at corralling offensive rebounds.

What's wrong with us, and how can we improve? To try to answer this question, I will turn to the excellent pace-independent statistics provided by Ken Pomeroy. Caveat: When looking at statistics in any evaluation of player skill, it is important to remember that context matters. Team strategy and the abilities of the other four players on the floor impact individual statistics. For those who are interested, here is an interesting discussion of scheme and its affects on rebounding, at Basketball Prospectus.

First off, FSU grabs 36.7% of all offensive rebounds, good for 55th in the NCAA, but they allow opposing teams to reach 36.1% of rebounds on the defensive side of the court. This makes them the 284th best defensive rebounding team in the nation. Now, it's generally thought that offensive rebounding has more to do with athleticism and pursuit, whereas defensive rebounding depends on discipline and technique. (Of course, both offensive and defensive rebounding depend on scheme as well).

Looking at the individual rebounding statistics, it's instantly apparent that Alabi is FSU's best rebounder in an absolute sense, ranking 74th in the country in offensive rebounding percentage and 377th in defensive rebounding percentage. This makes intuitive sense, as Alabi is a 7-1 beast, who always plays in the paint when he's on the court. Note however, that he is a relatively better offensive rebounder than defensive one. The picture becomes more interesting, however, when we look at FSU's other frontcourt players. Chris Singleton and Ryan Reid rate 331st and 353th at offensive rebounding, but are not even within the national top 500 on the defensive glass. I am excluding Xavior Gibson from this analysis, as he plays significantly fewer minutes than the others.

The picture changes slightly when we look at senior Uche Echefu. This year, Uche has been the nations 360th best offensive rebounder and 488th best defensive rebounder. There is still a disparity between the two ratings, but it's the smallest disparity we've seen yet for an FSU player. Checking back one year to 2008, Uche was the nation's 419th best offensive rebounder, but 127th best defensive rebounder (actually, Uche's 2008 defensive rebounding rate was better than Alabi's rate this year). In fact, 2009 is the first time in Uche's career that he has rebounded better on the offensive glass than on the defensive. For comparison, Reid has ranked highly as an offensive rebounder in the past two seasons, but been out of the top 500 on the defensive end.

What does this all mean? I take it as strong evidence that Uche Echefu actually does something different on the defensive boards than all of the other FSU frontcourt players. The overall rebounding trend can be attributed to the scheme, but Uche outperforms his teammates who are used somewhat interchangeably within the same scheme. By only looking at the numbers, it is impossible to tell if he establishes position earlier, fights to hold his boxout longer, doesn't extend his defense as far on the perimeter, tries to block less shots, or any combination of these factors plus countless ones that I haven't thought of. For the next basketball game, I will devote all of my attention to the FSU frontcourt, to try to establish what is it exactly that Uche does that I sincerely hope he can pass on to his young teammates. Stay tuned for Part II.

Welcome

Welcome to the inauguration of Somebody to Leon. Our original idea was to attend and chart all of the home games of the upcoming 2009 FSU baseball season, in the hope that we could provide some small amount of relevant statistics, analysis, and discussion to the hordes of fans left thirsty from the generally small and poor coverage that FSU sports get around the nation. We plan on keeping track of plate discipline, pitch selection, BABIP, defense, and perhaps some other stats, as well as our own very valuable opinions.

We will also use this space to discuss Florida State basketball, football, or any of the other important issues facing society today.

Important Issue number one: Why is our basketball team so amazingly terrible at defensive rebounding, when we're really pretty good on the offensive boards? How can we fix this? I have almost no clue, but I'll let y'all know soon.