ACC 2006: a statistical review of players

Every season, i do a statistical analysis of the top ACC players in men's hoops.  The method is described below (or in a later post), for those so interested.  But here are some results and observations...

§         The #1 player in 2006 was not JJ Redick, but his teammate Shelden Williams.  Now, right off the bat, this may cause you to pooh-pooh everything about this approach.  I can understand that; it actually troubles me, too.  Redick has done some things this season that are just phenomenal, and perhaps the model can't capture that adequately.  I know the model is agnostic about things like career record-setting and reaching milestones and "first-time-since-David-Thompson" scenarios.  Those things are rightly considered when voting for All-ACC and POY.  But this approach tries to measure impact to the team winning games in this one season, and it was pretty clear from my results that Shelden is tops.  He was the #3 scorer, the #1 rebounder and shot-blocker (quite easily), #2 in FG%, #3 in FT attempts (an extremely important metric), and #4 in steals.  Just a dominant, dominant season on both ends of the floor.

 

§         The final outcome of this analysis is a single-score metric for each player, using a scale of 0-100.  The best season i've logged, going back to the late 1980s, is Tim Duncan's senior year in 1997, where he scored a 96 on my scale.  In 2006, Shelden scored a 81, good for the 8th best season over the past two decades, and the best posted by a Duke player since Laettner's final year in 1992.

 

§         Redick finished with a 68, a clear second place in the ACC (Tyler Hansbrough of UNC was 3rd with a 49, to give you some sense of the scale).  His scoring output was more than 4 standard deviations above the average of the top 72 players in the league.  That is simply amazing.  The league leader is usually 2.5-3.2 stddevs above the mean.  I've never seen anything close to Redick's 4.3 mark this year, and while the model accounts for that, maybe it doesn't do it well enough.

 

§         I agreed with the media's first team All-ACC of the big 3, plus Craig Smith and Sean Singletary.  For 2nd team, I would have had Cedric Simmons (NC State) and Jamon Gordon (Va Tech) in place of Justin Gray and Guillermo Diaz.  For 3rd team, i like Alex Johnson (FSU) and Zabian Dowdell (Va Tech) over Bennerman, Canar-Medley and the inexplicable JR Reynolds.  The writers lazily focus too much on scoring output, to the detriment of other things that lead to winning basketball.