MAC Commonwealth Advanced Stats and Such

Note: This was originally posted on my old blog on Sunday, August 30, 2009.

Over the summer I have worked sporadically on calculating some advanced statistics for Messiah and the other teams in the MAC Commonwealth conference (it's DIII, so no, you haven't heard of it). I was curious as to what some of these stats could tell me about some of the players and teams in our conference. 


Having recently read and enjoyed Dean Oliver's book Basketball on Paper I decided to start by calculating some ratings that Oliver developed: floor percentage and offensive rating.

I'll let Mr. Oliver himself explain what these are:
"Individual floor percentage is an individual's scoring possessions divided by his total possessions. It answers the question, 'What percentage of the time that a player wants to score does he actually score?' A player like Shaq will do very well here because he shoots well [a high percentage], commits few turnovers, and gets to the line a lot.
Individual offensive rating is the number of points produced by a player per hundred total individual possessions. In other words, 'How many points is a player likely to generate when he tries?' Though Shaq may have a high individual floor percentage, his poor foul shooting means that he has a lot of one-point possessions, bringing his offensive rating down a bit. Good three-point shooters like Reggie Miller, who may not have the highest floor percentage, will have higher offensive ratings." (Basketball on Paper)

I also calculated some other individual statistics that give insight into more specific aspects of the game. These are effective field goal percentage (eFG%), true shooting percentage (TS%), offensive rebound percentage (OR%), rebound percentage (REB%), and turnover percentage (TO%).

I could attempt to explain all of these in my own words, but other people have already given much better explanations so I'll just direct you to those:
A good explanation of all of these ratings.
Explanation from Dean Oliver's old website.
Further explanation and links to other resources.

So hopefully looking at these rankings should help us better understand who the most effective and efficient offensive players in the MAC Commonwealth conference last year were.

Here are all of the ratings for every player in the MAC that played at least 100 minutes last year.

The first sheet is ALL of the data, which probably isn't that useful or easy to read, but it's there.
The other sheets in this workbook are the top 10 players for each of the statistics. For this I decided to include only players who played at least 60% of their team's games and averaged at least 10 minutes per game. So the second sheet is the players with the 10 best floor percentages, and the third sheet is a list of the players with the 10 best offensive ratings, and so on and so forth.

One thing to keep in mind about these stats is that it's basically impossible to reach definitive conclusions about players based on just looking at these stats, but they are valuable. They can tell you who the more efficient shooters were, or who took care of the ball better than most. They can't tell you definitively whether Matt Sosna or Brandon Wilkinson is a better shooter, but rather just that they are both really effective and efficient shooters. So don't take the fact that Derek Hall was ranked 1st in rebound percentage to mean that he is definitively the best rebounder in the conference, but rather just that he is among the best rebounders in the conference.

So hopefully you can learn a little bit about who is good at what in our conference by looking at these stats.