Happy New Year and a Few Updates

Happy 2007 everybody. Here's to another successful year for Duke's many talented athletes.

The ACC team previews are proceeding, with only four teams to go (BC, Clemson, Virginia Tech, and Duke). The remaining previews will go in that order, and will show up Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday mornings. The previews will be permanently linked over on the right side of the page, so everyone can see how wrong I was come March.

ACC tempo-free player stats have been updated through all games of 2006. Duke tempo-free player stats have been updated through SJSU (now not including either Air Force or Gonzaga, thanks to Pitt-Oklahoma State - which was a great game, so I'm not that bitter). A brief comment on the Duke tempo-free stat section. You may notice that the stats for Duke players in that section may be different than those for Duke players on the ACC leaderboard. There are two reasons for this. First, as mentioned above, I can't run the stats for the Air Force and Gonzaga games because I couldn't track substitutions. Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, the "standard" tempo-free stats on the ACC page suffer from an assumptional flaw - namely, they assume that the team plays identically all game. So, if a team takes 60 shots in a game, the standard tempo-free stats simply assume that the team took 1.5 shots a minute, every minute. It also assumes that the team plays the same regardless of who is on the court. Now, anyone who has watched a basketball game knows that it doesn't really work that way. This assumptional flaw is precisely what the "actual" tempo-free stats I track for Duke are designed to correct, and so they'll naturally be a little different. At the end of the year, it will be interesting to compare the "actual" tempo-free stats with what the "standard" tempo-free stats for Duke are, and see just how much of a difference there really is. Anyway, for the ACC tempo-free leaderboard, I've decided to use the standard tempo-free stats for Duke players, so that all players are compared on the same level.

ACC team tempo-free stats will preview during the last week of January, and soon thereafter I'll shift the player tempo-free stats over to conference games only.