We’ll see if a 6’0 155-lb mid-major point is going to bully Clark. Hell, Clark might use his extra 30 lbs to post up Pegues.
If Pegues were as talented as Davis or Roach, he wouldn’t still be at Furman.
I do wish we had Vander Plas in a game like this, though, to be an outside threat who can score down low, too.
This is the type of game that I have been looking at for Gardner since he’s been here. Tailor made for him to do well.
Seems like a good game for some Dunn/Shedrick put backs
6’1 180, but I agree. Many can shoot over KC, but few are gonna bully him
JP Pegues - 2022-23 - Men’s Basketball - Furman University (furmanpaladins.com)
Sports reference had him at 155 last night — maybe his incoming/freshman weight last year. He doesn’t “look” that size on TV.
Their methodology sounds reasonable-ish, but it also sounds like they might be chasing noise a little by anchoring their model so heavily on past postseason results as indicators of how upsets happen, rather than looking at regular season upsets too.
Some interesting divergences too where they are much higher on Miami (or lower on Drake) than T-Rank, and same with Kentucky, where they are higher on them or lower on Providence.
Watching some of their games this morning, a couple random things I noticed about Furman…
The 34.7% mark from 3 does not do them justice. This is a VERY good shooting team, there’s definitely guys in their rotation who you’d prefer to shoot it over others but everyone is at least a threat from deep. Bothwell is super streaky, but if he gets hot there’s not much you can do as he pulls up from anywhere. Pegues is the same way though to a slightly lesser extent with more 3’s taken in rhythm and Williams their bulky wing is a surprisingly good shooter who comes off the bench. Slawson will shoot a couple from deep but his game mostly stays around the wing where he initiates offense and backs his man down to the paint. This isn’t a game where we’ll be able to get away with going under screens, they’ll be glad to take the 3 if given any space.
Bothwell and Slawson are their only two standout defenders. Slawson does a ton of heavy lifting for them on switches and at the rim, but they’re flat out bad at defending ball screens and dumpoff passes to bigs in the lane along with being foul prone at times. Bothwell is a strong guard who has good instincts and can get in passing lanes but also tends to get a bit over-aggressive. As many have pointed out, Gardner should have a lot of good looks and hopefully Sheds can convert some passes from Reece and Kihei for easy dunks. This is not a team who has the size or frontcourt depth to adequately protect at the rim.
I’m surprised that they’re only 124th in adjusted tempo according to Kenpom. They play really fast in their half court sets, lots of back cuts and 3’s early in the shot clock. I’m guessing it’s weighed down because they don’t force a ton of turnovers on defense and therefore don’t get as many fast break opportunities. But they also tend to give up some offensive rebounds due to how quickly their guards try to break out on offense.
Basically TLDR is if they’re hot from 3 it’ll be a close game, if not we should be able to grind out a win barring another horrible shooting performance. Get Slawson in foul trouble and their interior defense kinda falls apart, the other frontcourt guy Hien is a stretch 4 who can shoot it but doesn’t do much else and is a terrible defender. Reece, Kihei, and Armaan need to live in the lane and not settle on offense, they’ll be able to draw fouls and get easy dribble penetration. I think we get a scare in the 1st half but eventually break them down and win by 7-8 points.
Could fly into West Palm or Tampa and rent a car.
“This model successfully identified eight major upsets” is not how a model is evaluated. These guys are publishing predictions with decimal point percentages. If you want to justify that, show me that when you predict that something has a 39.3% chance of happening, it’s happened 39.3% of the time. Don’t just say “many (no denominator given) of the things we predicted wouldn’t happen…” (because note, these are all <50% predictions) “… did happen.”
The model may be a good model. But as I’ve written before, I think the guy who writes about this model doesn’t really understand it.
yeah, how many did it miss? what does identify mean? Did they give those a 50% or higher chance?
Release the tapes!
Also need to define a major upset. e.g. Houston gettting beat because sassed is injured probably should not be called a major upset. And is one a lot of people could probably see coming
I’m putting a marker down in advance. I hereby identify all the 11, 12, and 13 seeds. Let’s see how many major upsets I just identified.
Whew. I’m tired. Modeling is hard.
I’ll one up up, I’ll take the field everyone 9 and up.
What if the new upset is picking against the upset? Gotta flip it on em.
Ok, just watched the extended higlights of the SOCON title game. A few thoughts
First - Furman was the 1 seed vs 7 seed UTC (who was 7-11 in conf play)
Neither team played much D apparently. Some ball pressure but lots of gaps, driving lanes and space for shooters. Our guys better make their lapups because they will be there for the taking. The space was there even with UTC playing a traditional slow big. Again, Kadin/Papi will have chances to be feed the ball deep in the post, MUST finish. Their big did shoot some 3s and that really opened things up, this would have been a good one for BVP, but lane should still have space.
Go Hoos!
Chattanooga vs Furman Basketball Game Highlights, 2023 SOCON Championship - YouTube
Are we even gonna play Shedrick more than 5 minutes? In this matchup I think Tony will go small with Gardner & 4 guards, or Gardner/Dunn, spread them out to open up driving lanes.
Yeah, it’s definitely trying to sound data science-y without doing some of the actual data science best practices in terms of evaluation.
A quick and dirty way to evaluate would be to take the odds of the predicted upset and bet based on them (or simulate betting based on them). Better yet, one could compare their model to another one, like the T-Rank model, and bet them against each other.
If we played Duke a bit better there would not be a narrative that this is a good upset pick, plain and simple.
Listened to Mark Titus’s new show last night and Big Cat said “Virginia is broken without BVP.” Clear he just heard about our rough stretch in Feb, watched some of the Duke game, and made up his mind.
It’s laughable that is even a narrative. He literally got hurt the last practice before the ACCT and we played two really good games without him, WITHOUT any practice time to prepare to play without him lol