I think he is an improved player purely based off who he will be on the court with this year and next year. I’m sure he has improved in his individual skill, but he will have an uptick in production with shooters around him even if he hasn’t improved at all(which I doubt is the case).
Another thing to consider is that big jumps sometimes occur or click mid season opposed to just during the off-season. With Reece last year he looked like freshman year Reece until that Clemson game in December where we got crushed but he popped off. Dre really hit his stride at the beginning of ACC play his RS Freshman year. Just some things to keep in mind imo.
Good point … Clark was named preseason all ACC 2nd team last year and got 5 votes for player of the year … also named preseason all 2nd team the year before …
And didn’t make any of the teams either year at the end of the year.
I think the issue with Reece has been the transition from Kihei to Reece…He’s been here 3 years and it still hasn’t really happened. (Not a Kihei hating post).
What happens when you’re running the team is that you then are able to decide HOW you want to run the team and players and *HOW you want to set up the players so that you can also score as needed. For example London ran the offense at a *deliberate pace, but was expertly able to set his team up to score, and space the floor for him to shoot. Ty similarly *controlled the offense at a specific pace, was able to get in the paint whenever he wanted by using his size and body to get to his spots. With Reece, I’m still not sure "how his game will look when he’s fully controlling the offense and playing with complimentary players. Will it be speed based?
The transition from London to Ty first year was that Ty was a *complimentary part at the point guard position, but then by the 2nd year he started and Nigel supported him in spot positions. The transition from Ty to Kihei was similar in that it was Ty’s team, and although Kihei played alot, it was really Kihei deferring to Ty. The same thing is now happening, and has been happening with Kihei and Reece in which Reece has been supporting him in spot positions.
So truthfully it is *still Kihei’s team in which he is allowed to make plays, take shots at the end of the shot clock, and ad-lib from the play calling, meanwhile Reece still does support him, and hasn’t fully been able to flourish at this point. We will have to see what happens next year with talent in important areas, plus Reece being able to fully run the show without deferring.
So the question is *how do we overcome the issue of putting an anchor on our “talented” players so that they’re not deferring to the elder statesmen and still are able to utilize their full potential?
Option A: Recruiting Nigel type players is an option which allows the younger talent to still *own the team.
Option B: Recruiting *combo guards to support the team when the point guard sits, meaning we only have one TRUE pointguard that is talented on the roster at any time, or at worse overlaps with another talented TRUE pointguard for a year or less.
For me, I think it just shows the limit of some of these statistical models. The top line stuff looks credible, but once it gets into these real granular predictions, the model seems like it’s being asked to do too much.
His tweet thread says that this is how much a player positively or negatively impacts his team’s performance when on the floor. That’s pretty different than a “top players” ranking. I agree on the granularity (450 vs. 550 doesn’t really matter).
The useful thing with this is where players are relative to one another. Gardner being comparatively low is interesting.
Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way. How many “credible” D1 teams are there? Not “good”, just… serious, maybe. 100? And maybe 600 starter-ish players on those teams out of 1200-1300 players overall. So, being 500th isn’t that bad, its like being the 6th man at VCU or something.
Reece at 29th is probably around ACC 2nd Team, which isn’t bad, and Kadin might squeak into Honorable Mention. So, at least a little high-end talent plus he sees the team as being deep, with us having 6 or 7 more guys in the ballpark of “VCU’s 6th man” or better.
I’ll admit that still doesn’t feel like it adds up to the 17th best team in the country but its a little more understandable.
Yep the delta or chasm between the guys at each position speaks loudly in 2 cases.
PG - Reece to Kihei is a chasm of 41.3 to 15.6 - 25.7 point differential
C - Shedrick to Papi - 29.4 to 10.6 – 18.8 point differential
Then after that it gets smaller …
Reece - 41.3
Sheds - 29.4
Armaan - 21.0
BVP - 20.7
McKneely - 16.0
Clark - 15.6
Bond - 15.5
Traudt - 14.3
Gardner - 12.5
Caffaro - 10.6
Dunn - 6.4
Murray - 4.9
The best example by far is Garrison Brooks. A couple years ago I think he was voted preseason POY, and then failed to make any of the teams including honorable mention at the end of the season.
I was curious about Miyakawa’s analytical method and read more about it and then compared some past UVA teams and players. It’s a little depressing that at the end of the 2019 season Hunter, Jerome, and Guy were ranked 2, 5, and 9 respectively, indicating that it’s a fairly good measure of past player performance. It’s intended to be a player performance predictive tool, though, and it’s predictive ability seems less accurate from preseason to the end of season. For example, the preseason rankings for the UVA players in 2017/2018 were way off from where they ended up by the end of the season.
Moreover, first year player predictive performance is entirely based on recruiting rankings.
Miyakawa’s player performance predictive formula, like all other data analysis formulas I’ve seen so far, struggles with individual player defensive ratings, relaying heavily on blocks, steals, and defensive rebounds and overall team defensive efficiency. He does apparently try to add another factor into the defensive rating by comparing the team’s defensive efficiency w/ and w/o a particular player on the floor, which I believe may have boosted both Reece, Kadin’s, and Armaan’s rankings some and possibly lowered Caffaro, Gardner and Kihei’s.
I think the pessimistic view here is that it’s been a long time since we’ve had to come from this low of a starting point, both based on Miyakawa’s player metric, and the KenPom ratings, and there’s no Hauser, Murphy or rapidly improving Huff to point to as incoming impact players. The first years this year are really good players, but they aren’t quite as highly rated as Guy and Jerome, and even Guy, Jerome and Hunter were not hugely impactful players until their 2nd years.
To make a big leap in performance this season, I think you have to hope that the defense will be much improved based on a year of playing Tony’s system and a deeper bench. I think you also have to hope that Reece and Kadin make a signficant leap in performance and Armaan at least gets his 3 point shooting up to the mid-30’s. Finally, I think we’ll need to see a Guy/Jerome-like first year contribution from two of the freshman or maybe BVP. I’m optimistic that the team will back up it’s preseason ranking, but I’m going to wait and see if several of the above happens before thinking this team is better than 18th in the country.
I dont see the value in stats until a couple games have been played. No idea how the pieces fit together, etc.
Even then I think stats fall short of a good ole’ eye test. SO many different data points and data sets, and then each of those has a billion different narratives you can pull from.
We really don’t have much of a sense of what Tony wants to do with rotations yet.** In Italy, he always rotated three guys off, so it was hard to square who were really the starters, never mind what combinations he liked.
Sometimes in the B/W game he has more of a starting 5, but he seemed to mix things up this year.
Maybe we’ll get a better sense after MD and/or Uconn, if we get decent box score data (big if).
** Basically we only have our intuitions, but I’m not sure how valuable those are.
Also have no idea about ceiling but both Traudt and McKneely as individuals, from what I saw, have more muscle on them than the entire 2016 class put together.
I dont know how to describe it. I am fully aware that preseason games and the scrimmage have “fluke” perforamnces. Wilkins was our leading scorer in either the 2017 or 2018 one and then never looked to even shoot a three. But watching Traudt in person at the Blue White scrimmage, I think he’s the real deal. And I think he’s going to be good right away. And it lines up with the smoke and rumors coming out of practices and out of the Italy trip.
I think Traudt is better as a first year than Guy Jerome Hunter and Huff were as first years. Again no idea about ceiling or long term development but just day 1.
