Ken Pomeroy on the Her Hoop Stats Unplugged podcast
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This week on the Her Hoop Stats Unplugged podcast, Megan Gauer and Aaron Barzilai talked with Ken Pomeroy of kenpom.com about the change from RPI to NET in NCAA women’s basketball, what changed for men’s college basketball with the NET, and more.
We’ve decided to share some of the highlights from the interview here, but you can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Episode Highlights
Gauer’s breakdown of the NET:
It’s a new metric similar to RPI in that it’s a math-based metric for evaluating teams, but at least in my opinion, and I would guess in everyone on this call’s opinion, much better than RPI. It uses the efficiency-type numbers that we look at on our site more and machine learning and [is] just a little bit more the wins and opponents’ wins type of framework that the RPI was. There’s two components to it. The first is the adjusted net efficiency, so that’s a team’s offensive efficiency minus the defensive efficiency. Those are on a points per possession basis, and then that’s adjusted for strength of schedule and location of the games as well, so home, away and neutral site. And then there’s a team value index as well that accounts for their wins and also the location of those wins as well.
Pomeroy’s breakdown of what changed for men’s college basketball after the introduction of the NET:
On the men’s side, there is one notable difference that they had, where they had a scoring margin component and they limited scoring margin to ten points. People found out pretty quickly that the efficiency margin, which is obviously pretty closely related to scoring margin, was not capped, so it has encouraged a way of thinking that every point matters. Even though the NET itself, the NET ranking itself, does not get you into the tournament and really isn’t considered — it’s just a baseline for determining the quality of your resume and whether you have top-50 wins or top-25 wins or whatever. Even though that is the word out of the NCAA headquarters, coaches still respond to the incentives that they see in the NET and there is this kind of feeling that, “I need to maybe leave my starters in the game or leave my good players later into the contest, even when it’s a blowout, just so I can pad the efficiency number a little.”
Pomeroy’s take on strength of schedule:
There’s a lot of inequity in terms of scheduling. I don’t even know if inequity’s the right word, but certainly if you listen to anybody on any staff who’s in charge of scheduling, they’ll complain about the process. There’s always this complaint about, “Hey, mid-majors need to be able to play good teams at home and they don’t have that opportunity.” To me, if we got to a system that kind of ignored that — obviously, you want to be concerned about strength of schedule, but we can obviously account for the schedule when we look at wins and losses and not have to worry about if you have X amount of top-25 wins or whatever. To me, that would be the direction to go and not have these kind of judgements about playing games early versus playing games late, as I see is one of the criteria. That just seems like an odd one because if you’re in a lesser conference, obviously your late schedule is going to be much easier than your early schedule, and then vice versa sometimes for teams in power conferences. They’re playing an easy schedule early on and a harder schedule later. There’s just so many confounding variables in all of this.
Once again, you can listen or subscribe to the Her Hoop Stats podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure you stay tuned for the newest podcast every Monday — this week, John Liddle caught up with Dallas Wings first-round draft picks, Satou Sabally and Ty Harris.
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Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also buy Her Hoop Stats gear, such as laptop stickers, mugs, and shirts!