"My rule was I wouldn't recruit a kid if he had grass in front of his house.
That's not my world. My world was a cracked sidewalk." —Al McGuire

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Value Add Database now a click away - big tables now replaced by instant search results for 16,434 player seasons since 2009 and 2013 projections

From now on you can click here for quick look-ups of any player's Value Add for each of his seasons. No more posts of huge tables - 16,434 player seasons from 2009 through 2013 projections can be searched with lightning speed. You can opt for more advanced searches but a slightly slower database by clicking here for the ADVANCED PULLDOWN Value Add database. I split the four images I pulled in this blog and left out some of the columns to fit our Cracked Sidewalks layout.

While a confidentiality agreement prevents me from publishing the statistical NBA Indicators that gave clear indication that Blake Griffin would be a much better pro player than Ty Lawson and Anthony Davis will be a great NBA player while Jon Scheyer may never come back from the Israeli league to play in the NBA, the fact is that Scheyer was every bit as valuable in leading Duke to the national title from the point as Davis was in leading Kentucky to the title from center. A player's Value Add is a good start to identifying players like DeJuan Blair and Norris Cole as surprise stars, but it is less than 30% of the equation for future NBA play. From the quick look-up database you can enter a word like "Butler" to get the following pull:
On these simple searches, you get Jimmy Butler and every other player with the last name Butler, as well as every player who played for Butler. One interesting thing I noticed when doing this is that Value Add contradicted conventional wisdom surrounding three great Marquette duos by calculating that even as a junior Butler was more valuable than Hayward, Matthews was more valuable than McNeal and when they were both juniors Crowder was more valuable than DJO. While certainly many fans would debate any of those three, it does appear that stars that are the focus often try to do a bit TOO much and end up with late missed shots and turnovers that pushes them slightly below the player who plays within himself. It appears in all three cases Value Add was a better predictor of future NBA play (despite not even factoring NBA Indicators yet), as Butler was just ranked as the 23rd best NBA rookie by ESPN, Matthews became the highest paid 2nd year NBA player in history, and Crowder did not even have to go Portsmouth due to his rising stock that is not reflected in the mock drafts just because they are running behind what the teams believe in this case. If you want to look at the team rankings coming into next year, you can just type "team" in the search all columns field, and you get this:
While Notre Dame is loaded, they do drop from 3rd to 13th for next year if Tim Abromaitis is NOT granted a 6th year - which I have heard but cannot verify. Cody Zeller and Indiana are clearly the best player and team heading into the season, though Jared Sullinger was clearly the top Value Add headed into this season. Of course a lot can change, but I believe fans are assuming Kentucky's No. 1 class can shoot them to No. 1 again just like Anthony Davis did for them last year. However, when we type "Available" into the search box it just doesn't look like there is enough Value Add left among unsigned high school players to push Kentucky past Indiana:
I've already given Kentucky credit for getting exactly half of the Value of the top four players they are recruiting, but even if they sign all four of the top players they are chasing I still have them as the third best team behind Indiana and Baylor. It is almost unheard of for a freshman to be as valuable as Davis - even Wall and Cousins simply were not close to his level of play their freshman year - so as great as their freshman class is and could be getting these last four, I still don't believe they will be the best team in the land. Certainly they will be the favorites when Indiana has to play AT Kentucky this year due to the home court advantage, but in the tournament Indiana would be the early favorite. Finally if you want to do more advanced searches you can click here for the ADVANCED PULLDOWN to search multiple items at once. For example, you could pull one name at a time through the PLAYER pull down and choose all potential transfers to Marquette to compare them all on one screen. Or you could pull down all "PG" NBA prospects (which is the position I listed for DJO by the way), and then under class pull down "FR" to see how all potential NBA Point Guards played during their freshman seasons. We have beta tested the database links, and they actually both have performed well on Mac systems, Safari on iPhones and Google Chrome on PCs - so you may want to always use the ADVANCED PULLDOWN version. However, for some reason that runs slower on Explorer, so you may find you want to use the faster system instead. I hope that this database enables others to calculate or make comparisons of items they would like studied, always siting Cracked Sidewalks of course. I do anticipate the 2006 through 2008 seasons being added during the coming week, as this web data base is able to quickly search and display many times the 25,000 or so seasons that will be entered at that point.

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