The unofficial online home for fans of the Kent State University Golden Flashes. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

(01-04-2019 06:16 PM)anti-zip Wrote:  

(01-04-2019 08:45 AM)burden Wrote:  

(01-04-2019 12:33 AM)anti-zip Wrote:  

(01-03-2019 10:42 PM)cschierh Wrote:  Interesting piece from Elton Alexander.

https://www.cleveland.com/sports/2019/01...ryheadline

It's amusing the article is about 'new metrics' yet one of the 4 he mentions is RPI. I didn't know anyone that followed college basketball still looked at RPI.

Also amusing that he says Kent needs to get more from it's bench. Heck even the Pac12 article knew that Walker is coming off the bench.

Remember your talking about Elton. I will say that bench scoring is an overrated statistic precisely because of players like Walker. We know he is a starter and his minutes reflect it. To say our bench is okay just because the coach won’t start him is fooling yourself. Our 6-8 or 9 players need to score more. Walker is not one of those.

Ok, so because Walker plays starter minutes you don't view him as a bench player, that's fine. But then that means you have to include one of the starters in what you consider the bench. Thanks to his foul addiction Whittington is playing the fewest minutes of the top 6, so by that logic we get to include him in our bench? Instead of getting into who is a starter and who isn't let's look at it this way, our rotation is 9 deep right now. That's a pretty standard rotation. So what are our #6-9 players giving us?

Here's the points per game on our #6-9 players (in MPG) over the last 3 years.
- 2018/19 - 21.9 ppg
- 2017/18 - 15 ppg
- 2016/17 - 15.7

You might say, well Walker missing the start of the season means some of those guys numbers are inflated because there were more minutes to go around while he was out... that's fair. So let's look at our #6-9 players points per 40 minutes.

-2018/19 - 55.5 points per 40 minutes
-2017/18 - 40.6 points per 40 minutes
-2016/17 - 41.8 points per 40 minutes

So our "bench" is giving us more scoring right now than it did the previous two seasons even if you don't think of Walker as a bench player.

Good data. My only point was criticizing Elton for not including Walker as a bench player wasn’t right (I can’t believe I’m defending Elton).