Eternal

I was going to write about NCAA tournament selections, not who to pick but who not to pick.  I'm not great at picking a bracket, though I did come within a Michigan State win in the Final Four last year from winning the bracket made up of friends from my freshman dorm, comically called Aycock.  The interesting thing is that I watch more basketball than anyone else in the pool and arguably more than all of the other participants combined.  What I believe ends up happening is that I know too much about the teams and thus over-think each game.  The truth is that no matter what the seeds are and who the teams are, it is too hard to predict who will win even if you have seen both teams play and know a decent amount about the players' abilities.  Given that I could but should not make a case for whom not to pick without some sort of research, and I really don't have time to research before the tournament starts early Thursday afternoon, I decided not to write about whom I believe usually chokes in the tournament, even though it is likely these are the teams that usually choke.  Instead I decided to make a case for who should win National Player of the Year.

I narrowed the field down to the five who were named First Team All-American by the United States Basketball Writers Association (USBWA), Jimmer Fredette, JaJuan Johnson, Nolan Smith, Jared Sullinger, and Kemba Walker.  I wanted to use statistics to judge each player's merit, the way an engineer should.  I charted six offensive stats and two defensive stats (steals and blocks).  I don't consider rebounds a defensive stat as they could be offensive or defensive rebounds).  While keeping your opponent from making a basket is just as helpful for a team as scoring a basket, there is no way exactly to judge how good a player is defensively so the offensive stats will lend the most weight in determining the best player.  Plus, blocks and steals are not the only things that make a good defender, they are just the easiest to count and could as much inflate the defensive perception of a player that takes a lot of risks rather than is a great defender.  Now I could develop a sophisticated scoring system giving certain weights to different statistics to really judge the impact a player has on the game, but the truth is that I don't have Excel on this computer nor do I have the desire to calculate all of that by hand.  Looking at the stats though shows that overall there aren't huge differences in the players' numbers (guards have more assists but bigs have more rebounds, and so on) so an elaborate scoring system probably won't shed too much more light than simply ranking the players in each category, 1-5, and adding up their overall rankings.  The statistics, taken from espn.com, are seen below:

When I tallied up all of the rankings, Jimmer and Nolan were tied for the best player, both with a 2.8 average ranking.  In order to break the tie I decided to rank the players solely on how their shooting percentages, a subset of the overall rankings, stack up in order to account for shot differential.  They are also really the only stats that are independent of pace and team offensive style.  While all five candidates, save Kemba, are above the national average in FG% (43.6%), and all of them are above the national average in FT% (69.2%), Jimmer and Nolan are the only ones of the five that are above the national average in 3PT% (34.8%).  When only shooting percentage rankings are added up, Jimmer comes out ahead of Nolan, with a shooting percentage average ranking of 2 versus 2.3.  The truth is that Jimmer's PPG are much better than Nolan's in a game where scoring more is required to win and there is no definitive statistic on points denied; Jimmer's FG% is slightly worse, but his FT% and 3PT% are much better. 

As much as we Duke fans would have wanted Nolan's stats to be the best, the truth is that Duke has more players around Nolan that take shots and thus points, as well as other stats, away from him.  He's Duke's best player, but he isn't the focus of the team's offense every possession like Jimmer is.  If we were honest with ourselves we really would not have thought Nolan's stats would be better than Jimmer's.  It is likely that Jimmer will win many of the Player of the Year awards.  When the nation's top scorer also plays on a Top 10 team, he is very likely to get many of them.  JJ Redick and Adam Morrison, with his child-molester mustache, are recent examples of this. 

Jimmer is really a shooting guard while Nolan has been more of a point guard this year.  Perhaps it is fair to say that Nolan is the best point guard in the nation, as he beats out Kemba in this study.  So there you have it.  Nolan has and will continue to win his fair share of awards, but the stats would suggest he isn't the best player this season.