Can we think of Virginia basketball as a sleeper team still?
Tuesday, December 29 2009 by Ben
I can't shake the feeling that this year's team might still break out. If Mike Scott can get healthy... If Assane Sene can learn the defense... If Sylven could start making a few threes...If, if, if.
But wait! As you've come to expect of me, I tend bring a few stats to the party. I went to the always awesome kenpom.com and dragged up his "luck" statistic. Now, "luck" basically measures the difference between what we expect from a team, based upon its offensive and defensive efficiency, and the team's actual winning percentage. For this exercise, I'm looking at the teams with the worst luck.
Then, I took the teams with records above 0.500, because there were a bunch of teams that, even if their "luck" turned around, they weren't going to be doing anything.
Voila!
Here's the top 10 teams above 0.500 with the worst "luck." The third column is the winning percentage, the second column is the pythagorean winning percentage (what we'd expect from a team with this offensive and defensive stats), and luck (not a straight difference between the two columns, but you can think of it that way).
| Team | Conf | Win Pct | Pyth Win Pct | Luck |
| Texas A&M Corpus Chris | Slnd | 55.6% | 58.2% | -0.236 |
| Stanford | P10 | 55.6% | 70.5% | -0.167 |
| Virginia | ACC | 60.0% | 83.9% | -0.145 |
| Minnesota | B10 | 64.3% | 96.3% | -0.140 |
| Southern Mississippi | CUSA | 61.5% | 73.6% | -0.124 |
| Auburn | SEC | 60.0% | 58.7% | -0.118 |
| Utah | MWC | 62.5% | 49.2% | -0.113 |
| Marquette | BE | 75.0% | 91.6% | -0.113 |
| UCLA | P10 | 55.6% | 57.8% | -0.103 |
| Bucknell | Pat | 57.1% | 27.5% | -0.102 |
So, keep your chins up laddies! We might be on to something.
That's why this game against UAB is so important. UAB might be the class of CUSA and it may be time to turn that "luck" around. A win against them would be fantastic.