Is your basketball knowledge greater than ours? Here’s your chance to find out!

New England opened the scoring in the 13th minute when forward Zack Schilawski slotted one past Duke goalkeeper James Belshaw. Just a minute later though, the Blue Devils equalized as Nick Sih headed headed home a Blue Devil corner kick. Though just a scrimmage, the game became chippy at points with a couple of hard challenges that got players yelling. Each team had plenty of chances throughout the remainder of the match, but none found the back of the net.

The game marked the return of Revolution players Darrius Barnes (Duke ‘08) and Mike Videira (Duke ‘06). Barnes did not see any action in the contest while Videira played the final forty five minutes for New England in the center of its midfield. Videira had one of New England’s best chances in the second half as he nearly scored on a header in the 76th minute.

The game marked the third of seven spring matches for the Blue Devils. Duke fell 3-2 to the Carolina Railhawks on February 20 and 2-1 to N.C. State on March 4. The Blue Devils’ spring practices continue for the upcoming weeks with their next match not coming until April4 against CSN Cork. For the full spring schedule, click here.

The President predicted that Kansas, Kansas State, Kentucky and Villanova would all reach the Final Four.

A minor problem for Mr. Obama, however, was his misspelling of “Syracuse” when he chose the Orange to edge out Butler in the Sweet 16. When Katz informed the President that he forgot the “r” in Syracuse, Mr. Obama laughed at his mistake and joked that his daughters would tease him for the error.

Mr. Obama is an staunch supporter of North Carolina and even played in a scrimmage with the Tar Heels during his presidential campaign in 2008.

Even though his personal aide, Reggie Love, attended Duke and played on the basketball team, President Obama refused to put the Blue Devils in the Final Four and instead advanced the Wildcats.

“I finally break away from Reggie Love and pick Nova,” Mr. Obama told Katz.

Last year, President Obama picked eventual champion North Carolina to win the NCAA tournament. Do you think his predictions are right this year?

Carrick Felix

Felix is described as an extremely athletic player (a scouting report from Rivals.com described him as possessing “NBA Athleticism”) who is a tough-nosed defender on the perimeter and a hard, dedicated worker with upside on the offensive end as well. Felix averaged 14.8 points and 4.7 rebounds this season for the Golden Eagles while leading his team in blocks with 37.

“He’s an extreme athlete, a real high flier,” CSI coach Steve Gosar told Scout.com’s Dave Telep. “He’s got great conditioning and runs the court really well.

“He’s a great kid, he plays hard. He’s 6-feet-6, 195 pounds and a great kid. He’s all about winning. He’s got a big upside with three years to play. He’ll be all about the program. He’s got an unbelievable mom who has raised him to be a really good person.”

The signing of a junior college transfer is an unprecedented step for Krzyzewski, who has accepted only three transfer players during his entire tenure at the helm of the Blue Devils, all of whom came from four-year institutions—Roshown McLeod from St. John’s in 1995, Dahntay Jones from Rutgers in 2000 and Seth Curry from Liberty in 2009.

Due to NCAA transfer rules for players leaving junior colleges, Felix will not be required to sit out a season, as Curry has done this season. Felix will have three years of eligibility with the Blue Devils after he arrives on campus.

The signing of Felix was made possible when sophomore Olek Czyz opted to transfer to Nevada, opening up an additional scholarship available for the 2010-2011 season.

Felix’s athletic ability is on display in the following Youtube clips, which show him competing in his team’s preseason dunk contest. What do you think about the Felix signing and Coach K breaking with precedent by signing a JUCO player? Excited by the signing?

It’s fun to see that most of the statistically-based approaches to projecting the NCAA Tournament install Duke as the favorite.  Of course, the NCAA Tournament is a probability-based affair. You’d look at me as if I were crazy if I suggested that the better team wins every game. But you’d also look at me as if I were crazy if I suggested that knowing the better team prior to the start of the game tells you nothing about the likelihood of predicting who is going to win that game.

To statistically project the NCAA Tournament, people who do this sort of thing use a quantitative ranking of NCAA teams, like the Pomeroy or Sagarin ratings. A computer that compares the rankings of two teams can determine the probability that one team will beat another. Then, using some sort of super-powerful wizard computer, the computer plays out the NCAA Tournament 5000 or one million times, compiles the results, and spits out the probability of each team entered into the tournament winning one, two, three, four, five and six games. For reasons that I don’t really understand, this is called the log5 method.

So here’s a compendium of tempo-free links to help you make your bracket picks:

• Someone wrote a program that uses Pomeroy ratings to essentially simulate the NCAA Tournament one time. There’s a little slider so you can set the level of randomness anywhere from Dick Vitale’s Chalk City to Bracket Busting Random. Warning: Clicking this link  will kill your productivity for several hours. [Bill Mill]
• A Duke grad student used Pomeroy ratings and the log5 method to determine the probability of every team in the field reaching each round of the tournament. [Immaculate Inning]
• Ditto from above, except its not a Duke grad student and he’s using the Sagarin ratings instead of Pomeroy. [Wayne Winston]
• Finally, the great Ken Pomeroy himself has a log5, tempo-free preview of the entire South region, and other members of the Basketball Prospectus team have the East, West and Midwest covered. [South] [East] [West] [Midwest]

But now, the antagonistic relationship between the two bluebloods has entered a new arena: Congress.

A lovely Politico blog post today centered on the Republican Part’s primary race in Kentucky, in which two gentlemen, Trey Grayson and Rand Paul, are running. Grayson is a Harvard grad; Paul went to med school at Duke. So both have elite academic roots, right?

Well, not exactly, at least not according to Grayson’s newest campaign ads. In the spots, Grayson paints himself as a true Kentuckyite, and depicts Paul’s Duke connections as a negative. His slogan: Beat Duke. Vote Grayson. Simple, elegant, and a tad ridiculous, as Paul points out in his own respnse.

And who said sports don’t matter?

Thanks to former sports editor and current Politico writer Meredith Shiner for this little nugget.

But fear not, Tar Heels! You can still buy tickets to see the team play once more this season at the NIT Tournament—and it’s just $5! That’s $67 cheaper than Duke’s student tickets, if you care to know.

Below is an email sent to the Tar Heels’ student body. (Some information below has been withheld to protect the sender’s identity.):

From: UNC Ticket Office <studenttickets@uncaa.unc.edu>
Date: Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 5:22 PM
Subject: *** 2010 NIT First Round Basketball Tickets Available Now ***
To: [#######@email.unc.edu]

The UNC Men’s Basketball team has been selected to play in the 2010 NIT. As a UNC Student, you have the opportunity to purchase up to 2 tickets at a discounted price of only $5. The NIT First Round game will take place on March 16, 2010 at 9:30 pm. The game will be played in newly renovated Carmichael Arena. Tickets can be ordered on a first come first serve basis starting tonight, March 15, 2010 at 10:00 pm.

To take advantage of this offer, you must log on to your student UNC Ticket Office account online with your PID, [#########], and your Student PIN: [####]

NIT STUDENT TICKETS-CLICK HERE

Please remember, tickets will be sold on a first come first serve basis starting at 10:00 pm tonight, March 15, 2010, and you must log on to your student ticket account online.

UNC Ticket Office
800-722-4335
Monday-Friday – 8:30am-4:30pm
Join us on facebook at www.facebook.com/uncticketoffice

Take a look at the attendees list for the MIT Sloan Sports Conference when you have a chance.

It’s incredible.

On March 6, the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center housed more influential minds at the tops of their respective sports than probably any previous gathering in human history. There were over 1,000 people at Sloan from sports management, media and fandom, plus an additional 400 on the waiting list. Panel discussions generated lines bigger than the ones at Alpine on a Monday morning: you had a better chance of finding an empty seat at Cameron that same night. Welcome to the big show. Everywhere you walked, there was a recognizable face.  Is that Bill Simmons talking to Brian Kenney about Sugar Ray Leonard? Are Adam Silver, Daryl Morey and Mark Cuban really humoring three Harvard kids waving resumes?  Wait… that can’t be… Steve Kerr? And a ragtag team of representative from MLB, NFL, NHL, FIFA, ESPN, Reebok, Nike, Bloomberg, EA Sport and Black Rock? In short, if you were anyone of consequence in sports, you were at Sloan.

You would figure, then, that Duke athletics would have a few representatives. Sports analytics should in fact be synonymous with Duke itself. This is how Duke has marketed itself for two decades: sports with an analytical, cerebral bend. Shane Battier, as portrayed in Chris Ballard’s “The Art of a Beautiful Game” and this must-read NY Times feature, perhaps best embodies this distinct Duke quality. Battier’s knowledge of analytics—for instance, Kobe Bryant’s effective field goal percentage from different zones on the floor, Manu Ginobli’s statistical tendencies—render him the unique player who combines athletic prowess and the scientific method. Battier’s four years at Duke weren’t marked by his athletic prowess a la Jason Williams, but rather a blend of ability and brains. He consistently made the right defensive rotations and rarely attempted low-percentage shots. Indeed, the Battier-style of play is pretty much the accepted standard for your typical Duke teams. Capable and smart.

Ironically, the Duke basketball brass might not actually be that smart by today’s sports standards. The team currently employs zero official basketball quants (think Dean Oliver of the Denver Nuggets) and does not delve into unorthodox statistical analysis (efficiency ratings, adjusted plus minus ratio, etc.) as a means of strategy evaluation. At least, that’s the team’s public relations stance. When The Chronicle’s Ben Cohen did a column on tracking offensive and defensive efficiency, he got this quote from assistant coach Chris Collins: “The numbers we use a lot are turnovers and offensive rebounds.  The other key is we try to get ourselves to the free-throw line. Those are probably the main ones that we look at—and obviously, well, shooting the ball.”

If we are to take Collin’s words at face value, then the team is doing only the most rudimentary statistical basketball analysis possible. Turnovers, offensive rebounds and fouls essentially mean nothing in a vacuum: they’re variables dependent on a range of factors, from pace to score of the game (What happens to John Scheyer’s assist/turnover ratio when Duke is up 10 with 5:00 left and K elects to run the shot clock down?) to lineups (What is Duke’s offensive rebounding like when the Plumlee brothers are at the 4 and 5? How about Thomas and Zoubek?). All of these factors, according to the basketball’s best and brightest—namely, Oliver, Morey, Cuban, Kevin Pritchard, John Hollinger and Mike Zarren (Celtics’ Basketball Operations Analyst)—can be relatively accounted for and weighted appropriately with enough patience and tinkering. Sure, these new statistical tools might not be perfect, but they’re certainly better at describing what actually happened in a game than the box score as constituted. The traditional box score might as well be thrown out the window. Points, free throw discrepancy, assists (which, by the way, are wholly determined by subjective scorekeepers), blocks and rebounds are worthless without context. Statistical analysis is the only empirical means of providing a way to corroborate what our eyes see with numbers on paper—the basketball guys at Sloan made this idea abundantly clear.

Yet, as I scrolled down the program and looked for Sloan’s Duke representatives, only one name appeared: mine. To be fair, I’m not sure any ACC schools sent their basketball people to Sloan. The analytics movement is mostly a pro-phenomenon, which makes sense. In the NBA, sample sizes can be large (five and six year analyses are possible), and data is less diluted. What I mean by the latter term is that everyone’s strength of schedule in the NBA is more or less the same, whereas in the NCAA comparing ‘09 Memphis with ‘09 UNC is virtually impossible: Memphis played in a watered down, woefully bad C-USA, while UNC competed in a conference chock-full of tournament teams and lottery picks. Perhaps Duke Basketball has no desire to invest in analytics because it has no legitimate application.

I for one am not sold on that train of thought. At the end of the day, the hard numbers, if interpreted and mathematically manipulated correctly, can tell a compelling sports story. A story, I would posit, that is more logical and accurate than any type of qualitative analysis. The statistical movement is now a staple of MLB and dominating the general management of the best NBA organizations. Not coincidentally, the eight NBA teams heavy on quantitative methodology—the Celtics, Lakers, Rockets, Thunder, Nuggets, Mavericks, Magic and Cavs—all are in prime position to contend for championships in the next several years. These teams unite around the idea that the same prized concepts we use in science and math should necessarily be a part of sports. These organizations’ decision-making processes are no doubt more rigorous and objectivity-based than their peers (just take a look at some of the research papers presented at Sloan—might I recommend Brian Skinner’s paper, The Price of Anarchy, which links hoops offensive schemes with Braess’s Paradox?). A strong analytic-minded managerial core is not sufficient to win a championship (cue discussion of talent and execution), but I’d argue it’s becoming progressively necessary.

College sports has yet to embrace Michael Lewis and the “Moneyball” line of thinking. Duke is in prime position to lead the way, boasting some of the best number-crunching undergrad and grad students in the world who will work for virtually nothing in order to get closer to the ground K and his cronies walk on. I doubt that K, Collins or any of the coaching staff knows much about Markovian chains, linear regressions or noise in data sets. However, there’s a plethora of students here who do, and they should be utilized effectively, even if it’s just in an experimental fashion. At the very least, Duke’s varsity teams should take a look at the value of analytics in their respective sports and see what the movement has to offer.

I’ll even save a few seats at Sloan next year.

(But don’t pick Cornell to go to the Sweet Sixteen. That’s my upset special!)

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Go to “Create or Join a Group” page on ESPN’s Tournament Challenge page. Search for “The Chronicle Sports Blog.”

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