Kenpom says Providence -20. I hope its that close.
The line I saw was -19.5.
I’m expecting a big jump tonight from TJ Power. He has a couple games under his belt, clearly knows how to play and he is a matchup problem for most teams at the 3. Hoping Ethan Roberts has a better shooting night, though the team needs to share the ball more to create better shots.
If we hang in there, it will be because our expected studs play like they are studs.
TJ Power is the real deal. Not many 6-9 guys have that skill set. He has shown steady improvement each game and last night he showed he can create his own shot, bring up the ball, defend 4-5 positions and rebound at a high level. I’m sold. He is going to be a force in the league along with Roberts. PG is another story. Levine’s biggest problem is not the lack of scoring. The biggest issue he has is that he strings bad plays together. Last night there were two different sequences where he turned it over and then followed that up with a bad foul almost immdediately. He did the same thing against American where he went TO, foul, TO in about a 45 second span. Great players string good plays together and if they have a bad play, they follow it up with a good play.
Power had a nice game overall on offense. He and Roberts are versatile scorers and ball handlers.
Zanoni was in a zanone last night. Wow.
But nobody had a good game defensively.
With two guys who can create shots combined with a couple (Zanoni, Thrower) who can shoot the 3, the offense will be fine. The defense, well, that’s another story. giving up 62% on 2pt attempts through 3 games is absolutely horrific. Defense is not something that develops, it’s there or its not. It can improve with different player combinations but you have to be able to stay in front of people and we aren’t doing that.
Also, Providence is ranked #73 by KP and Yale is #65 so there is at least 1 team still on our schedule of that caliber.
1 Like
I don’t think Yale will be sitting above Providence in the rankings by the time we play them.
Based on what? Yale has 5 games against teams in the KP top 200 before we play them and only 1 against a top 100 team. What’s going to cause Yale to move lower. Providence has 12 games in that time period against KP teams rated #6 to #118 and all but 4 of those are currently ranked better than the Friars. I mean, a generous view would be that these two teams would be ranked close together when we play them.
The KP rankings are just guesses this early in the season. It is not so much that I think Yale will sink that much as I think the Friars will climb.
KP rankings are not guesses, certainly when compared to your prediction. But everyone gets to have their opinion…..
They are not guesses, true, it’s an algorithm totally data driven. But it’s true that it needs a bunch of games to be relatively accurate. Right now your ranking depends too much on who you have played, as there are not enough games to establish cross correlations. Once we get to close to December, so that everyone has played ~7-10 games, rankings should be quite representative.
That was my point - that data that is driving these ratings is mostly stale at this point in the season.
Kreeker-I know that. And my point was that data driven ratings, even KP at this stage, are quite a bit more accurate than opinions supported by zero fact. To be fair, Bart Torvik (who takes into account the early season nature of these ratings) has Providence as #63 and Yale as #77, not too dissimilar than KP.
1 Like
Have you watched Yale? They’re very good, and their chemistry seems to be running even better this year than last.