Are we really that young? A cathartic analysis
by Bald Eagle on Feb 15, 2009 1:17 PM PST
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PrintSince the beginning of this season, many here on BN have contended that this is a young, inexperienced team, with lots of freshman who are new to the system. This has been done in part, I believe, to temper expectations for this team. While I applaud the rationale for trying to make such a claim, (keep expectations modest so as to not disappoint) I have secretly taken issue with the assessment believing in my gut that any team that starts three seniors all of which play considerable minutes, can not truly be considered “young”. Then, consider that the three reserves used most this year are juniors, one of which (MR) is a redshirt Junior who has been in CBH’s system four years, it becomes nearly impossible to subscribe to the belief that this team will underachieve because of too many Freshman.
So in the spirit of BN, where numbers and analysis are what carry the day, I went back and looked at each of the teams from the 03’/04’ seasons through the present to see if I could come up with some evidence to support my theory that this team is as seasoned as some, if not most of CBH’s previous squads.
Disclaimer: I’m a lawyer and while I fancy myself a decent “numbers guy” I’m no CPA or statistician. I’m going to show you all my calculations and assumptions to make sure there is complete transparency related to my argument, as I know I’m taking a position contrary to the belief of many who post here.
For each year I looked at the players from the roster who played the majority of minutes in that year and what year they were in school. Freshman got a 1; Sophomores a 2; Juniors a 3; Seniors a 4 and any player who redshirted while playing for CBH got another year added for the years they were actually in the system (for example, Josh Shipp got a 5 for this year because he redshirted while playing for CBH). My analysis is admittedly somewhat flawed in that I did not have the actual minutes each player played, but having followed the Bruins pretty closely during these years, I have decent recall of which players played the most minutes in a given year. If I made any glaring mistakes, I’m sure you’ll let me know.
So here goes:
03’-04
Ariza -1
Bozeman – 3
TJ Cummings 4
Fey – 2
Hollins – 2
Josiah Johnson – 3
Dijon Thompson – 3
18/7 = 2.57
04’-05’
Brian Morrison - 4
Farmar – 1
Afflalo – 1
Bozeman – 4
Shipp – 1
Fey – 3
Hollins – 3
Josiah Johnson 4
Dijon Thompson – 4
25/9 = 2.77
05’-06’
Farmar – 2
AA – 2
Bozeman – 4
Shipp – (RS DNP)
Fey – 4
Hollins – 4
LRMBM – 1
Mata – 2
Collison – 1
AA2 – 1
21 / 9= 2.33
06’-07’
Westbrook – 1
AA – 3
Keefe – 1
Shipp – 3 (Includes RS)
Roll -2
LRMBM – 2
Mata – 3
Collison -2
AA2 -2
19 / 9 = 2.11
07’-08 ‘
Westbrook – 2
Keefe -2
Shipp – 4
Roll – RS _DNP
Love – 1
Drago – 2 (I didn’t include him last year as he didn’t play much as a freshman)
LRMBM – 3
Mata – 4
Collison – 3
AA2 – 3
24 / 9 = 2.66
08’-09’
JK – 3
Shipp – 5 (Includes RS)
Roll – 4
Drago – 3
Collison – 4
AA2 – 4
JA – 1
DG – 1
JH – 1
ML – 1
27 / 10 = 2.77
So here is what it looks like:
03-04 – 2.57
04-05 – 2.77
05-06 – 2.33
06-07 – 2.11
07-08 – 2.66
08-09 – 2.77
While not a perfect analysis, I am fairly convinced that compared to the teams in the past, this is not a young, inexperience team. Our final 4 team from 06’-07’ was clearly our youngest and this year’s is in fact one of the most mature.
So, maybe going forward we can ease off the youth/lack of experience argument here to mitigate expectations or try and make people feel better after a difficult loss. I don’t buy it anymore. I really never did, and this analysis has helped confirm this belief.
Others have trotted out more plausible rationales for these losses such as a lack of heart, or a lack of real commitment to defense or no true “go-to-guy” (which I also don’t subscribe to because I believe DC is that guy – at least as much as any of our previous leaders (Farmar, AA, Westbrook or Love)). Some have chosen to hang it on the refs (not one I’m fond of either). However, I for one, refuse to buy into the assertion that youth and inexperience is an excuse for underperforming this year. I just don’t see the numbers supporting such a contention.
This has been a tough week for the Bruin faithful. I have been in a terrible funk since Thursday night. Which is why I probably went though this exercise on a Valentines Saturday night (my 4 Valentines were asleep at the time). Not sure I feel any better (or worse for that matter), now that I’m done, but what I do know is that I expect more from this team. I expect it because we have one of the best coaches in the country and a team that is one of the most experienced CBH has had while at UCLA.
Don’t misunderstand, please. I’m not one of those people who can only be satisfied hanging banners or winning championships. I expected 4 or 5 losses this year. I knew there would be ups and downs. But I also expected to pull out games like the one this past Thursday. And I expected to win at least half of the games we played against ranked opponents, which I don’t think is possible anymore. What I didn’t expect was the kind of effort I saw yesterday. And I certainly don’t think our poor effort had anything to do with youth or inexperience.
This is a good team. Not great yet but I hope we’ll get there. I do think this team has as much potential to win the Pac-10 and get to another Final Four as any we have seen in recent years. Whether they live up to that potential remains to be seen. But youth and inexperience is not an excuse I’m willing to accept if we don’t. I hope we do live up to my lofty expectations. I know all our Ben Ball warriors want to win a National Championship as do most people here on BN. And so do I. But if we don’t, I for one will have enjoyed the ride.
Let's try and continue to enjoy the ride. It’s far from over.
No excuses. High expectations. No regrets.
<!--EndFragment-->This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of BruinsNation's (BN) editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of BN's editors.
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i cant speak for others
but when i say “young” i mean in terms of actual game time, not age. Granted, ND is a junior this year. But this is the first time he’s actually gotten meaningful playing time. Likewise, JK is a junior as well but has not played many meaningful minutes before this year. And while JS and MR have been in the program for 5 and 4 years respectively, JS has been a meaningful contributor 2 of those years, and MR really hasn’t been a huge part of the team until this year. So while these numbers certainly show that we’re not young in a literal way, this doesn’t address our youth in terms of experience.
Remember in the first final four season, it was JF and AA’s second year of heavy playing time. They were more experienced than JK or ND are this year in terms of playing time. We started 4 guys (Hollins and Bozeman being the others) that had at least 1 season of starting experience. By the end of the season 4 of the guys had 2 full starting seasons. This year only DC and JS have even started before. DC is a 3 year starter, and JS is in his second year starting. Other than that, we are young and raw in terms of game experience.
I get what you’re trying to say, but I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. Age isn’t the best way to determine a team’s “youth” – especially a college team. In terms of meaningful playing time, this is the youngest and least experienced we’ve been in the last 4 years
It's all in how you define "experience"
Bucknell, I was writing the exact same type of post when yours popped up, so I pulled mine.
The real issue is not the academic year of the player — the issue is how much meaningful playing time that player had before this season.
There has already been a superb statistical analysis on this site that make clear that we are very inexperienced — in terms of playing time. Anyone who wants a real grasp of the issue should search for and read it.
Our starting 5 have 2 seniors, one of whom has had his career severely interrupted by two serious injuries and surgeries. We start a senior who played very few minutes in the seasons leading up to this year both because he was backing up other players and because he fouled out of games early. We start a junior who had very sparse minutes in his career here; in the beginning of the year he was sharing time with JK who lost most of last year to a medical issue and was only put into action, very late in the season out of sheer necessity.
PAA was a back up to KL. ND did not play much. MR and JK had serious medical issues that limited their playing time. Not one of them can be seen as “experienced” coming into this game.
Off the bench we bring in JK, and three freshmen DG, ML and JA.
If you simply look at academic year, then our senior Forward/Center John Diefenbach would count in the “experience” equation — even though he’s played a total of 9 minutes this year.
sjh
Bruinhoo's analysis
Is certainly thorough. But what I find lacking is any comparison to previous years. The actual minutes played is helpful but I truly believe that the experience in CBH’s system has to count for something too, especially when considered along with actual minutes played. Which is why I wouldn’t consider Diefenbach in my analysis having only played less than 10 minutes.
While PAA backed up KL last year, he did play as a freshman as did JK and MR. And during their freshman years JK and ML were not plagued by injury.
I just think until someone, maybe Bruinhoo can extend the analysis to previous years, to see how this team’s prior years minutes played stacks up against this years, I really can’t believe that we are inexperience or young comparatively.
JK and MR
Sure they both have experience as in time accumulated in Howland’s program but the fact does matter that neither of them had to log starter’s experience at UCLA. It takes a while for a team to gel.
It took the great class of JF, AA, JS, and LMR to gel for almost two years before they broke out in 05-06. But the fact is both JF and AA – the anchors of 05-06 run – accumulated solid starters’ experience heading into their second season. Neither JK nor MR has that.
Moreover, what you failed to consider is the actual makeup of the team. In this year’s team it was JH who was looked upon to contribute with his talent and emerge as the x-factor. If JH played at an average level on Thursday night, we would have won the game. He didn’t. And that has to do with experience and the raw fact that this is his FIRST year at UCLA.
No matter what numbers you throw up, it will not make up for the fact that our key freshman who was supposed to make up for the loss defensive stopper such as RW, just doesn’t have the requisite experience as a Ben Ball warrior.
Not everyone can be KL, a once and generational freshman difference maker. If you were expecting that, then you truly had unreasonable expectations heading into this season.
It is a complex issue to deal with
Bald Eagle’s point that time spent in CHB’s system certainly counts for something certainly has merit – the improvement in Dragovic’s game cannot be adequately explained by the 256 (mostly garbage) minutes that he logged in his first 2 years at UCLA, for instance. But one must not downplay actual game experience, and the experience of starting games and/or logging significant playing time; nor can the need for a team to gel be overlooked. Experience does not have a single meaning, nor is it the only relevant factor in the growth of a team.
When I wrote the above-linked post, I did consider creating a year-by-year analysis, but thought it too unwieldy for the objective of the particular post. This discussion has gotten me to consider looking through that data again; I just finished going over the numbers for the 2005-06 team, and may do the same with some of the other Howland teams over the next few games, and write something up, if there is interest.
Short story: The 05-06 team bears many similarities to this year’s team – 5 frosh, relatively young starting 5 + inexperienced bench – but does vary in some significant respects. The starting 5 in 05-06 were younger than this year’s squad (1 fr, 2 so, 1 sr, 1 Rsr v. 1 fr, 1jr, 2 sr, 1 Rsr), but actually had more starting experience than this year’s starters: Afflalo and Farmar had started every game of the prior (frosh) season, Bozeman had started most of his games played @ UCLA (though at PG, rather than SF), and Hollins had started approxmiately half of the games in which he had appeared in the prior 3 seasons. Luc, as a freshman, was the only starting player who had not logged at least a season’s worth of starts entering that season.
’66, I think you left DC out. Our starting 5 includes 3 seniors. DC has plenty of experience, both during the season and in the tourney.
In response to the general thread, stop comparing this team to past teams; instead compare it to its competition. I don’t know how much “experience” (or inexperience in this case) plays a role when comparing the rest of the conference. No team other than ASU really stands out as experienced. The fact that we have 4 conference losses may be a testament to the conference (I think it has more to do with teams stepping their game up and wanting to take down the 3-time champs). No other team in the conference lost more talent and experience than we did this past year; however, I think we are bringing as much experience to the game as any other Pac-10 team (not based on research).
Sure, we have freshmen in our rotation and players whom have been injured and missed significant time, but I agree with Bald Eagle in that we can not use experience as an excuse. Considering the lack of playing time and the injuries to our freshman, I think they are for the most part experienced; from Gatorade Player of the Year to McDonald’s All-Americans to USA Basketball Men’s Youth Team they are here because of their talent and experience.
While there is no experience like game-time, the injured players and others riding the bench can gain a different kind of experience from the bench. I think MR learned a lot last year and I know RW talks about patience paying off by sitting on the bench. With our level of talent and CBH at the helm, experience can NOT be an excuse.
All things considered, I’m looking forward to camping out Wednesday night and seeing how our Warriors respond.
Exactly
You guys covered it already. The analysis above is very incomplete (and frankly a little too simplistic) as it only takes int account how many years players were in Howland’s program. It doesn’t take into account how much experience the players actually had as starters.
Just looking at our roster very quickly it becomes apparently only DC and JS had substantive experience as starters heading into this season. AA2 and JK didn’t have a lot of experience as starters. Not to mention both MR and ND were nonfactors last year. Add into the mix we were working in a true freshman JH and four of his classmates, we did have a inexperienced squad compared to previous three years.
The 05-06 squad was anchored by AA, JF, CB, and RH … four players who had logged substantial starter mins in previous seasons. They had lot more experience compared to the team we had this year. So our preseason assessment wrt to this year’s team was more than realistic and not done in a way to temper expectations.
In addition, the freshmen
We also think of our team as inexperienced because 5 of the 11 scholarship players are freshmen. So, we have 3 juniors who have had limited playing time and 5 freshmen among our 11 players.
Despite that, I tend to agree with BaldEagle that we may not want to take comfort in our inexperience. I had been hoping that our inexperienced players, especially the freshmen, would gain valuable experience during the season and their improvement would lead to team improvement by the end of the season.
Has that been true? To some extent, yes. In many games, Drago and Aboya look like studs. Holiday shows glimpses of greatness and in a few games has been great. The other freshmen (Lee, Anderson and Gordon anyway) have also shown improvement. However, their improvement has not necessarily translated into overall team improvement because their minutes remain limited.
I was in a camp before the season that this team would not improve unless Lee and Gordon could unseat certain starters or at least put us in a situation where for example in a few games where the opponent has an explosive small forward, Lee would be good enough that he might get the majority of minutes and shut down that small forward. Instead, the team has improved mainly because Aboya, Dragovic and Holiday have improved with their increased experience (the last two games notwithstanding), with the bench support also improving. Will it be enough for a Pac-10 title? Maybe.
I think that's about right
As far as I know I am not going to take comfort in inexperience. Yes, I do believe we had to be realistic about our expectations heading into this season based on our inexperience in terms of starter mins and the fact that we were working in so many frosh in our rotation. However, there was no excuse for the way we played on Saturday. I believe my post game thread made that very clear.
I do think our seniors need to step up and show leadership. However, at the same time I do think our core group of seniors – DC, JS, and PAA – might not have the same natural leadership skills as we have been accustomed to via JF, AA, RW and KL in recent years. Does this mean we are conceding this season? Hardly. But it is a little silly to engage in simplistic analysis and insinuate we were talking up inexperience to tamper down expectations. That’s ridiculous.
JA, ML, and DG
I think their progress is obvious and was evident this weekend; there was little drop off, if any, when they were on the floor. There are many of us who would like to see them getting more minutes — especially when some of the starters are struggling — but none of us will second guess the best coach in college basketball.
JH is a bit harder to evaluate. It’s harder to see whether he is progressing or not. When you look at the numbers, he’s having a great year; this might not have been his best weekend, but over the season he’s been great. Many here think he should be taking over games, single handedly and that he is capable of doing so. He seems to want to play within the system, more, and that is admirable. Still, all that said, he is a first year player — and no matter the fact that he was a great high school athlete and played in a lot of high school tournaments against other great high school athletes, he’s still a freshman. Why does that matter? The game is faster. The opposition is bigger and stronger. The defenses, in many cases are much better — especially when opposing teams have played together a while.
Nestor and others have convinced me that the NBA drafts on potential and that JH, therefore, will be a lottery pick. But, that does not mean that he would not be better were he to stay a year, learn from this year’s experience, grow and get stronger, and understand the game a bit better. I just don’t see the fact that he was a Gatorade player of the year as translating into an expectation that he would dominate in his first year here.
sjh
Everyone else already covered it
I am looking forward an exciting rest of the season, Pac-10 tourney, and then March Madness; but I am so looking forward to our freshmen coming back (well, most of them) with all this experience. I think CBH is pleased with their development.
Its about being a game changer
JK & MR could have 1000 years in CBHs system, but that doesn’t matter. Neither one is a game changer. In fact, to this point, there has not been a game changer identified on this team. JH was brought in to be that guy, but has not thus far. Both JS & DC have shown flashes of brilliance, but not one guy has displayed the “I’m going to carry my team on my back through a burning building, jumping from the 20th floor for this victory even if it kills me” type of passion that we were used to seeing from past warriors like JF, AA, and even CB (who is tearing it up in the D-league). You can log all of the years until you are blue in the face and decide that our team has an overall rating of 6.95, but if not one of those players is going to take over a game, its a moot point. I will say that DC seemed to be that guy against U of A towards the end (maybe a little too late, but…), and hopefully, that lit a fire underneath him and made him realize that he is the savior that we’ve been waiting on all season long. For this to be successful though, he will have to use that dynamic speed of his and take it to the rack a bit more often. Stop relying on the jumper and put the pressure on the refs to make the call. Not making excuses for the refs (because they obviously blew that call), but maybe if he did that a little more often and the refs were accustomed to seeing him do that, he might have gotten that call against ASU on Thursday. Just saying…
Maybe it's too obvious to be noticed
We are that young. Our guys are still college kids, albeit with one grad student. College kids are, by definition, kids. They’ve played a lot of basketball in their young lives, but they’re still kids. Those who have the maturity level of a 10 year NBA veteran are few and far between. Just think where we would be if our team were coached by somene who did not have the discipline that has been discussed in depth elsewhere.
I’m done wringing my hands and moaning. We have good players – maybe as good as any players on any team. We have the best coach in the country – I don’t think there can be any question about that. But as I’ve said many times, there are lots of good players on lots of teams, and there are never any easy games any more. My guess is that we will win quite a few more games this year. I am certain that our season will be a success as Coach measured it.
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