A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, an oft-misunderstood genius named PackMentality mentioned how he likes to determine the quality of other teams by seeing how they impact their opponents' statistics (points for, points against). I have always admired that about him, as well as his ability to goad woth into a frothy rage. I was looking through the KenPom rankings, I mean, working today and tried my hand at quantifying such an effect.
I decided to simply subtract a team's OppD (points allowed/100 possessions by opponents) from a team's AdjO (points scored/100 possessions) to get that team's offensive impact or "ImpO." This value should quantify how much better or worse a team did offensively versus what their opponents normally allow.
For the other side of the ball I subtracted a team's AdjD (points allowed/100 possessions) from their OppO (points scored/100 possessions by opponents) to get that team's defensive impact or "ImpD." This value should quantify how much better or worse a team did defensively versus what their opponents normally allow.
Finally, to get the full picture, I added ImpO and ImpD to get TOTAL IMPACT! Results for ACC teams shown below:
You can see based on Total Impact! that UVA and Duke are the clear top dogs, while UNC is performing more like the 3rd best team in the ACC rather than the 5th and the Wolfpack has a Total Impact! score more closely aligned with ND than with the mediocre teams with whom they have been associating. And you can see that BC is . . . well they are terrible by any measure. Pretty awesome stat right? Yeah, I thought so too. But after I got done banging these 2 hot chicks that were taken with my mathematical prowess, I thought, "I HAVE NOT TAKEN TOTAL IMPACT! FAR ENOUGH!"
I multiplied the Total Impact! value by the team's Pythagorean strength of schedule rating (which is a measure of strength of schedule, I'm surprised I have to explain this to you) to get the adjusted Total Impact!. The thinking behind this is that if two teams are having the same Total Impact! the one with the harder schedule is actually performing better. So the AdjTotImp has been added to the table below:
This is where I turn to you, faithful BtP commentariat. I know that you all are extremely smart, beautiful, nice smelling people. I think a straight multiplication might be weighting SOS too much. I then experimented with e. Converting the pythagorean SOS to e^(pythagorean SOS) somewhat deemphasizes the SOS impact. Updated table below:
You can see all this manipulation to the Total Impact! value doesn't change the rank orders all that much, so I'm probably just splitting hairs.
All this analysis has me seeing rosy things in NC State's future, since the final results (W-L) should eventually reflect the quality of the team, and the random bounces that go against us will start going our way, right?