[Bumped. Fantastic stuff. Beat Michigan. -KJ]

Michigan State vs. Michigan
Best-of-3 series
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (if necessary) at Munn Ice Arena

No upsets in the CCHA first round (in fact, the home team swept all four series), so Michigan comes to town. This preview is going to be a bit light on personal observations; I've seen very few games this year (one of the hazards of living over 1000 miles away) and thus have to rely on the boxscores and team stats. Pairwise update will follow the series preview.

Tale of the Tape

Season series: MSU won 3-1 (3-2 at Yost, 2-0 at Munn, 3-2 at Munn, 4-5 at Joe Louis)

Despite a better record, we're both scoring fewer goals and allowing more overall. In conference play, our goals against was slightly better but net goal difference was still worse. If we define difference between the record you would expect based on goal difference and the actual record as "luck", then Michigan has been spectacularly unlucky this year: one game over .500 in conference despite a +14 GD in 28 games is pretty hard to do. My minimal observations, combined with reading some previews and recaps from Brian and looking at the boxscores, have led me to a possible alternate explanation for this phenomenon. (Be sure to check there, as his preview will almost assuredly be more thorough than mine. That's the advantage of actually being able to see games.)

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Does anyone know where I can find the intro video from the Breslin?  The one that features the Sports Illustrated School of the Decade stuff? I've been looking for it for a while.  Hopefully someone on here knows where I can find it, Iit never ceases to pump me up.  Thanks a lot.

Go Green for Life.

My post is apparently too short, so I am going to ramble on here for a few words, da da dah, GO GREEN!

I was just listening to Ermanni Midday on 1130 am, and he just broke the story that Allen has been suspended for Friday's game. He did not say why, or what happened, but just that he was suspended. I have looked everywhere on the internet, and have not found anything. Once I do, I will put up a fanpost.

Obviously, this puts a huge damper on the chances of going far in the tournament, depending on what happened, and how long the suspension is.

[Bumped.  So we tend to play down against bad competition (although it hasn't cost us a game yet) but we don't play up against good competition.  Not helping.  I'm thinking we should ban any further statistical analysis of this team until we get through Sunday' game. -KJ]

The following quote has appeared on this site before, but in the wake of last night's nail-biter over Penn State, it definitely bears revisiting.

While a team plays to win the game, its chances of winning are much greater when it leads by 20 with five minutes to go than if the game is tied at that point. There is a significant incentive to building a comfortable lead rather than just trying to stay a point ahead of the opposition all game long. You never know when your opponent is going to go all Chandler Parsons on you. For this reason teams capable of building big leads typically build them, and past results indicate that those teams are headed for good things in the future.

Thinking about this also led me to consider John Gasaway's recent observation that although Wisconsin currently sits atop his efficiency margin rankings of the conference, with the best numbers on both offense and defense (and holds a similarly lofty position with other margin-of-victory-based rankings systems - Pomeroy #4, Sagarin PREDICTOR #4), the Badgers have attained this position with the aid of two major blow-outs of conference doormat Indiana. Controlling for games against Indiana still leaves the Badgers looking good, just no better than Purdue or Ohio State.

When you look at the Big Ten this year you see three pretty clear strata: the top four (sorry, Illinois), the middle four and the bottom three (Penn State and Indiana have recently been trying to separate themselves, albeit in different directions). If teams "headed for good things" build big leads, then we would expect to see impressive wins over the worst teams by the best. How do the teams look if you separate their games against the weak sisters of the conference from the rest? Like this: (Numbers are from Ken Pomeroy's site.)

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[Auto-bump.  --LVS.]

MSU hockey sent the seniors out in style with a 5-2 home win on Friday, but fell in a shootout (counts as a tie for Pairwise purposes) on Saturday. Unfortunately, 1-0-1 against an awful team didn't help our RPI, and a few teams took advantage. Cornell and Alaska both passed us in RPI to take the comparisons, but Colorado College being swept gave us the advantage over them. No movement at the TUC cliff. Net result: down one point to 12, dropped to 12th in the standings (and a precarious 12th at that: Vermont trails in RPI by just .0017; should it come to an RPI tiebreaker with UMD and Ferris at 11 points, we would come out worst and potentially right on the cut line.

Thanks to Western somehow forcing a shootout both nights against Ferris, we earned the #2 seed in the CCHA tournament. That means we sit out the first weekend. Not having to play one of the dregs of the league averts any risk of an RPI-anchor loss; a 2-1 series win would probably be a net loss in the Pairwise.

After the jump: the CCHA tournament, other teams of interest, and our rooting interests.

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So  I was hoping to find a database somewhere that could show me any MSU basketball roster I wanted, preferably in the Izzo-era.  Does anyone know where I could find them? I want to find atleast the rosters of all the Izzo teams (1995-present).  Anyone have this info and/or know where I can find it online?  If you cannot find the rosters specifically, is there a list somewhere of all Izzo-recruits?

Thanks for any help.

I may be a little early with this, but the Ohio State game (which I drove 260 miles each way to attend) put many of us in a similar state of mind. MSU has now matched last season's loss total, with three regular season games remaining. And I think it's safe to say that they're unlikely to run the table from now through the NCAA tournament, meaning that this season represents a drop-off from last, in one of the most important statistics, anyway.

Although many of us probably felt that the pre-season expectations for this team were a bit inflated, they were based on the general idea that a very good but not dominant team (+0.13 efficiency margin) returning 69% of its possession minutes* would expect to improve enough on offense to offset an almost certain fall-off in defense (from the losses of Suton and Walton).

*Returning Possession Minutes is a John Gasaway statistic that tries to qualify returning minutes by adjusting for the role that departed players had in the offense. So a team like MSU (Walton) or Illinois (Frazier and Meachem) that lost players who consumed relatively few possessions on offense would have a higher RPM than raw returning minutes. It could really just as well be called returning offensive minutes.

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[I know that KJ mentioned this post below, but it's far too thorough and fantastic to not be on the front page.  Also, I added the picture.  --LVS.]

Last week I outlined the Pairwise Rankings and how their existence makes it a little easier to predict what will help or hurt your team's chances of making the NCAA tournament.

Last weekend didn't go particularly well for MSU hockey. We split with Ferris State, remaining tied for second in the CCHA with one weekend to go in the regular season. That split leaves our comparison with them in serious jeopardy; from here on out we have to match them win for win. Minnesota crept into the top 25, bringing our loss to them into play for TUC record. Alaska's sweep of Lake State is a double-whammy: Alaska (and our 0-1-1 record against them) is pretty solidly into the top 25 now and probably can't drop out without a disastrous run, and Lake State (and our 1-0-1 record against them) dropped out. The good news: Michigan has now snuck in at #25, which is huge for our TUC record (3-1), and Nebraska-Omaha split with Miami to hold their spot. We currently sit 10th in the Pairwise, but with Michigan hovering right on the edge we could easily drop if they fall out.

The conference race is down to the final weekend, with a lot still up for grabs. There is still a chance that we fail to earn a bye, as Northern Michigan and even Michigan could catch us if we have a disastrous weekend. (Teams 5-12 play best-of-3 series, and the winners are re-seeded and face teams 1-4 in best-of-3 series, with those winners advancing to the single-elimination final rounds at Joe Louis.) The good news is, we're playing Bowling Green this weekend, which is to the CCHA what Latvia is to the Olympic ice hockey tournament. A sweep there clinches at least third (Ferris would own the tiebreaker over us due to goal difference in our head-to-head games if they also sweep).

After the jump, a detailed breakdown of the Pairwise: which comparisons are still in play for us, which teams near the "TUC cliff" (the RPI #25/26 cut line) we would like to see above the line, and who to root for.

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[Bumped.  Whatever Tom Izzo is doing at halftime, he should go ahead and do it before the game starts.  My theory on the phenomenon is in the first two paragraphs after the jump in Sunday's game recap.

Also, hockey fans should check out SpartanDan's comprehensive rundown of what need to happen for MSU to make the NCAA Tournament. -KJ]

As we are all aware, this year's MSU team has a tendency to fall behind by big margins in the first half of games and then make a valiant comeback effort in the second half. In the past few games against quality opponents those comeback efforts have fallen just short. I thought it would be interesting to look at our efficiency and our opponents' efficiency by half for every Big 10 game. Statsheet.com provides box score data by half but not tempo free stats by half, so I had to calculate possessions myself in a spreadsheet. This was an educational experience, as when I did the calculation using the common formula suggested by Ken Pomeroy, which is FGA-OR+TO+(.475xFTA), I got disparate possessions for each team, often with differences approaching 4 possessions per half. I asked KJ and John Gasaway how to reconcile discrepancies, and both said to average the estimated possession totals for both teams to get total possessions, so that's what I did. Without further ado, here are the MSU and opponent efficiency averages by half:

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[Bumped.  Further inquiry into the "Mystery of the Unusually Low Opponents' Free Throw Rate. -KJ]

I've begun to think that the mystery of MSU's low opponent free-throw rate (28.7, #21 in the country according to Kenpom) reflects more than just a conference-wide lack of aggressive offenses (see discussion here for example). Not only does the Big 10 lack teams with a dominant inside game, but it looks as if the refs "let 'em play" more in the Big 10 than in, say, the whistle-happy Big 12 (all stats are for conference-only games through 2/18 from Statsheet.com):

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