Your PORPAG-Based All-Big Ten Basketball Teams

Original post on Points Over Replacement Per Adjusted Game (PORPAG) is here.  Mid-conference-season numbers are here.  Big picture concept/caveats:

• As a refresher, this stat is an attempt to measure the marginal points per game a player contributes to his team on offense above what a "replacement-level" player would provide.
• Major caveats: (1) Basketball is a team, not an individual, sport and (2) this stat tells you nothing whatsoever about defense.

Technical stuff:

• Pace factor is set at 62 possession/game--roughly the average for Big Ten play.
• I've continued to leave the "replacement-level" offensive rating at 88.0.
• This stat is meant to measure cumulative, rather than average, offensive impact.  So missing time due to injury hurts you (Evan Turner/Robbie Hummel).
• This is conference-only data.
  
• The table below includes all players who've played at least 40.0% of their teams' minutes in conference play.
• Data pulled from StatSheet.com.  The Minute% numbers are a little glitchy for players that have missed time due to injury/etc.  I've corrected any obvious errors.

Numbers after the jump:

You weren't expecting that name at the top of the list, were you?  John Shurna was pretty remarkable in conference play (shooting line of .537/.397/.795, 10.4 TO%); he also benefits from the fact that Bill Carmody never took him off the court. 

I tend to discount the PORPAG numbers of players with usage rates below 20%.  Players with high offensive ratings and low usage rates tend to be 3-point specialists.  That's a valuable specialty, but also a unidimensional one.

If you remove players below the 20%-usage-rate threshold, you end up with, voila!, exactly the same team of first-team all-conference picks the Big Ten Geeks came up with: Shurna, Hummel, Turner, McCamey, and Buford.  Case closed, eh?  You can click through to the Geeks' site for extended commentary on that quintet.

Using the same methodology, your second team would be Battle, Sims, Taylor, Hughes, and Moore (a little guard-heavy), and your third team would be Damian Johnson, Lucas, Green, Morgan, and Westbrook (a little Spartan-heavy).  You could bump Johnson up to the first team (and demote one of the guards) based on his defensive contributions; he led the league in both steal percentage and block percentage during the conference play.

You can certainly quibble with those results.  Maybe Bohannon, Hoffarber, and Thompson deserve more credit for their highly-efficient-but-not-that-assertive offensive performances.  You could also make a pretty good argument for David Lighty, based on his defensive prowess and the way he stepped up when Turner was out.  But those three sets of all-stars look pretty solid to this blogger's eyes.

Your two major disappointments in conference play would be Manny Harris (46.0 eFG%--basically flat from 2009) and JaJuan Johnson (47.8 eFG%, 6.6 OReb%--both down from 2009).  Harris was on my first team based on nonconference play, but falls all the way off the top three teams here.

DeShawn Sims (#2 in PORPAG through 9 games), Kalin Lucas, and Draymond Green took a bit of a tumble from their rankings on the midseason list.  The ankle injury obviously hurt Lucas, as did the tougher schedule down the back stretch.  Outside of 3-point shooting, Lucas' conference numbers were actually pretty steady from last year, when the batch of offensive stars was significantly weaker (8 players over the 3.00 PORPAG mark this year vs. just 2 last year).

PORPAG likes Drew Crawford for freshman of the year.  The top five again matches the Geeks' list: Crawford, Hulls, Richardson, Watford, and May--with Darius Morris (who I thought played very good defense on Lucas yesterday, by the way) right there.

The official all-conference selections come out tonight.  More commentary to follow.