Praise for the Frontcourt

Continuing my hard-hitting series of posts on the merits of various meaningless preseason lists, the news today is that Rob Dauster at NBC Sports has come out with a list of the Top 15 frontcourts in college basketball this year. Wisconsin is ranked seventh, and Dauster has this to say:

We know about the kind of player that Jared Berggren is offensively, as he averaged 10.5 points and shot 37.2% from three last season. But Berggren was also one of the most underrated defensive centers in the country a year ago. When combined with Mike Bruesewitz and Ryan Evans, the Badgers have a chance to be as good defensively as they have up front in a long time. And that’s before you mention Sam Dekker, a top 20 recruit whose versatility is perfect for Bo Ryan’s swing offense.

(This comes on the heels of another post by Dauster the other day in which he preemptively chastised himself for not putting Wisconsin in his pre-season top 25.)

The funny thing about this high-ranking, of course, is that according to Jeff Goodman, Gary Parrish, and the other geniuses over at cbssports.com, Wisconsin has no good players in its frontcourt—not even one of the best fifty in the country. As an experiment, I decided to see how the other teams on Dauster's list of Top 15 frontcourts fared on the cbssports.com list of the Top 50 big men.

Rank	Team	Top 50 Guys
1	Kentucky	3
2	Indiana	2
3	UNLV	3
4	Louisville	2
5	NC State	2
6	Tennessee	2
7	Wisconsin	ZERO
8	Florida	2
9	Missouri	2
10	Kansas	1
11	Baylor	1
12	Creighton	1
13	Duke	1
14	Syracuse	1
15	Miami	1

As you can see, Wisconsin is the only team among the "good frontcourt" teams that has no heralded players in its frontcourt. Indeed, every team ahead of Wisconsin has at least two Top 50 players, and so do the two teams ranked immediately behind it.

How can this be? It could be that Dauster is just a Wisconsin fanboy. But, as mentioned above, he idiotically failed to rank Wisconsin in his preseason Top 25, so that's probably not it. Still, Dauster could be overrating Wisconsin's frontcourt. But I don't think he is. Three returning starters from a Sweet 16 team plus a five-star recruit would get any team on this list.

I think it comes down to defense. When sportswriters are evaluating players for these kinds of list, they have a really difficult time taking defensive abilities into account. For one thing, there are not very many defensive stats. Basically, there are only steals and blocks. As fate would have it, Bo Ryan's defensive system deemphasizes both steals and blocks. So if the Badgers have a great defender in the frontcourt (and they do, actually) it would be hard to tell by looking at the stats.

On the other hand, as a team, Wisconsin gets a lot of credit for its defense. Indeed, it sometimes gets too much credit because its slow tempo decreases overall score which leads many to believe Wisconsin's defense is better than it really is. For example, two years ago Wisconsin had a mediocre defense in efficiency terms (56th in the country, according to kenpom.com), but it allowed only 58.6 points per game, which ranked eighth in the country.

The point is, when people think about Wisconsin's front court as a unit, they think about how difficult it is going to be score on. But when they think about those individual players, they don't think about defense because we laymen don't really understand defense except in terms of steals and blocks, which Wisconsin tends not to create.

Now, with this analysis in mind, go back and read Dauster's snippet about Wisconsin's frontcourt. It's pretty much all about defense.