Basketball: Finding efficiency in the past

While football is in full swing, the basketball tournaments are underway—I count 56 men's games and 49 women's exhibition games so far. So before the season starts, let's take a look at the most efficient players from last year.

You might remember some men's and women's individual player rankings from 2008–2009; one of the #1 players from those rankings, Kayla Dykstra, won her league's MVP and the other, Boris Bakovic, perhaps should have.

Now, not to take anything away from "average adjusted game score," but after crunching through some more advanced basketball metrics, our vast performance analysis department here at CIS Blog Labs came up with Player Efficiency Rating for the CIS. PER "sums up all a player's positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player's performance." And the PER results are...a little different than we saw previously.

(At this point, you can skip to the full PER stats, available here for all qualifying players. I tried to catch all the spelling errors and mistakes, but that's what we call an upstream problem.)

MEN

Among players with at least 400 minutes played (i.e., at least 20 minutes per 20 games), Bakovic led the CIS as expected, with a PER of 34.4. But not far behind, at 33.2, was Aaron Doornekamp, who was only third, in the OUA even, in game score. (This is why PER might be a better metric of performance.) TWU's Jacob Doerkson, UPEI's Andrew Black, and another Raven in Kevin McCleery fill out the top five nationwide.

Speaking of Carleton, they had Doornekamp (2nd), McCleery (5th), Stu Turnbull (12th), and Mike Kenny (22nd) all in the top 25. If you can name the only other team to have two players in the top 25, without looking it up, you'll win a year's free subscription to the blog.

Notable players who didn't make the 400-minute cutoff include Axeman-turned-Redman Leo Saintil (PER of 40.8 in 133 minutes), Gamaliel Rose of PEI (30.4 in 342, 7th in game score), and uOttawa's Josh Wright (29.1 in 308).

WOMEN

With a PER of 37.7, Dykstra falls behind Cape Breton's Kelsey Hodgson, who had an incredible season, as evidenced by her PER of 46.0. Dykstra, however, is right there at #2, and with more than four extra games on Hodgson (713 minutes to 540), it's hard to argue against her MVP award.

Also in the top five: Dal's Laurie Girdwood at 37.6, Chelsea Cassano of Regina with 32.1, and Alisa Wulff, the Ontario leader and likely-to-be former Lancer, with 31.7. Both Girdwood and Cassano just barely qualify, with 400 and 416 minutes respectively; next on the list are UNB's Amanda Sharpe and Jenna Kaye, also of Dalhousie.

Standout performances in limited time: Brittany Read, Regina (35.8 in 296 minutes); Laura Mullins, Windsor (33.6 in 260); and Kate Hole, SFU (28.5 in 261).

And while we're on the Clan, let's mention how they dominated the rankings in the same way the Carleton men did: in the top 30, they had Laurelle Weigl (8th), Robyn Buna (19th), Matteke Hutzler (20th), Courtney Gerwing (23rd), Katie Miyazaki (29th). All, except Gerwing, return this year.

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Questions and comments are welcome below. Depending on how much the CIS website, or its conferences' websites, agree with me this year, we may or may not have PER throughout the 2009–2010 season. The end-of-year rankings will be done in late February/early March as usual; it's just a question of producing it before then.