You might have heard of the art of predicting basketball games and maybe wondered how that’s even possible. How can you tell what the outcome of a game will be before it’s even happened?
Well, the key to this is not measuring the points, but rather the points per possession.
Possession is when a team starts with the ball in their control, at which point they have the first chance at making a shot.
The possession of a basketball game will change when a team makes a shot and it then turns over to the other team, giving them the ‘possession’.
So how can you determine how a game will turn out based on possessions? How does ranking college team factor into these predictions?
How can you make a prediction based on this information? Read on to find out everything about basketball predictions…
What Is A Possession And How Can You Predict A Game By It?
Most basketball games will be based on points, although most analytics will look at possessions when it comes to predicting points.
First, you’ll need to look at the different paces of each team.
If you have one team that likes to run up and down the court and then another team that likes to keep it confined to one half of the court, then this will factor in which team you can predict will get the most possessions.
\What you’ll need to do is calculate the number of possessions that a team gets during an average match and then make an average of that between the two teams.
You’ll have to take this average across a number of games in order to get a more accurate prediction. The higher the number of possessions that a team gets, the higher the chances of them scoring.
But there is more to ranking your basketball games than this. Determining the rankings of each college will also help you to predict various games.
Ranking College Basketball Games
To work out which teams are more offensive and more defensive, you can calculate the number of possessions that they get. The team with more possessions could be seen as having an offensive stance.
By working out the offense and the defense of each team, then you can work out how many possessions they might get in each game in the future.
By matching up the offensive and defensive positions of each team, you can then figure out how many possessions they’ll get and therefore how many points they are likely to score.
This is a simple method of deduction based on past events.
However, in this, you’ll also have to have a general idea of how each team is going to play. This will also factor into your overall rankings.
How To Make A College Basketball Prediction
So if you take team A, who has an offensive rating of around 115 per 100 games, then this means that you can expect them to get 115 points per 100 possessions.
However, team B might have a defensive rating of 90 out of 100 possessions. This means you can expect them to get at least 90 points out of 100 possessions.
But you’ll have to factor in how much teams A and B deviate from the average score.
So let us consider that the average score is a rating of 100 out of 100 possessions. This means that team A is 15 points above the average.
However, you must factor in that team B’s defense is 10 points better than the average of 100.
So, all you need to do is minus the defense’s rating from the offensive’s rating. This leaves team A with an average offensive rating of 5, as this is the result of 15 minus 10.
You then add this to the average of 100, leaving you with a score of 105 in that match.
If you are reducing this to 70 possessions during a game, then you can predict that team A will score 73.5 points per possession.
However, to calculate team B’s offensive score and team A’s defensive score, you have to take the offensive rating of team B and figure it out in the same way as you did above.
So if team B has a 111 offense rating and team A have a defense rating of 93, then you can work out that per 100 possession, team B is more likely to score on average 4 points more than team A.
This means in a game of 70 possessions, you can expect team B to score around 72.8 points. This means that team B is predicted to win with an average of 0.7 points.
However, this is not a concrete prediction. You would have to adjust this for the speed at which your game is played.
What Makes A Good Offensive Strategy?
Many basketball commentators have determined that there is 4 factors that make a great basketball team offense:
- Shooting – this is the way that the offensive team scores the most points. For a decent offensive formula, you need to ascribe more credit to a 3-point shot. Field goal percentages are around 50% extra.
- Offensive rebounding – this is the number of rebounds, that is second-chance shots, that the offense takes. This is generally not an accurate measure, as it depends on accuracy quite a bit, which is variable. The average rebound rate is around 28%.
- Turnover – this is when the offense turns over to the defense. A team cannot score if they haven’t achieved a turnover. The rate of turnovers per possession is only around 19%.
- Getting to the foul line – about 70% of shots are scored from the foul line, making it a very reliable method of scoring points. Getting to the foul line is usually measured by free throw attempts divided by field throw attempts.
All of these factors determine offensive efficiency to within quite a precise margin. If you take all of these factors, then explain around 98% of offensive efficiency.
The most important factor is shooting, as this is how you gain points. Then comes the offensive rebounding and turnover, finally followed by the least important aspect, which is getting to the foul line.
Imbalances In Matchups
What happens if one team is very strong in one of the four factors listed above and the opposing team is weaker in that same factor? Can this determine the outcome of a basketball game?
Calculating these factors, there are four types of games that you can use for predictions:
- Elite offense against an elite defense
- Elite offense against an awful defense
- Awful offense against an elite defense
- Awful offense against an awful defense
Using these metrics to predict a game came out with pretty accurate score ratings. These matchups will not completely determine games, but they will help you make much more efficient predictions.
Conclusion
We hope that our guide to predicting college basketball games has helped you understand this complicated science.
There are plenty more factors that determine basketball predictions and it is worth taking a deep dive to understand how all these elements work together to make the final result.
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