HHS Top 25: Incorporating the New Her Hoop Stats Rating
Christmas came early this year for Her Hoop Stats staff, as we finished our new Her Hoop Stats rating for every NCAA women’s basketball team and released it on December 20. We also published HHS offensive and defensive ratings, simple RPI, and several other statistics. We hope that these statistics will help people working in women’s basketball and fans of the game alike be more informed and better able to assess and compare teams. Starting with this week’s ballot, Her Hoop Stats will also use these statistics to inform our voting in the Sport Tours/Hoopfeed Top 25 poll.
Here is the ballot that we submitted to the STI/Hoopfeed Top 25 Poll for Week 7, which covered games played from Tuesday, December 18 through Monday, December 24. Movement up or down from our Week 6 ballot is denoted in parentheses.
1. UConn
2. Louisville (↑1)
3. Notre Dame (↑1)
4. Oregon (↑1)
5. Stanford (↑2)
6. Mississippi State (↓4)
7. Baylor (↓1)
8. Maryland (↓1)
9. Tennessee
10. Oregon State
11. North Carolina State
12. Minnesota
13. Syracuse
14. Iowa (↑1)
15. DePaul (↓1)
16. Texas (↑1)
17. Marquette (↑1)
18. Kentucky (↑1)
19. Drake (↓3)
20. California (↑1)
21. Michigan State (↑1)
22. Gonzaga (↑1)
23. Texas A&M (↑1)
24. South Dakota (↓4)
25. Iowa State (NR)
Dropped out: Arizona State
Also considered: Florida State, Miami (FL)
The HHS rating and the other newly added statistics have not changed our broad philosophy about how we rank teams. As I explained in Week 1, our guiding question when comparing teams is which team we think would win a best-of-seven series starting today on a neutral floor. We still focus primarily on teams’ schedules: what are a team’s best wins, and to whom have they lost? But the new statistics inform those judgments by helping us gauge how difficult a team’s schedule actually is and giving us a rough ranking of all 351 teams nationwide. For example, here are the new statistics for Notre Dame and Mississippi State:
Notre Dame and Mississippi State both rank in the top 5 of the HHS rating, HHS offensive rating, and HHS defensive rating. Where they differ, though, is in their strength of schedule. This can be assessed in two ways: opponent average win percentage (the third row from the bottom) and opponent average margin per 100 possessions (the fourth row from the top). Notre Dame’s opponents win nearly 70% of their games and score nearly 15 points more than they allow per 100 possessions, while Mississippi State’s opponents win less than 50% of their games and allow one more point than they score per 100 possessions. These numbers suggest that Notre Dame’s opponents have generally been tougher than Mississippi State’s.
This information impacts how we value each team’s accomplishments to date. A team being 10–0 against top competition is very different than being 10–0 against easier opponents. Similarly, if a team’s offense has been highly efficient to date, that is more impressive if it has happened against tougher defensive teams.
The HHS rating and simple RPI are also useful for identifying teams that we may have overlooked. For example, Iowa State ranks in the top 10 of both metrics and beat Drake on December 16, yet we hadn’t considered the Cyclones for last week’s ballot. This week, we looked at Iowa State anew. With wins over Drake and Miami (FL) and close losses to Iowa and South Dakota on the Cyclones’ resume, we decided that they deserved the No. 25 spot over Arizona State. The Sun Devils have played an easier schedule and have not beaten a top-25 team.
No metric is perfect, which is why we are not basing our ballot solely on the Her Hoop Stats rating. We believe that teams ranked No. 26, No. 30, and so on in the HHS rating deserve consideration on our ballot, and that the human element of voting is very important in creating any list of the top teams.
What do you think of the HHS rating and our other new statistics, and what have you learned from them about your favorite teams? Let us know in the comments section below or on Twitter (@herhoopstats), and check out our rankings on the Hoopfeed website throughout the season.
If you like this content, please support our work at Her Hoop Stats by subscribing for just $20 a year. All stats were compiled from Her Hoop Stats on December 26, 2018.
