The Villanova Wildcats received some backdoor recognition from an unlikely source last week. Ken Pomeroy was writing about the difficulty of developing or identifying a good metric for rating defensive players over at The Basketball Prospectus. In his article, "The Renaldo Balkman Threshold" he suggested that while measures for offense are available (relatively speaking) in abundance -- shooting percentages, 2 point/3 point shooting mix, assists, offensive rebounds, turnovers...a similar metric that measures "defensive prowess" has only rebounds (defensive...), steals and blocked shots to work with. After toying with a dual measure of steal percentage and blocked shots percentage, Pomeroy began to cite specifics...
Remember Anthony Randolph? I bet Villanova guards Scottie Reynolds, Reggie Redding and Corey Fisher do. They have nightmares about him. But I bet they can't pick him out of a lineup, because they never got a good look at him. Their field goal attempts "blocked" their view. Randolph, freshman forward for LSU, along with teammate Chris Johnson sent 7 of LSU's 14 blocked shots back at them. Randolph picked up his fifth foul at the 4:08 mark of the second half. Villanova had 10 possessions after that, and scored 19 points in 9 of the those 10 possessions -- that is a ppp of 2.11. Pomeroy keeps it Randolph-focused however by pointing out that during Randolph's 50 possessions (those Villanova possessions when he was on the court) the 'Cats scored 33 points. For the 28 possessions when he was sitting the 'Cats scored 35 points. The guy is a keeper. Now if he would only smile...
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