Happy thoughts

Want something to feel optimistic about?  Look no farther than the Dawgs 16 assists on 26 made baskets against Georgia Tech.  The figure could have been higher, too, but for some abysmal shooting to start the game.

Even better, all but 3 of them came from guards.

Why does this matter?  Because this is an area in which Georgia was absolutely terrible last year, ranking an astonishing 331st in the nation in assists/game.

After the initial (and unwise) 3-point barrage, Georgia actually got pretty good looks at the basket last night.  Let's hope that's a trend that continues.

Dollars and sense

Interesting blog post from Neil Greenberg trying to quantify what a men's basketball player is actually worth to his school.  He readily admits this probably isn't the true fair value, but the goal is simply to find a calculation and see how close it is to the $20,000 over 4 years that an athlete could be paid under the system suggested by Judge Wilken.

Greenberg methodology is simple.  He peeks into a basketball program's revenues and expenses to figure out net revenue.  He then divides that revenue by the team's 2013-14 wins to arrive at a "cost per win" figure.  Finally, he takes each player's Win Shares - as determined by Basketball-Reference.com - and slices up the pie accordingly.

Doing this, he arrives at some fairly eye-popping numbers for guys like Julius Randle ($1,535,888) and Andrew Wiggins($904,205).

So let's run the math for Georgia and see what we come up with.

The most recent numbers I can find on http://ope.ed.gov/ for the University of Georgia are for the 2012-13 season.  The basketball team racked up $5,953,014 in expenses and took in $8,469,928 in revenue.  In 2014 dollars, that equates to a healthy net revenue of $2,575,105.  Georgia won 22 games last season, so assuming a similar revenue figure in 2014, every win was worth about $117,050.

Using the Win Shares totals, we get the following results:

So, are you surprised?

Remember, Georgia isn't even a basketball school, right?

h/t Neil Greenberg

Stats, stats, stats

So we embark on another long summer with no college basketball, which means very little news, which means plenty of time to kill over at www.statsheet.com/mcb.  Or, you know...go outside and stuff...your choice...

What I wanted to know today was any area where Georgia was really terrible this past season.  I certainly know the team well, and I probably could have guessed, but the stats don't lie.  Georgia's national rank in assists/assists per game/assist to turnover ratio?  311/331/330 respectively.  That is out of 351.  Let that sink in.

Georgia assisted on 341/767 made field goals.  How much does it matter?  A lot, it seems.  There was only one tournament team with fewer assists per game than Georgia:  Nebraska.  After that, you have to move up about 80 slots to find the next one:  Colorado (yeah, those teams have something else in common, but let's move on).

Is this something Georgia should improve on next season?  Absolutely.  Charles Mann is one of the more seasoned point guards returning in the SEC next year.  It is time for him to turn drive-and-score into drive-and-kick.  An abundance of 3-point threats (Gaines, Frazier, and Djurisic at least) should be available to cash in.  We will talk more this summer about what else Charles needs to do to elevate his game, but the irony is that drive-and-kick will also open up more drive-and-score.  It should help cut down on the turnovers, too.  The circle of life.