Today I once again look at all meaningful injuries and suspensions for teams in consideration for an at large bid. I am generally going to limit the splits to situations where we have at least three games with and without the player. I also limit my analysis to players who were playing at least 20 minutes per game when in the lineup. Obviously, all of these splits involve small samples. These stats are descriptive, but not necessarily predictive of the future. But part of the discussion below will be to decide whether what we see in the splits was caused by the injury and whether the trend is likely to continue. This analysis is through games on Saturday, March 8^th.

AdjOff = Points Scored Per 100 Possessions, Adjusting for Opponent and Venue

AdjDef = Points Allowed Per 100 Possessions, Adjusting for Opponent and Venue

W = Wins

L = Losses

PWP = Pythagorean Winning Percentage

-I include Arizona’s loss at California in the “no Brandon Ashley” category because Ashley played only 2 minutes in that game.

Arizona’s record is clearly worse without Brandon Ashley in the lineup, but Arizona’s schedule has been much tougher in the last 10 game stretch. Adjusting for opponent and venue, Arizona has still been playing like the 3rd best team in the country even without him, with margin-of-victory numbers worse than only Louisville and Florida. To lose a key starter and continue to play like a national title favorite is an impressive feat. The biggest issue is Arizona’s offense. With Ashley out, the team has been more likely to struggle to score. The poor offensive game at Oregon was particularly distressing given how porous Oregon’s defense has been this season.

-Meanwhile, Georgetown has rebounded from a pitiful stretch of basketball without Jabril Trawick and Joshua Smith. With Trawick back in the lineup, Georgetown has been competitive.

-Finally, Raheem Appleby’s injury splits are a bit complicated. He missed 12 games due to injury. But in the game prior to his injury and the three games since he has returned, Appleby has played minimal minutes. Thus I group these four games separately (noting that Appleby was limited in these games.)

Louisiana Tech suffered its worst loss of the season, to East Carolina, when Appleby was out. But overall Louisiana Tech was still playing very good basketball while Appleby was out. Surprisingly, despite his scoring prowess, the defense took the biggest hit when he was absent. And in more of a puzzle, Louisiana Tech has actually played its best defense in the recent stretch were Appleby has played minimally.

There are several key lessons from this first table:

1)      The quality of the replacement player matters a lot.

And by replacement player, I don’t just mean the player who takes the spot in the starting lineup. Rondae Hollis-Jefferson started a number of games and most closely absorbs Ashley’s direct minutes. But Hollis-Jefferson was already playing quite a bit for Arizona. The real replacement players for Arizona are Gabe York and Elliot Pitts. And while both are not quite as impactful on offense as Ashley, York is a former Top 50 recruit, and Pitts is another 4-star recruit who just missed the Top 100. Both are quality players that are strong-enough to keep Arizona in the elite class of teams.

But contrast that to Georgetown when Smith and Trawick first went down. Georgetown ended up elevating the playing time of walk-on John Caprio. Caprio even played 22 minutes in the OT home loss to Marquette. Let’s just say that Georgetown’s replacement players were not nearly as good as Arizona’s replacement players.

2)      You need a decent sample of games before you can really trust an injury split.

I think Georgetown’s performance in the 5 games without Smith and Trawick shows the danger of any small sample split. Georgetown went 1-4 when Trawick was out of the lineup, the worst basketball of John Thompson’s entire career with the Hoyas. I highly doubt that would have continued permanently. But it was brutally tough to replace two starters at once.

Similarly, we only have four games with a part-time Raheem Appleby. And Louisiana Tech’s defense has been outstanding lately. But that’s such a small sample; they probably did hit a few teams that had bad games.

Conversely, we now have 12 games with no Josh Smith, but a healthy Trawick, and that feels like a decent enough sample to get a real read on the current version of the Hoyas. We’ve seen Georgetown play well (beating Creighton) and play poorly (blowout loss to Villanova) with the current lineup, and that’s what you want to see before you feel like you have a full read on a team’s new level of play.

3)      Expect the committee to ignore all three of these injuries.

The committee says that in order for an injury to really impact its seeding that a player must be a major contributor. But while Jabril Trawick has clearly been essential to Georgetown’s success, he only scores 9 PPG, and there is no way the committee elevates him to a major factor.

Conversely, Raheem Appleby, 14 PPG, is a major contributor for Louisiana Tech. But in order to count his return as significant, the committee needs to believe he will be healthy and scoring at a high rate again. In the three games since his return, Appleby has scored a total of six points. Unless he suddenly has a huge scoring game in the CUSA tournament, I am skeptical that the committee will factor in his return to a large degree.

That said, the above splits also suggest that Appleby’s injury was not catastrophic to Louisiana Tech. We probably shouldn’t look to give them a ton of credit for his absence.

-California remains a bit of a mystery. When Ricky Kreklow was out with an injury (Jabari Bird also missed games in this stretch), California actually played its best basketball of the season. And with Kreklow and Bird returning to the lineup, it sure seemed like California was poised to jump to the top of the Pac-12. Instead, the team has stagnated since their returns.

Mike Montgomery has forgotten more about basketball than I will ever know, so I suspect he sees value in Kreklow that I don’t, but if you want to make an argument against using him I can see it. When Kreklow plays in the post, he’s undersized, and he basically doesn’t have a block all year. And when he plays on the perimeter, California already had two very good big perimeter players in Tyrone Wallace and Jordan Mathews. I honestly think this is a case where those two should be on the floor in critical minutes, and not Kreklow.

-Colorado has played admirably since Spencer Dinwiddie went down, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking this is the same team. Since Dinwiddie has gone down, Colorado is playing like the 62^nd best team in the country. With wins at Stanford and Arizona St. in that stretch, there is no question they have a good enough profile to make the NCAA tournament. But just realize that if you are picking Colorado to advance in your bracket, you are picking against the margin-of-victory stats.

-One quick note on the George Washington splits. I’ve thrown out the game against Dayton because Kethan Savage, Maurice Creek, and Joe McDonald were out in that game. There really isn’t anything we can learn about any team from that game.

Ignoring that game, I’m shocked at how well GW has survived without 13 PPG scorer Kethan Savage. True, their only real big win over a quality team in that stretch was against St. Joseph’s, but they really kept up their high level of play. The game at Fordham on Saturday was closer than expected, but even with that game, they’ve been playing like the 36^th best team in the country without Savage. Ever since Patricio Garino got healthy and boosted the defense, GW has become a legitimate tournament sleeper.

Nebraska’s Deverell Biggs might be the clearest case of addition by subtraction I have seen this year. He went down in mid-January, and Nebraska has actually been playing much better basketball since he went down. While Biggs scored a lot for the Huskers, he was also one of the team’s least efficient players. By allocating his shots to other more efficient players, Nebraska’s offense has improved. The defensive improvement is more of a surprise. Part of that is because David Rivers has been playing more in that span, and the 6’7” Rivers is a solid all-around defender. Also, Benny Parker has seen his playing time increase, and Parker has the best steal rate on the team. But surprisingly, the current Nebraska lineup looks dangerous enough to win a game in the tournament if they get there.

-Oklahoma St. really did miss Marcus Smart when he was suspended. But I don’t understand why people say the committee will treat this 3 game stretch like an injury. If a player fouls out in a game and that changes the outcome, the team doesn’t get a benefit from that. So if Smart did something that got him banned for three games, it isn’t clear to me why Oklahoma St. should get a pass on those three outcomes.

Regardless, with Smart but without Cobbins’ defense in the paint, Oklahoma St. is playing like a Top 15 team. That’s better than during the swoon, but still not at the top 10 level they played at early in the year.

-We got caught up quite a bit in talking about Pittsburgh’s resume because of all the close losses to elite teams. But the reality is that this team has been performing at a much lower level since Durand Johnson went down. The splits say this is only the 34^th best team in the nation right now.

And if you want to talk about luck, in the last 14 games, Pittsburgh has just seven wins, and four of those have come in OT. Yes, Pittsburgh was unlucky against Syracuse. But they are fortunate they escaped against Virginia Tech, Miami, Notre Dame, and Clemson.

-Finally, I include some splits for West Virginia. Terry Henderson missed four recent games due to an illness and he missed the season opener back in November. (Henderson played limited minutes in the Kansas win, so I’m leaving that out of either category. This is probably a mistake because the Kansas game was WVU’s best offensive game of the year, but I didn’t think Henderson was 100% back in that game.) Regardless, the point of the table is clear: When Henderson was out with an illness, West Virginia played some lousy basketball.

Other Notes

-I’ve thrown up my hands with Michigan St. I’m not even sure which split to create. Is Keith Appling injured or still hurt? Is Branden Dawson 100%? Let’s put it this way. The only two Michigan St. players to play in every game this year are Denzel Valentine and Gavin Schilling.

-Kansas’s Joel Embiid missed loss to West Virginia. He also missed the TCU and Texas Tech games, but mismatches of that magnitude are hard to judge, so I’m not going to run that split.

-Mississippi’s Derrick Millinghaus was suspended for three recent games, but his minutes were steadily falling before that, so it didn’t make sense to do a split. Realistically, he was only critical to the team in November and December.

-Southern Miss’s Michael Craig has a high ankle sprain. The team hasn’t lost when he’s been out yet, but it is worth tracking.

-Richmond isn’t on the bubble, but I wanted to note that the team really has fallen on hard times without Cedrick Lindsay and Derrick Williams.

Quick Events

-UCLA was missing Jordan Adams and Kyle Anderson in the 2 OT loss to Oregon. Other than the George Washington game at Dayton listed above, I can’t think of a game the committee will put less weight on than that game. Beating a team without its two leading scorers just isn’t worth much.

-Kansas St.’s Shane Southwell missed the team’s 2OT loss at Baylor. Remember that Thomas Gipson missed season opening loss to Northern Colorado. The committee might not care, but these injuries could have easily swung those two games.

-Green Bay is obviously going to be a huge point of discussion for the committee this year after they lost in the Horizon League semifinals at home. Keep in mind that Green Bay’s 7'1" center Alec Brown was out in the team’s loss at Valparaiso.

-Syracuse’s Jerami Grant missed the loss to Georgia Tech.

-Colorado’s Wesley Gordon missed the team’s loss at UCLA.

-Connecticut’s DeAndre Daniels did not play in team's loss to Cincinnati.

-Harvard’s Wesley Saunders missed the team’s loss to Connecticut.

-St. John’s Orlando Sanchez missed the three point loss to Villanova due to the birth of his daughter.

-Arkansas’ Michael Qualls and Alandise Harris were suspended and did not play in loss at LSU, one of only three Arkanasas' losses since the start of February.

-Minnesota’s Andre Hollins missed losses to Nebraska and Northwestern.

-Indiana’s Will Sheehy missed Michigan St. loss and Noah Vonleh was out in the Nebraska loss.

-Clemson’s Landry Nnoko missed the team’s five point loss to Virginia.

-Florida St.’s Ian Miller missed the team’s loss at Maryland.

And if that isn’t enough for you, I also discussed a plethora of early season injuries back in January. Click here for the full analysis.