HOW MUCH IS THE CONVOCATION CENTER WORTH?
Testing Kennesaw State's home-court advantage while the team plays 1,500 miles away.
Kennesaw State just won a basketball game 1,500 miles away from campus, which means there’s no better time to talk about…
Yes, that’s right — home-court advantage. Following last weekend’s CUSA sweep with a harsh trip to the frontier made me want to figure out the true effect of the Convocation Center so far this season.
Depending on the bookmaker/power rating, playing in your own arena is usually worth about 3 points in college basketball. Upper-echelon home-court advantage teams - think altitude and remote travel especially - can get nearly 5 extra points during certain seasons.
Our sometimes-ball-knowing friend Mr. Pomeroy publishes his own list of the HCA he applies each year. The methodology is fairly simple - net scoring margins comparing your last 60 conference games. Kennesaw State ranks 7th in CUSA, with a 3-point advantage applied at the Convocation Center.
Does that seem right, given what feels like such a drastic difference in vibes (scientific, I know) on the home court this season?
My initial thought was that most of the home/road splits came from opponent quality. That’s the nature of our level of college basketball. Even without a high-major buy game, you’re usually destined to face a tougher schedule away from home during the non-con.
That tracks for KSU’s season so far: Home opponents average out to essentially D1 replacement level (-0.01 KenPom rating), and opponents for the non-metro Atlanta road trips were about a +4. Those road trips also included 5 of the 6 best defenses faced in terms of eFG% allowed and some absurd cross-continent travel.
OK, the scheduled opponents gave the Owls a tougher starting point. But what about the stats on the court? Even when adjusting key numbers for what opponents typically allow, Antoine Pettway’s team performs far better in the Convocation Center - a boost in essentially every category up and down the stat profile. Here are the Four Factors and efficiency ratings, via CBB Analytics.
Fine, let’s see final scores. Those are the only numbers that really matter. With KenPom’s ratings and his algorithm’s home court advantage for each road trip, we can also determine how the scoreboard compares to expectations. Using current Adj. Efficiency filters out some of the noise and preseason misses, like how most sites projected Chuck Stone as more valuable than Adrian Wooley preseason. What a time.
Check out the comparisons between final scores and the projections, with a positive number showing where the Owls exceeded expectations, including home-court.
In Kennesaw…
Prebyterian: +8.8
Abilene Christian: -1.1
Rutgers: +11.3
Jax State: +11.7
Sam Houston: +5.3
Louisiana Tech: +4.6
6.8 points per game better than expected
Everywhere else…
Cal Baptist: +0.5
UC Irvine: -0.6
Towson: +3.8
Kent State: -2.8
Georgia State: -2.5
Santa Clara: -3
San Jose State: -20.2
MTSU: +5.6
WKU: -7.6
New Mexico State: +20
0.7 points worse than expected
We’re still working with a tiny sample size, but there’s no doubt this particular Owls team has overperformed in Kennesaw relative to regular home-court advantage and the current power rating. Compare these results with Year 1 of the Pettway era: Last season’s team only had a +1 swing in the Convo and -0.1 on the road.
The results away from home, minus a complete shocker at SJSU, aren’t as consistently bad (or unexpected) as they sometimes felt in the moment. The differential moved from -3 to -0.7 after handling NMSU basically gave the Owls a mulligan on that no-show in California.
Do I have a major takeaway here? No - just know your eyes aren’t deceiving you this year if it looks like the Owls actually do play better in Kennesaw.
Major news out of the Hootmail World HQ: A college basketball team plays better at home. More groundbreaking info to your inbox next week.
KSU 69, New Mexico State 56
They say a playoff series the CUSA regular season doesn’t really start until the home team loses. Well, we’re here now. The Owls claimed their first road victory in the league, taking down a New Mexico State team that entered the weekend tied for first after winning 8 of the last 9 games. If you see the Battle of I-10 loop as CUSA’s toughest road trip, can you think of a better finishing move for the first leg than that 18-2 run to close out the first leg?
TRINITY TEST
A couple hours down the road from where Bobby Oppenheimer tried out his first plutonium bomb, Pettway conducted his own experiment in Las Cruces. This one will probably have the same historic staying power: Why not just play with three guards the entire game?
That wasn’t the first time Pettway has gone smaller this season. It was, however, the most he’s gone to the well in one game as he matched personnel against NMSU’s lineup of three small(er) guards. Usual starting wing Jamil Miller played just 10 minutes, by far the shortest outing of his freshman season. Ricardo Wright and Delaney Heard split Miller’s usual time on the court - something that might not work out in every game with the lack of guard depth, but it was well worth an extended look given the opponent.
Adrian Wooley spent the first couple minutes on the bench, for reasons unknown, and then played essentially the rest of the way. What more do we need to say this far into the best scoring season we’ve ever seen from a KSU freshman? This time out: 23 points on 75% true shooting while getting to the basket at will, with his 14 in the paint nearly outmatching the Aggies by himself.
I always wondered how Terrell Burden would play if he was 7 inches taller.
Midway through the first half, one of the gentlemen on the NMSU broadcast decided to say Wooley was having a “below-average night.” I think he had half of the Owls’ 8 points at that moment, for the record. I don’t normally believe in broadcaster karma, but you have to appreciate the lady wandering through ESPN+’s stunned postgame shot with a knowing smile. He knows what they did, and so does she.
In a nervy first-half moment, Cottle limped off with what looked to be knee trouble. It turned out to be a “call the ambulance, but not for me” situation as the junior guard returned and hit a few key shots down the stretch during a second half that the Owls won 45-22. We don’t need to talk much about Kennesaw’s shooting in that first 20 minutes.
Heard was out there for a career-high 26 minutes and posted 10 points, the first time he’s hit double figures in college. You’ll take that from Heard every day of the week, even if it doesn’t feel very repeatable. Your milage may vary on plus/minus numbers from a one-game sample size, but Heard went +19 during his time on the court. Only Wooley and Frankquon Sherman came within ten points of that mark.
Another 1-6 night for Wright from deep most likely won’t make you - or him, really - feel like the transfer guard is any closer to figuring out what’s going wrong. I do like him getting 20 minutes, because how else will he work through the shooting slump? The breakthrough is coming, eventually. We hope.
ANDRE, THE GIANT
Every basketball fan can appreciate a dominant center. Shaq, Hakeem, Mutumbo, Weir. You know, legends of the game. That’s 5 more blocks and 8 rebounds (in 21 minutes!) for a guy who was legitimately unplayable at times earlier this season. He looks like an entirely different player on some of those hard hedges lately.
Toss in Rongie Gordon’s 4 rejections and another from Sherman, and you get a 26% block rate on the night - nearly double the average of FIU, the current CUSA leader. The Owls rank just behind the Panthers for the full season, but leap ahead if we’re only talking conference games.
You can see the rim protection show up in New Mexico State’s shot chart from Thursday night, where an OK night from three got totally buried by shooting sub-30% from inside the arc.
Compare that to their shooting zones for the full season. The Aggies already had some trouble scoring around the rim, and Kennesaw State exposed them on Thursday.
ONE SIGN OF GROWTH: TURNOVER RATE
We may have already seen the light at the end of the tunnel working through the turnover issues. Remember when the Owls gave the ball away like 25% of the time? It’s too early to say that’s fully solved, but they’re certainly trending in the right direction and handling business against teams like NMSU and JSU that don’t typically force mistakes.
The game-by-game TO% trends tell a promising story as Pettway’s young team (take a drink, I said it again) continues to settle in.
Next up on the performance improvement plan: Let’s figure out the three-point shooting, too. A three-game CUSA winning streak while going 21% from long-range doesn’t seem possible, and yet here we are.