I have no problem being ranked 5 spots (or even 10) behind KU from last year. But Baylor, I just don’t get. PPP just isn’t that powerful of an indicator, as I see it anyways.

and then when I didn’t answer it, you were a jackass about it.

Before I proceed, let me make one thing perfectly clear: you are stating, unequivocally, that the Baltimore Orioles are a better team than the Los Angeles Angels. There is nothing whatsoever you can say at this point to countermand that; you claim that head-to-head is the only thing that matters. To hell with the other 156 games each team played which by and large prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Baltimore is the far inferior team. You probably also think the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates were a better team than the 1960 New York Yankees just because the Pirates won the World Series that year despite being outscored by about a billion runs.

You have continually refused to address this point — the complete stupidity of depending on head-to-head competition when teams don’t play one another head-to-head enough to matter — while at the same time having the unmitigated gall to give me shit for not having answered your question? Really?

I didn’t bother to answer it the first time because, frankly, it was preposterous and you should know it. But what the hell, I’ll humor you now.

No, they do not use deflections in their statistical analysis. They CAN’T. It is impossible to create a valid statistical model of a sport, any sport, using as any part of its base an event which is not universally tracked in every game. (Bear in mind, “points” and “blocked shots” and “steals” are not “statistics”. They are “events”. “Statistics” are what you get when you perform mathematical operations on the numbers which represent those events, for example “points per game” and “turnover margin” and “defensive efficiency”.)

Until deflections become part of the standard box score (or until someone has access to every game played on video tape in order to analyze them all and count deflections, like John Dewan is doing with baseball defense), then they can’t be factored into a sport-wide calculation of anything. Not by BP, not by you, not by anyone. In fact, even attempting to include them right now would totally invalidate the output, rather than making it better and more informative.

Don’t mistake me, I think they should be, and in that sense your concern is not irrelevant. And once they are counted as an event, then they could be part of any grand unifying theory, although it’s worth noting that efficiency margin all by itself has an outrageously high correlation with winning; any more detailed calculation would have to improve on that correlation to be worthwhile.

But for now they’re not, and trying to incorporate them inherently creates flawed output.

There. Question answered; a question you shouldn’t even have felt the need to ask if you’d thought about it for a tenth of a second.