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Siegel Thoughts: Day One Review

- All the talk all season about how Greg Paulus was the problem for Duke.. and suddenly he's the only guy keeping him in the game. What was odd about his 25 point effort is how many times he got into the lane.. and if he just had that killer scorers instinct down low, he probably could have had a half dozen more.

- VCU's Eric Maynor (22 points) picked up where he left off in the CAA Finals when he had 20, 7, and 4 assists.

The PAC-10 Tournament starts on Wednesday with the winner getting the automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament. I’ll preview each team’s chances as well as potential matchups throughout.

#3 USC TROJANS
Record: Conference (11-7) Overall (21-10)
VS
#6 STANFORD CARDINAL
Record: Conference (10-8) Overall (18-11)

The following four candidates are the frontrunners for PAC-10 Player of the Year.

 

Arron Afflalo (6’5 Junior Guard, UCLA Bruins, 17.4 ppg, 2.3 rpg, 2.1 apg)

I love sports stats. Its as simple as that.. baseball has the best stats obviously, but college basketball has some underrated numbers. And I'm not talking about the RPI, I'm talking about Ken Pomeroy's offensive and defensive efficiency numbers. Its not my place to explain these numbers, but you can check out http://kenpom.com/blog/index.php/weblog/stats_explained/ for what the stats mean. But basically a good offensive efficiency rating means a team is good at offense and a good defensive efficiency rating means your good at D. Ken combines these two efficiency ratings into the "Pythag Winning Percentage" which basically predicts how a team will do against an average schedule. For example, last year's national champion Florida, ended up #1 in the Pythag category. They were projected to have a 97.4 winning percentage against an average schedule. The worst, not suprisingly was 1-26 Savannah State with .8% Pythag winning percentage. This means (theoretically), Savannah State would only have won 1 of every 100 games against an average NCAA schedule last year.

Here it is.. the list you've all been waiting for, the Top 20 stars of Saturday's college basketball action. You'll notice there's only 18 listings, because 2 pairs of teammates are stuck together on the list..

1. Shan Foster/Derrick Byars - Vanderbilt - 24 points each in he huge win over #1 Florida. Byars also added 8 assists for good measure.

2. Carl Elliott - George Washington - The senior guard had the first triple-double in GW's history. He scored 17, had 12 boards, and added 11 assists in a league win over Temple.

3. Brook Lopez - Stanford - The Cardinals beat up on tumbling Oregon behind 26 and 10 boards from Lopez. It was the heralded twin's best career game, and he also added a couple of blocks.

I took a day off from the Dribble yesterday because I was working on CHN's new "FanBlogs". Basically you can have a blog about anything basketball (not even just college) related on CHN.. simply register (on the left) if you haven't already.. and then click on "My FanBlog" and start posting away. Right now we're in a developmental stage, so the blog posts don't appear on CHN's frontpage and I'm not promoting in full yet. But if you look on the right hand sidebar of this page, you'll see a box for "Recent FanBlog Posts" where you can see two of the readers who have already got started.

You should definitely think about having your own blog on CHN. You'll get an archive for your blog posts, your own user profile with a bio and a picture, and each week the best FanBlog posts will be featured on the main page.