Simulating the Big Ten Tournament

by septimusharding on Mar 6, 2011 11:58 AM EST

I wrote a little program to use Ken Pomeroy's tempo-free stats to simulate the outcome of the Big Ten tournament. If you're interested, the results are after the jump.

OK, I redid this after all the games ended on Sunday. I also ran 10000 simulations, and here's what I got. The columns here show how many times each team (1) won it all, (2) made it to the final game, and (3) made it to the semifinals.

			Champ		Final		Semi		Quarter
Ohio State		3896		5711		7732		10000
Purdue			1891		4190		6966		10000
Wisconsin		1399		3354		6987		10000
Michigan		583		1277		4381		10000
Illinois		1001		1904		5619		10000
Penn State		197		725		1978		6123
Michigan State		293		923		1928		6034
Northwestern		128		326		800		4441
Minnesota		394		782		1468		5559
Iowa			141		501		1106		3966
Indiana			77		307		1035		3877

According to the simulations, OSU is far more likely to win than anyone else--more than twice as likely to win as the 2 seed, Purdue. Illinois looks a good sight better than the higher-seeded Michigan. There's an 87.7% chance that one of the 5 teams with a bye will win. Among the teams who have to play on Thursday, these simulations say that Minnesota has the best chance to win it all. This seems surprising, and may be a problem with the numbers I'm using--namely, they don't account for all the players that Minnesota has lost. I wonder if Michigan & Michigan State might not be tougher outs than these numbers suggest. In general, though, I think these numbers largely accord with my intuitions about the relative strength of the B10 teams.

Now for some more Purdue-centric results. According to the simulation, here are the probabilities for all possible outcomes for the Boilers:

Lose in quarterfinals	30.3%
Lose in semifinals	27.8%
Lose in finals		23.0%
Win it all		18.9%

We can break these down further.

RECORD IN QUARTERFINALS
			Gms		Record		Win%
Michigan State		6034		4106-1928	68.0
Iowa			3966		2860-1106	72.1
-------------------------------------------------------------
			10000	6966-3034		69.7


RECORD IN SEMIFINALS
			Gms		Record		Win%
Wisconsin		4842		2714-2128	56.1
Penn State		1376		922-454		67.0
Indiana			748		554-196		74.1
-------------------------------------------------------------
			6966		4190-2778	60.1


RECORD IN FINALS
			Gms		Record		Win%
Ohio State		2378		862-1516	36.2
Illinois		795		422-373		53.1
Michigan		526		320-206		60.8
Minnesota		361		200-161		55.4
Northwestern		130		87-43		66.9
-------------------------------------------------------------
			4190		1891-2299	45.1

Surprisingly, these numbers suggest that Illinois and Minnesota are both tougher matchups for us than Wisconsin is. Perhaps a large sample size (especially against Minnesota) would smooth that out, but it's still notable.

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Comments

IU winning the tournament 0.77% of the time still seems too high

BT Powerhouse @babaoreally

by babaoreally on Mar 7, 2011 2:22 AM EST reply actions

Heh

Perhaps. I guess the only way to know for sure is to play the tournament 10,000 times. That’d be fun.

I’m interested to see how my numbers match up with KenPom’s log 5 numbers that he posts at the Basketball Prospectus website. That formula does tend to give lowest-seeded teams incredibly low chances of winning it all. For instance, he just gave Toledo a 1 in 125,000 chance of winning the MAC tournament. The makes the 1 in 130 chance that I gave the Hoosiers look positively sweet.

by septimusharding on Mar 7, 2011 3:29 AM EST up reply actions