Tempo-Free Hate 2013-2014: Bo Ryan's Revenge!

Last year, between the Ohio and Wisconsin games, we spent the time wondering why do we all hate Aaron Craft so much? To answer this question, we proposed the Four Factors of Hate, and used these factors to find the Big Ten leaders in Tempo-Free Hate. This year, the question of why we all hate Aaron Craft was answered once and for all when Doug Gottlieb blamed this on the ball being too slippery:

GIF by Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog)

Even though unwarranted media attention and apologia are good reasons to be annoyed by a player, the Four Factors of Hate try to quantify just what makes a player so annoying using only the stats on the floor. The four factors are:

• Steals per personal foul (ST/PF). Also known as handchecking ability, or Craftiness.

• Ability to draw fouls (Free Throw Attempts/(Minutes Played * Usage %)).  Jordan Morgan is not as bad at this as you think.

• Three-Point Specialization (3FG/FG). The "Just A Shooter" Award.

• Free Throw Percentage (FT%). For those annoying players who just Win The Game. Since all players are supposed to be able to shoot free throws reasonably well FT% only counts half as much as the other three.

All stats come from Sports Reference College Basketball, except for team adjusted tempo, which is pulled from the front page at kenpom. Who is the most annoying player in the Big Ten? Find out after the jump!

First, the top ten in each factor. Only players that averaged more than 5 minutes per game before the Big Ten Tournament were considered. Here are the leaders in steals per personal foul:

Rank	Player	Team	ST/PF
1	Ben Brust	WISC	1.130
2	Aaron Craft	OSU	1.096
3	Austin Hollins	MINN	1.017
4	Roy Devyn Marble	IOWA	0.966
5	Gary Harris	MSU	0.947
6	Aaron White	IOWA	0.939
7	Branden Dawson	MSU	0.935
8	Shannon Scott	OSU	0.914
9	Deandre Mathieu	MINN	0.773
10	Mike Gesell	IOWA	0.694

Aaron Craft was further down this chart last year, but in 2013-14 he's right near the top, just behind his Wisconsin doppelgänger, Ben Brust. This factor is dominated by backcourt players, in particular Spartans, Buckeyes, Hawkeyes, and Gophers.

Next up, the ability to draw fouls:

Rank	Player	Team	ADF
1	Hanner Mosquera-Perea	IND	1.170
2	Geno Thorpe	PSU	1.057
3	Gabriel Olaseni	IOWA	1.019
4	Nigel Hayes	WISC	1.008
5	Anthony Clemmons	IOWA	0.900
6	Aaron White	IOWA	0.886
7	Josh Gasser	WISC	0.860
8	Austin Etherington	IND	0.849
9	A.J. Hammons	PUR	0.812
10	Noah Vonleh	IND	0.812

Hanner Mosquera-Perea leads the way here in limited action. He averaged one free throw for every five minutes he was on the court; the Big Ten average was one free throw for every 12.5 minutes per player. Aaron White is the only player in the top ten of the first two factors.

Three-point specialization is fittingly third:

Rank	Player	Team	3FG/FG
1	Kendall Stephens	PUR	0.808
2	Graham Woodward	PSU	0.778
3	Malik Smith	MINN	0.730
4	Nathan Taphorn	NU	0.714
5	Ray Gallegos	NEB	0.710
6	Zak Irvin	MICH	0.708
7	Kenny Kaminski	MSU	0.696
8	Kale Abrahamson	NU	0.694
9	Travis Trice	MSU	0.652
10	Josh Oglesby	IOWA	0.652

The three-point specialization leaderboard is composed entirely of part-time players; Ray Gallegos averages 26.2 minutes per game, the most of anybody on this list.

Lastly, we have free throw percentage:

Rank	Player	Team	FT%
1	Ben Brust	WISC	88.4
2	Brandon Taylor	PSU	87.3
3	Josh Gasser	WISC	87.2
4	Benny Parker	NEB	86.7
5	Kendall Stephens	PUR	84.4
6	Andre Hollins	MINN	83.8
7	Malik Smith	MINN	81.7
8	Terran Petteway	NEB	81.7
9	Yogi Ferrell	IND	81.6
10	Nik Stauskas	MICH	81.1

To compute tempo-free hate, we perform the following calculations.

1. For each factor, I calculated the league mean and standard deviation and converted each player's raw factor score into a normalized z-score. Each of these stats in a rate stat, so I defined a player's Hate Rate as HR = z(ST/PF) + z(ADF) + z(3FG/FG) + 0.5*z(FT%).
2. You can't build up hate if you're not playing. So, to calculate a player's total Hate, I multiplied the Hate Rate by Minutes played (HATE = HR*MP).
3. To calculate Tempo-Free Hate, we divided a player's total Hate by his team's number of games played and adjusted tempo (TFH = HATE/(G*Tempo)).

Crunching the numbers produces your 2013-14 B1G leaders in hatred!

Rank	Player	Team	TFH
1	Ben Brust	WISC	1.509
2	Josh Gasser	WISC	1.112
3	Aaron Craft	OSU	0.960
4	Roy Devyn Marble	IOWA	0.909
5	Gary Harris	MSU	0.903
6	Nik Stauskas	MICH	0.810
7	Austin Hollins	MINN	0.784
8	Aaron White	IOWA	0.697
9	Yogi Ferrell	IND	0.609
10	Malik Smith	MINN	0.602

Ben Brust is so far off the charts this year, it's like he's 40 feet away from everyone else *ducks*. Not only is he the leader in ST/PF and FT%, he's also the highest ranked three-point specialist who averages more than 30 minutes per game. Finishing a distant second is Brust's teammate Josh Gasser, whose inability to steal the ball keeps him from being quite as hated. Aaron Craft finishes third, held back by his poor three-point shooting ability. You can't hate him that much when you're thinking about him shooting three pointers.

Using TFH, we can assign each team its "Most Hateable Player" award.

Rank	Player	Team	TFH
1	Ben Brust	WISC	1.509
3	Aaron Craft	OSU	0.960
4	Roy Devyn Marble	IOWA	0.909
5	Gary Harris	MSU	0.903
6	Nik Stauskas	MICH	0.810
7	Austin Hollins	MINN	0.784
9	Yogi Ferrell	IND	0.609
14	Rayvonte Rice	ILL	0.407
15	Tim Frazier	PSU	0.311
17	Kendall Stephens	PUR	0.273
25	Ray Gallegos	NEB	0.179
29	Kale Abrahamson	NU	0.146

There's a strong relationship between a team having a very hateable player and that team being good at basketball. The exception: Nebrasketball. Everybody loves Nebrasketball.

To get more insight into the relationship between TFH and actual basketball ability, here's a scatterplot of the 114 players we considered, with a loess curve on top:

Based on this chart, we can conclude that you don't have to be hated if you're good, but you have to be good to hated. There's almost no correlation between TFH and Offensive Rating - Defensive Rating if the tempo-free hate is less than about 0.25 - the loess curve is basically flat in this region. However, there's a group of 10-20 players that are both pretty good and basketball and masters of at least one of the annoying skills that make up the Four Factors of Hate.

Comparing this year's chart to last year's, not only will you notice that I've upgraded from Excel to ggplot, you'll see that tempo-free hate is somewhat repeatable. Nnanna Egwu is the least hateable player in the league for the second year running. Who can hate a center who can't create his own shot?

Jordan Morgan and Jon Horford are basically tied for being the most likeable player relative to performance and they're in the same spot on the chart that Mitch McGary had last year, before he went beastmode in the tournament. Austin Hollins, Craft, and Nik Stauskas all make repeat appearances in the Top Ten of Hate.

And all those Northwestern guys are at the bottom in Offensive Rating - Defensive Rating. Poor Northwestern. They wouldn't have turned down the CBI.