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!

Aaron Craft and the Four Factors of Hate

While thinking about Tuesday's game against Ohio State, I was struck like I walked through a plate-glass window by the observation that, although Deshaun Thomas is clearly OSU's most valuable player, Michigan fans didn't experience massive schadenfreude in seeing him lose. Instead, we were filled with glee to see Aaron Craft lying on the floor in defeat. Part of the reason I find Craft so annoying is that he's the beneficiary and victim of Ecksteinism, or "scrappy white guy media affection." Another part of the reason is that his aggressive defense always makes you wonder, "How on earth was that not a foul?"

I'm not going to try and quantify media overexposure in this post. What I'm going to try to do here is use nothing but freely-avaiable statistics to try and predict which players in Big Ten men's basketball inspire the most hatred in opposing fanbases solely by the way they play. I downloaded data for all Big Ten men's players this season, including conference and non-conference games through February 7, and then eliminated the players who haven't seen the court for at least 100 minutes. This left a dataset of 113 players for which I attempted to determine "The Four Factors of Hate."

The first factor I came up, inspired by Craft, is steals per personal foul. There are two kinds of players who can rack up the steals and not the fouls: the player who never gets whistled for overaggressive defense and the player who is actually really good at stealing the ball. Both of those players will drive you crazy when there's on the other team. Here's the leaderboard for ST/PF:

Rank	Player	Team	ST/PF
1	Tim Frazier	PSU	1.125
2	Austin Hollins	MINN	1.023
3	Branden Dawson	MSU	1.000
4	Victor Olapido	IND	0.931
5	Aaron Craft	OSU	0.860
6	Shannon Scott	OSU	0.857
7	Julian Welch	MINN	0.818
8	D.J. Richardson	ILL	0.809
9T	Josh Oglesby	IOWA	0.800
9T	Joe Coleman	MINN	0.800

The second factor is the ability to draw fouls. Sports Reference College Basketball doesn't have this listed as a stat, so I estimated it with the formula ADF = Free Throw Attempts/(Minutes Played * Usage %). This stat favors the frontcourt, with centers and forwards occupying eight of the top nine spots. Two factors in and it's clear Penn State really misses Tim Frazier.

Rank	Player	Team	ADF
1	Amir Williams	OSU	1.268
2	Aaron White	IOWA	1.080
3	Tim Frazier	PSU	1.020
4	Cody Zeller	IND	1.006
5	Trevor Mbakwe	MINN	0.972
6	Andre Ingram	MINN	0.894
7	Abodunrin Gabriel Olaseni	IOWA	0.861
8	Maurice Walker	MINN	0.852
9	Melsahn Basabe	IOWA	0.801
10	Pat Ingram	IOWA	0.793

The third factor measures three-point specialization: it's the fraction of made field goals that are three-pointers, of 3FG/FG. A whopping 92% of Penn State's Nick Colella's made shots are from outside the arc, almost 14% more that #2 Josh Oglesby.

Rank	Player	Team	3FG/FG
1	Nick Colella	PSU	0.920
2	Josh Oglesby	IOWA	0.784
3T	Kale Abrahamson	NU	0.733
3T	Travis Trice	MSU	0.733
5	Maurice Creek	IND	0.727
6	D.J. Byrd	PUR	0.712
7	George Marshall	WISC	0.700
8	Jordan Hulls	IND	0.667
9	Nik Stauskas	MICH	0.624
10	Maverick Ahamnisi	MINN	0.600

After the jump, read about the fourth factor and see the leaderboards of hate.