DO I REALLY NEED TO UNDERSTAND KENPOM METRICS WHEN READING THIS SITE?

Basketball can be a foreign language at times, particularly when hoops snobs start throwing around advanced metrics.  Among the advanced metrics that hoops snobs use is Ken Pomeroy’s advanced metric system (known as KenPom), which is among the most popular systems used today.  We’re going to give a quick overview of some of the most widely used KenPom stats because this site will use these metrics regularly.  [But of course, we will be the good kind of hoops snobs.]

Added bonus for reading today’s short blog — if you want to look smart to the bad kind of basketball snobs, just ask them about Team X’s KenPom Adjusted Efficiency Margin and watch their heads explode in real time.   

So without further ado, here are the primary KenPom metrics that we will utilize on this blog:

AdjO (Adjusted Offense Metric):  This is the number of points a team scores against an average D1 opponent per 100 possessions.  Somewhat confusingly, a college basketball team gets 60-80 possession in a game (CU gets 68.7 possessions per game this season, just slightly abover the NCAA average) .  So if you were to look at a team’s AdjO, you might think a team scores a lot more points than they actually do — it’s because you can’t think about them on a per-game basis (as they’re more like a one-and-a-third of a game measurement).  CU’s AdjO is 108, ranking 138^th nationally.  

• AdjD (Adjusted Defense Metric):  This is the number of points a team allows against an average D1 opponent per 100 possessions.  CU’s AdjD is 99.3, ranking 60^th nationally.
• AdjEM (Adjusted Efficiency Metric):  This is the difference between AdjO and AdjD efficiency.  A more positive AdjEM is better.  This is the primary KenPom stat, and Coloardo currently ranks 88^th nationally with a +8.75 rating.  As a rough ballpark estimate, for a Power 4 team to earn an at-large NCAA tournament berth, that team will need to be at or higher than a +20 rating.  
• Adjusted Tempo:  This measures the number of possessions a team has over 40 minutes (one game).  Remember, as mentioned above, the average team has between 60-80 possessions per game.  This stat measures how quickly (or slowly) a team pushes the ball down the court. 
• Luck rating: The measure of deviation between a team’s actual winning % and what one would expect from its game-by-game efficiencies.  Essentially, a team involved in a lot of close games shouldn’t win (or lose) all of them.