College Basketball Analyst Evan Miyakawa talks BYU Basketball

College Basketball Analyst Evan Miyakawa talks BYU Basketball

we are live in Studio B this is your day-to-day BYU Sports play byplay I Am Spencer Linton alongside jerem Jordan making his BYU Sports Nation D is yet another college basketball analytics Guru and the creator of Evan mia.com Evan makawa on by usn welcome to the show Evan how are you this morning I’m doing great glad to be here all right first things first how did you get your start in college basketball analytics because you’ve on next level in a relatively short amount of time looking back on the recent past yeah so my my background is in sports uh stats and sports analytics but my favorite sport my entire life has been college basketball I grew up in Indianapolis I was a Butler Bulldogs fan growing up uh I went to the uh Gordon Hayward almost make against Duke in the national title game so I’ve always just had a a real spot for college basketball in my my heart um you know fast forward I ended up getting my PhD and statistics from Baylor and so a couple years ago I created this Advanced college basketball analytics website initially as the side project but it’s organically grown a ton over the last several years uh and it’s now used by tons of coaches journalists and fans for analyzing the sport um you know so much so that I was actually able to leave my previous job doing consulting for NBA teams to focus on this full-time so the site evan.com you know covers a lot of different things it has team and player ratings transfer portal project ejections um lineup analysis and it’s used by lots of coaches for things like roster building game scouting and things of that nature this is uh a dream come true for every little boy that loves sports and numbers right it’s pretty it’s pretty cool um we have Cool Jobs you have a cool job it all Blends together which is really fun okay you just wrote an article I’ve got it printed right here how to build a roster in the modern portal era it was fascinating because you explored basically the last three years of successful teams how many what percentage minutes played were used by transfers freshmen returning players what were some of the conclusions you came to in the article yeah I mean part of why I wrote this article is because we have more transfers than ever there’s more roster movement than ever and so every single coaching staff is trying to figure out almost on the fly like what is the best way to construct a roster because the ways that people traditionally did it five or 10 years ago it’s just not really the only option anymore so basically what I found was that besides the the main point of recrui which is to get good players and that’s obviously always going to be the most important strategy is get better players on your roster that’s kind of obvious but outside of that what I found was that teams that were mostly reliant on returning players ended up doing a a bit better than teams who were more reliant on incoming Talent especially from the transfer portal so basically what that meant was kind of as a ground rule teams that had during a season over 50% of their minutes played by team players who were on the roster the the previous season ended up doing much better than teams who were much more reliant on new faces and so basically some of the conclusions from this are that you know it’s important to always look for new talent and so if a a team has a key spot or two or three that they can upgrade through the portal or through getting good freshman Talent that’s super important and valuable but just flipping your roster every offseason for the point of potentially getting marginal gains but maybe losing some players who you could keep often damages teams in the long run Evan makawa is on BYU Sports Nation we heard from several BYU basketball players in the previous staff how important it was to start new and get old together which goes with what you are saying Evan so when you say teams that had at least 50% or more of the minutes played from returning players that those teams did better how much better are we talking in terms of wins and losses where it really matters sure so I mean basically when you look at the last three national champions Yukon twice in Kansas every single one of those teams was mostly rely on returning players all of them were above that 50% Mark in terms of percentage of minutes played by returning players when you look at the one seeds from the last three seasons or teams that finished in the top 10 it’s like 90 to 95% of these teams uh were majority rely on returning players as opposed to new Talent now that doesn’t mean that you can’t be good with new talent but it just makes the challenge a little bit harder because roster continuity especially with how many pieces are changing teams really does give you an edge and so for the teams that are able to establish a culture of having guys who will come either as freshman or as transfers but then stay two three four years if they can which is harder than ever in the modern age because of nil and because of the transfer portal these teams that can establish that culture and get players to buy in for multiple seasons and then add one or two or three key pieces during the offseason but not overhaul their entire roster these are the teams that are having success year-over-year and typically their floor in terms of where they’re going to be during the season is really high these teams typically don’t really bottom out that much because they have such a solid foundation to build on from the previous year we’re really hoping that buy football does this because a year ago they brought in a gajillion transfers unfortunately went five and seven and year one of the big 12 we kind of call it the men’s basketball continuity Theory which is what exactly you are talking about in the article you also said the strength of a team squad in the preseason will always be the strongest indicator of success during the season with that said BYU has six returners five expected to play a lot some real high talent coming in that we haven’t seen ever coming to BYU the likes of Jor demon Russian projected lottery pick Kanan Catchings earlier this week uh and others what’s your assessment of what BYU is right now and what they could be this season I I think that the balance is really good between those returning players but then adding new talent and I think the thing is especially impressive about Kevin young and what he’s done in just a a few two short weeks at BYU basically is you look at so many other new head coaches who are taking a job and they’ve pretty much lost their entire roster and that just sort of seems to be the norm I mean you look at Mark Pope who left BYU he’s at Kentucky ky’s the biggest brand in the sport and he had to recruit an entire roster from scratch because every single player that was on Kentucky who could have stayed left BYU has somehow managed to keep several key guys from last season you know your D Halls your Trevon Nells your Richie saers your tror like those four players are key to BYU being good next year not just because of how talented they are but because of the fact that they can you know bring in this roster continuity piece they’re already familiar with BYU they’re already familiar with the setting they’re already familiar with the environment and then you add key pieces through the transfer portal and then through the ref freshman ranks which weren’t even really in the conversation until one or two months ago I think they’re really approaching this in the right way and especially given how many other new head coaches have strug to retain their roster super impressive Evan makawa on BYU Sports Nation you have several fascinating very intriguing numbers and categories we want to ask you specifically about the BPR rating because we spent a lot of time looking at the kenpom index and his offensive and defensive ratings but this BPR seems to go next level so if you could explain how BPR is different than some of the other analytics that are already out there sure so BPR stands for basian performance rating it’s basically the player version of what you might think of on a kenpom for example so basically what it’s saying is not just how good your team is but how good each player is on an individual level in terms of the uh level of value that they bring to their team offensively and defensively on an efficiency perspective uh per possession so basically what BPR looks at is it says for a single player kind of regardless of any of the other you know factors that might be at play whether you score 30 points or five points at the end of the day what we really care about is how good are you going to be for your team in terms of uh elevating your team’s performance when you’re on the court uh on both ends so BPR looks at several things that looks at your individual box stats um because it can find a lot of value there but it also looks at just when you’re on the floor how well is your team performing how are you affecting your team’s performance and it does adjust for the strength of all of their players that are on the court for every single minute that a player plays so for example if a player is matched up against the other teams star player every game they will get credit defensively for that for example so there’s that there’s a little bit of recruiting information involved as well because it’s not just a reflective rating of how good your performance has been it’s also forward-looking and saying how good is this player likely to be going forward and so high school recruiting information especially for younger players or freshmen can often give us a better picture of what their potential is and how good they might be and so when we come to the transfer portal for example this offseason part of what I’m doing is I’m predicting what each player BPR next season will be kind of regardless of what team they play for adjusting for the context adjusting for opponent strength and all that stuff to basically say when it boil it down to one number what does the data say about how good this player is going to be on a per possession basis for really any team next year Evan you just essentially defended your thesis as it pertains to the BPR so we’re going to award you a master certificate honorary from BYU Sports Nation yeah congratulations you have two big 12 graduate certificates now which is pretty cool BPR is really fun because it’s a metric I haven’t seen out there and it quantifies the success of individuals in a different way and it was fun because last year we were looking at Richie Saunders specifically who’s out there with this headband he’s flying around he’s got all this energy he wasn’t Just Energy guy he was skill guy too and you said of the LA well the numbers said of the last five years he had the second highest BPR to only Yoli Childs in 2020 which was pretty cool so what have what have you enjoyed about this metric in terms of being a able to and that’s what stats guys do quantify how you can assess a player in college basketball the thing I love about it is that you’re going to have your star players get their due Zach yei was ranked number one in the country in BPR last year that’s not should shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody he was the most dominant Force we’ve seen in college basketball in a long time and the stats showed it but you also get guys like a Richie sers for example uh who may not be the primary scorer on a team or the player who gets the biggest head headlines but their impact on the court is so good in all of the intangibles that they bring to the court all of the things that they do off the ball or defensively that you can also reward guys who you know again may not be 15 point or 20 point per game scores but they’re doing all the little things well and so that shows up both in the individual stats but also just in terms of the team performance well on the floor so when I look at Richie Saunders for example last season not only were his individual stats really efficient he shot the ball well he contributed in a lot of areas but when you also looked at how well BYU played while he was on the floor the team was uh you know reason much better when he was on the court both offensively and defensively which showed that the effort that he put forward was really you know adding a lot of value to the team that they didn’t have when he was on the bench so you’re able to reward guys both for being you know star players big-time scorers but also guys who are fitting into a role that’s not that but still equally important to the team and those guys can often be ranked really high as well Evan as you look at B you and we’ve already mentioned some big names some newcomers notably and most recently jagor demon and Kanan Catchings who join the veterans like dalon Hall and Richie Saunders and fuss trayor and Trevon Nell as you look at the roster right now how does it stack up against the Big 12 and and where would it fall in your ratings compared to a conference that’s just ridiculously tough and talented I I think your point about the Big 12 being talented uh is is really the big Point here because the Big 12 I’ve seen a lot of different preseason top 25s might have like four or five teams in the top 10 in the country so you know where does that leave a team like BYU who’s going to have a what I would argue a you know tournament ready roster they might still be like sixth or seventh in the Big 12 and that’s not a slight on them that’s just how crazy good the Big 12 is and I mean you look at other programs in the Big 12 like a Houston and like an Iowa State they have built this roster continuity culture that I’ve talked about that’s so important over the last couple years you know like a TJ otzelberger at Iowa State you know he came in and basically had a fresh roster in the first year that he was at Iowa State and way overperformed expectation but he’s been able to build on that every year and Iowa State’s in the top 10 conversation you know Houston is one of these teams as well who they keep all of their best talent they bring in a couple key pieces and so especially for a team like BYU who just lost their head coach being able to retain the players that they have get the new talent that they have I think their roster is looking really good and that still may not have them in the top five of the Big 12 and I think that’s totally okay Evan it’s been awesome to introduce you to BYU fans and to start this conversation that we hope to keep going uh often as we push forward through the college basketball season we’re just wonder when you’re going to do it for college football too uh I think I’m probably sticking with basketball at this point Evan what’s your BPR uh like 100 point something I don’t know Evan great to have you on the show we’ll do it again soon I appreciate it guys thank you all right [Music]

College Basketball Analyst Evan Miyakawa joins Spencer & Jarom to talk about his article, composing a roster in
the transfer portal era, and all things BYU Basketball.
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