Using the Google Cloud March Madness Insights Dashboard

We’re very excited to add some new features and insights to our coverage this year, including:

We’re also bringing back some of our top features from last season, including:

Each page contains a set of filters on the left that can be used to expand or limit the data for consideration by season, team properties, player-related attributes, or game-related information, depending on the page.

Below is a guide to the types of data-driven insights you can find using this dashboard, by page.

Here we have a table and chart displaying two overall team performance metrics. “Adj Net Eff” represents a team’s point differential per 100 possessions, adjusted for schedule (opponent and site of each game). The teams that have higher Adj Net Eff are the most powerful/”best” teams, and are more likely to do well going forward.

The chart at the bottom plots each team-season as a single point, with teams that are “more deserving” further up and those that are “more powerful” further to the right. Some interesting teams to examine are those toward the top right (in general, high quality teams) and somewhat off the black line (those whose résumé and true quality don’t align as much).

For instance, compare Virginia and Texas Tech, the two teams that played for last season’s national title on the men’s side:

This season, there are three women’s teams that have an adjusted net efficiency of more than +50 points per 100 possessions (the gap between top women’s teams and the average is much larger than the distance on the men’s side, every year). Using the dashboard, we can quickly see that those three teams dominate in different ways: Oregon with an amazing offense (~12 points per 100 possessions better than anyone else!), Baylor with its top-ranked defense (on par with their title-winning squad from last season), and South Carolina with the most balanced team, ranking second place in both categories.

Kansas, Gonzaga, and Duke are the three top men’s teams in net efficiency. We can use their offensive and defensive Four Factors to see how different facets of the game help distinguish their performance on the way to achieving success.

On offense, all three shoot very well from the field, do a good job protecting the ball, and have pretty solid offensive rebounding rates. The teams are a bit more distinctive on defense, with Kansas really strong at limiting opponent shooting from the field, Duke also very good in that area and solid at forcing turnovers, and Gonzaga’s strengths being in defensive rebounding and limiting opponent free throw rate (while being relatively weak in the first two factors).

This page is more complex, but represents a truly unique and dynamic way to evaluate and compare two teams’ résumes side by side — a super-useful feature as selection and seeding debates arise this time of year. Each long table displays the selected team’s team’s schedule and results, with a few résumé-oriented columns to add perspective:

(More details to come in a résumé evaluation-focused post.)

Game-level filters on the right allow you to drill down to specific games based on date, opponent rank (e.g. Top 50 in adjusted net efficiency), site, or result, with each team’s schedule table then being filtered accordingly. The summary table up top for each team shows W-L, total expected wins, and total win value across the games that fit the filters selected.

Going back to the Virginia-Texas Tech men’s comparison mentioned above, let’s look at their game-level results side-by-side.

The Cavaliers have built a stronger résumé on the back of some very close wins in tough games. Notice how many more non-“gimme” wins (those with win values in the 0.2 to 0.5 range) they have compared to what shows up on the Red Raiders’ résumé to date.

Some other notes on the metrics shown on this dashboard page:

We can see that the top men’s game by Adj WAA in all six seasons for which we have data came earlier this year: Marquette’s Markus Howard posting a +0.602 vs USC back in November, when he scored 51 points on nearly 80% true shooting in a 22-point win. Howard has a penchant for this type of peak single-game performance, accounting for three of the top 10 individual player games by this metric during the span of our data.

Take a deep breath, as we just covered a lot of ground! But hopefully that sets the table for all the interesting things that are possible to learn with our NCAA basketball metrics and dashboard this season.

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