Depth in these tournament games is a major non-component when determining how far a team advances.  March Madness breeds longer TV timeouts, more deadball situations, and other elements that would induce stoppage that do not normally occur during the regular season.   By degrees as teams move on to the next round, a coach is inclined to shorten his bench minute distribution to get the best possible five out on the court throughout the course of the game.  Its a myth that depth in the tournament is a significant factor.   To arrive at this resolve, I’ve aggregated a set of data showing appropriation of a team’s bench minutes.  Here are the percentage of regular season bench minutes extracted from kenpom of the remaining final four:

A quick survey of the table betrays the insignificance of depth, not only in this tournament, but in the regular season.  Not one remaining team is ranked inside the top 140.  The next table shows how coaches have even further hardened the barrier between playing and sitting the bench.

The average is only slightly below that of the regular season table, however when taking into account Michigan State being severely encumbered by injuries to key players, and West Virginia having a ratio of bench/starter minutes approaching 50/50 induced by a complete annihilation of Morgan State in round 1, the tournament numbers are in practice lower than what is actually calculated.   And the next graph will show how as the tournament progresses, the allocation of bench minutes tightens considerably:

x = Round #

y = percentage of bench minutes

The reduction of the possible contribution by way of bench is logarithmic in relationship, a much more glaring signifier of the significance of the starting lineup than if it were a linear relationship.  A linear relationship would still show how teams shrink their bench from round to round, but with a lower reliant variance.  The coefficient of determination isn’t used here to actually make an analytical prediction on the percentage of bench minutes each team will exercise in the final four, but merely for a quantitative comparison and proof.

Because Butler is a 5 seed, they have had a relatively tougher path to navigate. Despite close and hard fought games throughout, their bench minutes have slightly declined from round to round.  For Michigan State, due to injuries as mentioned before, Izzo has had to introduce some innovative schematics into his bench allocation philosophy.  Duke and West Virginia would be expected to have the sharpest reduction of playing time from the bench, because of their seed.  WVU has a very high coefficient of determination, meaning the regression line is very close to matching the actual set of data points.  What that does is indicate a consequential decline in bench minutes from round to round.  As pointed out before, though reiterating with varied rhetoric, they completely obliterated Morgan State leading to garbage minutes commandeered by bench warmers.   Regressing WVU’s round one game to a more manageable number, their coefficient of determination (R²) would be very similar to Duke’s or Michigan State’s.

Now having deduced from the table and graph that essentially the starting five has a more measurable impact in the tournament from the bench corollary, what is the best way to figure out which team has the best or most effective set of starters?

Basketball State and Ken Pomeroy both evaluate players through the use of efficiency statistics, and assign the most productive with the highest number.   Directly from BBState:

Efficiency, Eff – The NBA Efficiency Model, which attempts to reward key “good” stats and punish “bad” stats, all in one single statistical measurement. Formula: ((Pts + TReb + A + Stl + Blk) – ((FGA – FGM) + (FTA – FTM) + TO))

I’ve discovered after observing some of the players’ efficiency data, that each of the remaining four teams appear to have three key players, and the rest play supporting roles in some form, often times the four and five starters are juggled with various bench players for starting positions apropos to the dynamics of an MLB team’s starting rotation.

Top three for each team:

West Virginia and Duke are virtually even in terms of top-level basketball acuity measured by efficiency, and the ratings basically show as much.  BBState currently has Duke 2nd compared to WVU’s 4 ranking, and Kenpom has the spread at a modest five points favoring Duke, which says a lot about the Mountaineers considering this year’s Duke team is the greatest in history.  Butler, higher rated in both BBState and Kenpom, also has the top three advantage even with a healthy Kalin Lucas for Michigan State.  After Lucas for the Spartans, two players, Durrell Summers and Devlin Roe, have an efficiency rating of 9.3 and 9.2 respectively.  Durrell Summers has performed admirably up to this point in filling the relative void left by Lucas.  He’s been their proverbial spark, though injuries will likely catch up to Spartans, and apparently Butler is just better.