BTN.com staff, March 15, 2013

On Thursday, BTN.com offered something new for the 2013 Big Ten Men?s Basketball Tournament in the form of deeper live box scores provided by Stats LLC. Just check out this example from Thursday's Illinois-Minnesota game. And we do it again today as well as for the rest of the weekend.

The Stats? SportVU Tracking System captures X/Y positioning coordinates of the players and the ball to deliver unique performance data by merging the in-depth tracking data with traditional play-by-play information. So what does that mean? The new in-game stats include:

  • Speed & Distance: Distance Run (Dist.) is the total miles a player has run in the game. Average Speed (Avg Spd) is the average speed (mph) of a player during live ball action.
  • Rebounding: Rebound Chances (Reb Chances) is the number of times a player is within 3.5 feet of the ball at the time of a rebound. Rebounding % (Reb%) is the percentage of rebounds a player secures divided by his chances.
  • Assists: Secondary Assists (SA) is similar to a hockey assist, the secondary assist tracks which players help set up an assist. Adjusted Assists (AA) is the sum of assists, secondary assists and free throw assists.

Learn more about SportVU here. It's really pretty cool. See these other box scores below from Thursday's games to see what we mean – and use Friday's to see them live.

The data also allows us to look at games from a different point of view. For example, here's a look at Minnesota's efficiency from Thursday's loss to Illinois.

  Min Touches Points Points/Touch FGM FGA Touches/FGA Touches/FTA
Rodney Williams 38 59 5 0.08 2 7 8.4 29.5
Andre Hollins 36 101 13 0.13 4 10 10.1 50.5
Trevor Mbakwe 27 32 8 0.25 3 4 8.0 16.0
Austin Hollins 24 45 16 0.36 4 5 9.0 9.0
Andre Ingram 24 25 3 0.12 1 4 6.3 25.0
Joe Coleman 20 56 4 0.07 2 6 9.3
Maverick Ahanmisi 11 32 0 0 1 32.0
Elliott Eliason 7 8 0 0 0
Julian Welch 5 13 0 0 2 6.5
Oto Osenieks 4 15 0 0 1 15.0 7.5
Maurice Walker 3 3 0 0 0
Total 389 49 0.13 16 40 9.7 27.8