Neutral Courts

Up next for UTEP - a game against #7 Baylor on a neutral court, this time in New Mexico.

First, Baylor's card set.



As you can see, Baylor's impressive stats look even more impressive when you multiply them by that 1.203 factor which signifies the strength of the Big Twelve vs. Conference USA. My rule of thumb is that anyone who is shooting in the "fives" - whose field goal range on the card starts with 11 and ends up somewhere in the 50s - is a force to be reckoned with. There are two or three good players on Baylor who have that kind of shooting ability. Add to it the fact that that 1.203 factor boosts rebounding as well and Baylor is a team well deserving of its Top Ten ranking.

The only hope for UTEP is that Baylor's shooters do poorly and they get a few forced rests to take them off the courts. Other than that, it might be a long game for UTEP. On the other hand, I said the same thing about Missouri and UTEP had no trouble with Mizzou.

(* * *)

The next thing for me to figure out was "how do you handle a neutral court"?

My first notion was to simply remove Team Index points as a factor. This way, neither team could call on its special and mysterious powers to ignore forced rests and fouls, to grab rebounds, etc.

However, if you look at the Baylor Card set above, Baylor has a Home Court Index of "9" and a Road Index of "7". UTEP has a Home Court Index of "4" and a Road Index of "-1".

The 1993 Statis Pro Basketball Rules introduced the idea of Home and Road indices. One subtracts the smaller of the numbers from the larger and the team putting pu the bigger number gets the index points.

If the game were at Baylor, Baylor would have 9 (Baylor Home Index) - (-1) (UTEP Road Index) for 10 Team Index Points.
If the game were at UTEP, Baylor would have 7 (Baylor Road Index) - 4 (UTEP Home Index) for 3 Team Index Points. Even though UTEP still keeps its home court advantage in setting assignments, Baylor gets 3 points.

Since Baylor is still dynamite against UTEP either at home or on the road, it's unfair for Baylor to be deprived of their Index Points. Hell, they have Index Points even when they play in the hostile environment of UTEP.

The solution: for neutral courts one splits the difference of Index Points. What is between Baylor +3 points and Baylor +10 points? That would be Baylor +6 Team Index points, rounding down (3 + 10)/2. Baylor gets 6 Team Index Points on a theoretically neutral court. If it were the difference between, say, Baylor +10 at home and UTEP +4 at home, Baylor would get (10 - 4)/2 = 3 Team Index points on a neutral court.

There is one more advantage home teams get in the game: the visiting team is forced to put its player cards on the table first, and then the home team decides how it wants to position its players against the visiting team's players. On neutral courts, each team will swap duties. For the first half of the game, one team gets to choose the most advantageous matchups and during the second half, the other team chooses.

More on the outcome of this game later.