Sports and Numbers

Methods

All Big 12 players were given cPSAN and cPSAN70 scores based on the entire season, not just conference games.  IMPORTANT: For the sake of comparing "apples to apples," the scores for Kansas players were computed the same way as for all other teams.  That is, the season-ending boxscore was used, rather than the sum of each individual game cPSAN rating.  This means the KU players' ratings are less indicative of what they truly contributed than my usual analyses, but I didn't want to introduce any systematic bias.

Please remember that the PSAN system of ratings don't always match the perceptions of the media and fans.  Looking at the media's all-conference teams, you'll find mostly players with the highest per-game averages in scoring.  The point of my ratings system is to account for the value of all the other statistics accurately to present something closer to the true value of the player, if possible.  As always, boxscores only contain some of the information necessary to assess player performance, but I think there is value to doing this analysis.

cPSAN is meant to represent "total impact" or "overall contributions" to the team, while cPSAN70 is a way of measuring the efficiency of contributions on a per-70-possessions basis.  For the selection of my all-conference teams, I decided to use a combination of both metrics.  That is, who contributed the most and the most efficiently.  I ranked all 109 players in both parameters.  Then sorted them based on the combined ranking.  I decided that each all-conference team must have at least 1 big and 1 small, and they could not have more than 2 bigs or 2 smalls.  "Combo" represents players who aren't clearly a big or small.  With those criteria, here are the results: