Hoya Paranoia | The Hoya's Sports Blog

At one point during Head Coach John Thompson III’s appearance on ESPNU’s College Basketball Podcast on Feb. 18, host Andy Katz said, “You know, the schedule is completely unbalanced, but you’ve known that for years in the Big East.”

Complaints about unbalanced schedules in the Big East are nothing new. When the league had only 10 teams, the schedule was a double round-robin, meaning that each team would play every other team twice — once on the road, and once at home — a system that is about as fair as possible.

This season, with 15 teams in the league, such a format is impossible, and Georgetown will play each team at least once and four teams (Marquette, Rutgers, St. John’s and Syracuse) twice. Between 2003 — when five teams from Conference USA joined the Big East — and 2012, each team in the Big East played every other team in the league once and three teams twice each season.

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A few weeks ago, columnist Peter Barston took a look at home-court advantage for each of the schools in the so-called “Catholic Seven” over the past five seasons. Like all of the schools profiled, Georgetown performed notably better at home than on the road, even when you remove all non-conference games from the equation. If you haven’t already read the piece, I suggest you do, but now I’d like to take a closer look at Georgetown’s numbers.

In the past five Big East seasons, the Hoyas have scored an average of 67.3 points in the Verizon Center and have allowed an average of 62. On the road they have averaged 66.3 points scored and 65.9 allowed. By examining Georgetown’s offensive and defensive statistics both at home and away in those five seasons, I hoped that I could find the source for those extra points. There was a lot of data and it didn’t make sense to post it all, so below are the stats that I found the most significant and some analysis.

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With the Hoyas on a week-long break at the halfway point of their Big East schedule, it seems like the ideal time to reflect on the team’s play up to this point in the conference.

Studying players’ plus-minus is a relatively common practice in basketball today. For those unfamiliar with how this works, it’s quite simple: one subtracts the number of points a player’s team allows while he is on the floor from the number of points that his team scores during the same time period. Proponents of the statistical measurement argue that it provides a quick and simple way to evaluate a player’s value to his team, while detractors say the stat fails to account for important factors such as both the quality of opponents on the floor and quality of a player’s teammates. In order to account for the latter, unit plus-minus (the difference between points scored and allowed for an entire unit) has grown in prevalence over the past few years.

Although the stat still doesn’t account for the quality of opponent on the floor, it can offer interesting insight into a team’s play. As such, I reviewed Georgetown’s first nine Big East games and calculated the plus-minuses of all 58 player combinations that Head Coach John Thompson III has utilized. Below are the stats for all the five-man combinations that have seen more than four minutes of action and some brief analysis:
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