MVPotN Game 18

 Man the players really shined brightly last night, some incredible games.  I wasn't able to find the time to really look into all of the games in depth this time, but let me at least go over some of the players who really stood out last night.  First and foremost, I'd like to welcome Ralph Kim, our newest addition to our list :)  I am sure if he were real, he'd be jumping for joy and screaming like a school girl in excitement.  He replaces Michael Woll, also from the Lynchburg squad.  Woll is a very impressive player, but Kim certainly tends to have more MVPotN-like performances.  Speaking of which, he just so happened to put up 28 points last night on normal tempos.  He was lights out from 3, going 8-12 and even made his only shot attempt inside the arc as well.  FYI, that's the equivalent of shooting and making thirteen 2-point shots in a row!  Donald Zipkin had another amazing night, 67% from the field, 26 points, 6 boards and 3 blocks in a fairly slow-paced game.  The guy has been putting up super numbers all season long.  Robert Quinto may have been a touch less impressive, scoring 22 with 5 turnovers, but he was nearly 50% from 3 and just because Quinto makes it look easy doesn't mean it is.  

Joshua Wallace led the candidates last night in scoring, putting up 58 points.  Obviously I set him to 100% distribution, ran uptempo and cut him loose.  He ended shooting about 37% from 3 which is right around what I was expecting.  He won't be in the running tonight for a couple of reasons:  I don't want to encourage others to be foolish like me, I feel his performance actually hurt the team's performance, and because the 100% distribution was against a SIM and it was just for experimentation.  Had I been bold (stupid) enough to try this against a human, maybe I'd have considered it.  Percentages are just as important as big numbers. :)  On to McCaffree, he was also on the money last night with some big scoring.  It would have been nice to see a couple more rebounds considering the "Up-Up" tempos, but still a grand performance.  Bobby Lujan (last night's runner up) had another notable performance, no trouble as usual with his dazzling 3-point performances.  No standout numbers in the other categories but it looks like he got a little bit of everything and that really adds up.  That just leaves Tommy Andrews (last night's runner-up).  The guy had a spectacular night and ripped down 15 rebounds to go with his 32 points.  That is a lot of points and a lot of rebounds, in case some of you weren't aware.

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It's time to pick-em!  Now, I might not have had time for a great write-up today, and I feel bad that I didn't have it done earlier, so I am going to try to make it up to you all.  I've been working this season on a method for calculating players' performances.  The SIM measures RPI and SOS and the players' stats and ratings are all there, but I have always thought it would be great to watch a player do respectable against a top 10 rpi team and a player do spectacularly against some 180 rpi SIM and be able to compare the two performances and see which was better.  As of now, I have not finished testing the system and am sure it will still need some adjusting but since the results came out almost how I would have picked them anyway, here's the link and you can see the results for yourselves.  Quinto and McCaffree had great performances but I didn't include them because it's so time-intensive and I felt they were just a notch below some of the others.  John Whyte played a very tough game last night and I included him for my research.  And after you've seen my picks, I wonder how you would pick them?