2011 Caltech Most Outstanding Athlete - Ryan Elmquist '11
2011 All-West Region Team - Ryan Elmquist '11
2011 All-Conference Second Team - Todd Cramer '14
2010 Vesper Trophy - Ryan Elmquist '11
2010 SCIAC Athlete of Week - Ryan Elmquist '11
2010 SCIAC All-Academic - ZeNan Chang '10, Christian Clanton '10, Ruslan Kurdyumov '10, Ryan Elmquist '11, Wison Ho '12
2010 NABC Honors Court - ZeNan Chang '10, Christian Clanton '10, Ryan Elmquist '11, Ruslan Kurdyumov '10
2010 Fulmer Tournament Sportsmanship Award - Ryan Elmquist '11
2010 Carl Shy Freshman of the Year - Mike Edwards '13
2010 Caltech Outstanding Male Athlete of the Year - Ryan Elmquist '11
2010 Caltech Freshman Male Athlete of the Year - Mike Edwards '13
2010 All-Engineers Classic Tournament Team - Ryan Elmquist '11
2010 Academic All-District First Team - Ryan Elmquist '11
2009 Vesper Trophy - Ryan Elmquist '11
2009 SCIAC Ducey Award - Matt Dellatorre '09
2009 SCIAC Athlete of Week - Mike Edwards '13
2009 NABC Honors Court - Han Bin Man '09, Christian Clanton '10, Dan Cullina '09, Travis Haussler '09, Ruslan Kurdyumov '10, Wei Li ' 09, Yang Yang '09
Pan Wang scored in double figures in each of the last five games.
As the Caltech basketball program evolves, milestones continue to materialize. The Beavers won program changing games this year during the non-conference slate. Significant wins on the road at West Coast Baptist and Macalester preceded an exciting home win against Babson College, an always strong program from New England. With additional wins over University of Dallas and Pacifica College, all five victories mark the first time Caltech triumphed against said schools. The Beavers played competitive games against several SCIAC opponents, and along the way more records were set.
On the season, Caltech made 158 3-pointers, breaking the record set during Coach Eslinger's first season (up from 133)
The Beavers also eclipsed their mark set last year for 3-point attempts (455), this year upping the total to 535
The 95 points scored in the win at West Coast Baptist are the most points scored in a road game win in team lore
Through the initial part of the season, Caltech held high national rankings in several categories (stat, rank):
3-point field goals per game (9.0 per game, 21st)
3-point FG% (40.9%, 23rd)
3-point FG% defense (27.2%, 28th)
assists per game (18.0 apg, 19th)
Caltech finished the season ranked No. 100 in 3-point FG% defense (32%), 168th in 3-point makes per game (6.3), and 211th in steals (7.2), showing significant improvement from a year ago (up from 34.6%, 258th ... 5.3, 288th ... 5.4, 363th)
The Beavers' 3-point defense and steals per game were good for second and third in the SCIAC, respectively.
Junior Michael Edwards, who was named to the all-conference second team, scored his 1,000 point during the Babson game and finished the season with 1,200 career points. With the mark, he moved past the legendary Fred Anson '54 and into fourth all-time on the career scoring list. He needs just 98 more to pass George Papa '94 and become the program's scoring leader.
Edwards scored a season-high 28 points in a home win versus Pacifica College.
Junior Ethan Boroson tied a program record with 5 steals in the game against Babson, tying the figure set by Matt Dellatorre '09.
Junior Alex Runkel recorded three double-doubles, including an emphatic one in a close game against Occidental where he scored 16 points and hauled in 16 rebounds.
Juniors Collin Murphy (15 points at Redlands) and Pan Wang (20 points vs Whittier) set career-highs for points in a game.
Sophomore Mike Paluchniak scored a season-high 10 points on two occasions (vs UC Santa Cruz and at Claremont-Mudd-Scripps).
Freshmen Andrew Hogue and Bryan Joel etched their names into the program's top 10 for 3-point field goal percentage in a season (.333 and .367, respectively). They each scored 16 points versus La Verne, a season-high for Hogue, while Joel poured in a season-high 22 at West Coast Baptist.
Edwards, Hogue, Joel, and Wang each hit at least four 3-pointers in one game on separate occasions.
Seven different players led Caltech in scoring or rebounding in separate contests during the season.
Periodically, CxB3 presents posts by alumni and friends of Caltech Basketball. Mr. Yang graduated from Caltech in 2009 with a degree in Biology. While playing basketball for the Beavers, he also served as a contributing writer to The Tech, the campus newspaper.
Despite however much we worship the stars of the game, such as Kobe or Lebron, and laud their individual heroics, basketball is a team game. During game four of the NBA Finals last year, Phil Jackson used Bryant as a decoy on the last out-of-bounds play in regulation. Bryant dove towards the ball in order to draw the double team, caught it, then ping-ponged the ball right back to inbounder, Trevor Ariza, who had zipped down the sideline. Ariza then whipped a pass to Derek Fisher on the other side of the floor. As we all know, Fisher hit the wide open 3-pointer to send the game into overtime and the Lakers would go on to win the game and the championship.
Three Lakers. Three passes. Six seconds.
Two players voluntarily passed to teammates in a better position to score. In basketball, plays like that are fairly common, especially on winning teams. Each coach has his own word for it: teamwork, unity, ubuntu. Whatever one calls it, cooperation is key to winning basketball games. In a recent UC Berkeley manuscript, the authors found that the best NBA teams touch each other more. Why? According to the researchers, in other primates like chimps, adults spend up to 20 percent of their day grooming each other. The constant touching is a sign of mutual cooperation. In humans, touching (a handshake, a high five, a friendly punch) may build the same bonds. When I fist-bump a teammate as we're walking onto the court, it may send the message "Hey, bud, next time you're open in the corner, be ready for the kick-out and drain the three. Also, you have the ball and I'm open in the post, dump the ball down low." And it’s all communicated without speaking a single word.
Anecdotes from successful point guards do seem to support the hypothesis. Just look at two-time MVP Steve Nash. The Suns had an intern record how many times Nash high-fived teammates in a game. Take a guess before looking at this video:
The answer is 239. In this case, Nash does seem to build trust and cooperation through his numerous high-fives. Is there any wonder why the Suns went 60-15 with him (and were only 2-5 without) during his first MVP season?
A lot of blogs have featured the Berkeley study and just presented the conclusions at face value. "Touch each other more during games and you'll play better!" But is that really what was concluded in the study?
The paper mentions many ideas, but the main claim is that better bonding between teammates produces better team results. Touch is a proxy for bonding because it’s important in building trust and cooperative bonds. Right off the bat, I have to say that one concern I always had with social science papers is the lack of experimentation. It's not because social science people don't understand how to conduct experiments. Often, experiments are just impossible, and they require the ability to manipulate variables -- while holding all other possible interfering factors constant. In this case, no NBA team in their right mind (well, maybe the Clippers) would allow some experimenter to mess around with team chemistry even if the authors knew exactly how to strengthen or weaken team bonds. In other cases, its often unethical. For example, one can't take twins and coddle one while mistreating the other to see how nurture affects success – that is child abuse.
But, back to our original point: without experimentation, the best the authors can show in a paper is that two variables -- when observed in the real world -- are often found with each other and tightly correlated. The tighter the correlation, the more likely there is a real relationship between these two variables rather than just random chance. Even before all of that, they had to find a way to measure touching and team performance.
For touches, it was as simple as sitting someone down and having him note whenever two players of the same team touched. This included "fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles." Notice these touches come outside of normal basketball plays, so screens and fighting for rebounds don't count. As we all know, a good screen sets players free for open shots. In order to pick off the defender, a good screener usually rubs shoulders with his teammate, while bad screens don't result in any contact ("screening the air"). If screens are counted as touches, the conclusion might as well be winning teams set good screens, while losing teams set bad ones.
As for team performance, it might surprise people that the authors didn't use total number of wins for each team. Instead, they used some statistics not found in a normal box score: offensive and defensive rebounding efficiency, assist ratio, rebound ratio, win score and NBA efficiency. This may surprise some people since, in practical terms, winning more is more often associated with performing better in basketball, but these statistics seem to predict future performance more effectively than total wins. That is because a lot of basketball analysis is done with knowledge of probability theory in mind. To statisticians, two teams playing a game is nothing more than a coin flip. Good teams maximize their probability to win, like weighing a coin to come up heads 90 percent of the time instead of 50 percent. Why look at teams this way? As one knows, with a normal coin, once in a while, the toss will get nine out of ten heads in a row (much like a .500 team goes on a long winning streak). Does that mean the coin will start flipping heads more? Now that would be a neat trick.
Instead of looking at how many heads versus tails came up in the past, a more accurate way to predict future coin flips is to measure where the center of gravity is in the coin. Rebounding efficiency, assist ratio, win score and NBA efficiency are supposed to be a basketball team's equivalent of the coin's center of gravity. But is playing a basketball game really as random as flipping a coin? It's too deep of an argument for this blog post, but I will say these statistics predict more winners in playoff series than just picking the team with a better record.
Once they've determined how they were going to measure touches and team performance, it's on to the analysis where they used hierarchical regression and came up with significance β = .34, t(25) = 2.55, p < .05 for these correlations. In layman's speak, the authors compared number of touches to team performance to see if a team with more touches also had higher performance; if the two values weren't related, the dataset being examined could be generated randomly less than five percent of the time. (p-values are a really tricky and non-intuitive subject. For a better explanation, see this article from scienceblogs.com.)
However, even with the low p value, it’s still difficult to conclude that closer bonding leads to better performance. For one, number of touches measured may not be a good indicator of team bonding. One point the authors missed is that regardless of bonding, better teams produce more high-five worthy plays – that is how they win. More touches equals more good plays, so good teams -- regardless of how well they bond -- will have more opportunities for touches. I would love to see something more nuanced. I think better bonded teams will congratulate each other more for each good play. I would like to see measurements such as "high-fives per dunk" or "chest bumps per clutch defensive stop" and how they correlate with team performance.
How did the young Beavers stack up against the competition this past season? Check out various team and individual ranks, within the conference and on the national stage. (For the majority of team stats, the NCAA ranks 404 schools; for most individual stats, the NCAA ranks 500 players).
Success on the court cannot necessarily be measured by society's traditional sources, those being win-loss columns. At least not yet. Overall development has to be taken into account, and this year, there was certainly improvement.
With such a young and inexperienced team, it's impressive that a dozen program records fell this season. Witness the evolution of Caltech Basketball.
The shot blocking has been talked about and was certainly a positive. The Beavers recorded 92 rejections in their 25 games, smashing the 2008-09 squad's accomplishment of 76. Ryan Elmquist had much to do with the stat as he accounted for more than half of the blocks (an individual season record 50 that bested the talented Ben Turk '98), which was just seven fewer than he and Travis Haussler '09 turned in last season. The eight swats against Chapman was also a team first for getting-that-stuff-out-of-here in one game.
The other team record? Field goal attempts in a season. Certainly worthwhile considering the lack of scoring opportunities due to turnovers and limited offensive rebounding.
Freshman Mike Edwards turned out to be as good as advertised as he broke six individual records (most noteworthy his 62 3-point makes that overtook the trifectas of Josh Moats '97), and entered the Top 10 in four other categories, including points in a season (470), scoring average (18.8 ppg), free throw percentage (.777), and steals in a season (44).
Besides the Elmquist shot blocking party, the junior forward became the No. 1 player in season free throw attempts (208), as he surpassed the foul line feats of Bryan Hires '08. Elmquist already holds the mark for freebies made and attempted in one game (17 of 19).
First-year cagers Collin Murphy and Ethan Boroson also entered the Top 10 in steals for a season (35) and assists per game (3.3), respectively.
Here is the complete list of records in the new era. For everything else, check here.
By the way, since when does Pasadena get to claim so many important bowls? It doesn't really have a college team of its own, aside from those warrior-nerds of Caltech. Ever seen the Caltech basketball team? They're the topic of my latest screenplay, "White Guys Can't Pass Either."
We at CxB3 appreciate the "warrior-nerds" title -- that is pretty cool -- but we're not sure about the proposed screenplay. Seems a bit artificial, forced, and even off color.
First, there are 16 players on the active Caltech roster and just half of them are white. Second, in his attempt to creatively mock a sequel to the film about white men not jumping, he failed to note -- probably because he did no research -- that the Beavers are a good shot blocking team. Third, the team in Pasadena actually boasts a decent assist per field goal ratio. We explored this statistic in comparison to the rest of the SCIAC and a handful of the top teams in the nation, with the assumption that a good pass often leads to a made bucket.
Caltech falls in with a decent rate -- a respectable 54.8 percent of its field goals have an assist factored into the play. How do other teams rank?
Well, Maryville leads the nation in assists per game (20 per contest) and 58.1 percent of its FGs are linked to an assist. Williams, ranked second in the d3hoops.com poll, is at 53.9 percent. No. 1 Wash U, the defending national champion, is at a blistering 66.7 percent. Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, the regular season SCIAC champ, stands at just 43 percent.
Check out the full SCIAC standings in relation to assists/field goals.
Redlands = 55.4
Occidental = 55.4
Caltech = 54.8
La Verne = 54.0
Whittier = 51.1
Pomona-Pitzer = 50.5
Cal Lutheran = 47.9
Claremont-M-S = 43.1
Not that Asst/FG is a significant predictor of success, but interesting to say the least.
Maybe Erksine, at the very least, can come see for himself next season.
Facing Cal Lutheran on February 3, 2010, the Beavers' five blocked shots propelled them into the team record books as they set the mark for most rejections in one season. The previous number was 76, a total that was accumulated during the 2008-09 campaign. Caltech's current team now has 88 with three games to play.
With Ben Turk '98 in the crowd this past Saturday night, junior Ryan Elmquist tied a 12-year old record for blocked shots in a season with 47. Elmquist, who totaled four blocks against Occidental, now has 103 blocks in his career. Turk owns the career record with 126 and maintains the mark for most rejections in one game with six. (Official release from Saturday night).
Elmquist, who through this past weekend was ranked among the nation's elite in blocked shots (2.1 bpg), has blocked three or more shots in seven games this season.
Caltech set a program record against Chapman University on January 6 for most swats in one contest with eight. Elmquist was responsible for five of those on that historic evening. (Official release from Chapman game).
Other Beavers who have aided the blocked shot effort?
All freshman.
6'7" Mike Edwards, 6'9" Jesse Shevin, and 6'2" Ethan Boroson.
6'0" point guard Collin Murphy is even in the mix.
The men's basketball staff has been busy digging up files and statistics in order to compile an updated and truly unprecedented record book. Some fascinating numbers have been uncovered. 1,000 point scorers. Team highs and lows. Individual milestones. Top 20 lists. Even a year-by-year account of game results.
