NCAA Championship Preview: A Statistical Breakdown Of Butler Vs. Duke

First off, congratulations to the three out of every 1,000 bracket pickers (0.3 percent, based on ESPN data) that picked Butler in the final game. Even if 80 percent of you are Butler students, faculty, or alumni, you all deserve to win your pool.

(Factoid: About three in every 10,000 brackets, or .03 percent, had Butler versus Duke in the final game. Tough tarts if you were competing against one of them!)

Just for kicks, we went back to check where these teams ranked in our NCAA Basketball Predictive Power Ratings as of the start of the 2010 NCAA tournament. Duke checked in at No. 2 behind Kansas, while Butler had just moved up to No. 22. On a neutral court, Duke projected as the better team by exactly five points.

After its tournament run, Butler has improved its predictive ranking from No. 22 to No. 9. However, Duke has also been playing well, and still projects as the better team by 4.6 points based on a power ratings analysis.

There's no getting around the fact that Duke projects as a significant favorite in the NCAA tournament final. Whether that edge is as large as seven points, as the Vegas point spread currently implies, most likely depends on your assessment of the potential impact of two Butler injuries. If forward Matt Howard (listed as "questionable" as of Sunday night) and/or guard Shelvin Mack ("probable") doesn't play, the Bulldogs will lose one or two double-digit scorers.

It's also easy to lean toward Duke because of their recent play, especially against West Virginia, when the triple-S-club (Scheyer, Singler, and Smith) were all on fire, going 12-for-23 from three-point land and scoring 23, 21, and 19 points respectively—all above their season averages.

The odds of that happening for a second game in a row are likely not great. And those three players combined for a full 81 percent of Duke's total scoring against West Virginia. If one of them cools off in the final, this game could be closer than a lot of people think. If two of them go cold, it could be a lot closer.

Butler will almost certainly need to keep Duke from dominating the offensive boards in order to win. Something will need to give on this front, since this season, the Blue Devils have rebounded nearly 40 percent of their missed shots, while the Butler defense has only allowed opponents to rebound about 25 percent of their missed shots. (However, Butler faced a significantly weaker schedule.)

Both defenses hold opponents to lower effective field goal percentages and scoring efficiency than their offenses average, but Duke has both the more efficient offense (by a fair amount) and defense (by a teeny bit).

Three-point shooting will be another interesting angle.

Butler is clearly a team of bombers (40 percent of Butler's shots this season have been three-pointers, versus 33 percent for Duke), but Duke seems to be airing it out in the tournament.

Against West Virginia, a whopping 45 percent of Duke's shot attempts were threes. And Duke absolutely lit it up last game, making 52 percent of its three-pointers, while Butler sucked up the joint, shooting just 23.8 percent from behind the arc, well below its season average.

Hopefully, this will be a fun game to watch, as there are a number of statistical, as well as more random factors, (e.g. Duke goes cold shooting after an extraordinary performance on Saturday, while Butler heats up after an off game) at play that could break Butler's way and give the Bulldogs a decent shot.

But at the end of the day, the trade we ply is ruthless and unforgiving data analysis, and our predictive models say Duke has at least a 70-75 percent chance to win this game.

Let's put that in perspective. It's Red Sox 2, Yankees 1. Bottom of the ninth. Two out. Men on second and third. Jorge Posada (.285 average) takes his stance in the batter's box. If he gets a hit, Butler wins the national championship.