Wake Forest Basketball: KenPom Update and Analysis
The Wake Forest men's basketball team are on a four game win streak. Winners of six of their last seven, the Deacs are riding high fresh off of a home victory over the ACC-leading Clemson Tigers.
Selection Sunday is less than two months away, and the Deacs are over 60% of the way done with their regular season schedule. Even though head coach Steve Forbes isn't a fan of the computer rankings, they can be very telling about the quality of a team, regardless of their record. Let's take a look at how Ken Pomeroy's predictive model ranks Wake:
The win against Clemson moved the Demon Deacons up one spot in KenPom, from 73rd to 72nd. Wake Forest fell as low as 92nd in mid-December, but they've been steadily rising over this successful stretch. There are a handful of teams with much worse record's than Wake ranked higher in KenPom, including Washington State, who is 9-11 on the season. The model uses numerical data only in its ranking of teams, and factors like strength of schedule, margin of victory, and tempo adjusted efficiency are crucial aspects of the formula.
Although Wake Forest boasts a fearsome offense, ranked 32nd in adjusted offensive efficiency, defense is a different story. The Demon Deacons currently sit at 138th in defensive efficiency, which is 11th best in the ACC.
Only one team in the KenPom top 30 ranks outside the top 100 in defense, the Baylor Bears. Other teams with a similar disparity are Iowa (32nd overall, 7th off, 120th def) and ACC rival Miami (42nd overall, 11th off, 145th. def).
In fact, of the top 30 teams in offensive efficiency, eighteen teams are ranked 65th or worse in defense. On the other side, 17 of the top 30 teams in defensive efficiency are ranked outside the top 65 in offense. Of note: no team in over ten years has won the NCAA tournament while ranked outside the top 30 in KenPom's defensive metric.
Wake Forest has been rolling offensively, averaging an impressive 82.7 points per game over their last seven. Only Miami and UNC rank ahead of the Demon Deacons in offensive efficiency on the year. During conference play only, Wake Forest ranks first in the ACC.
For this team to rise up in KenPom's model, defensive improvement will be the key. This is not the final version of the Wake Forest basketball team, and with twelve tough games remaining on the schedule, there is plenty of opportunity for this team to get better, on both ends of the floor.
Follow @DeaconsDaily on Twitter and Instagram for more Wake Forest content
Ben is a contributing writer for Deacons Daily A '22 Wake Forest graduate, Ben has also written at RedbirdRants, the St. Louis Cardinals FanSided site, for two and a half years.