Cleveland State 1st 16-player Team Among All-Time Greats

We have finished calculating the Value Add Basketball Game’s six newest inductees, which now appear below and among the 300 all-time teams listed on the Great Teams page. Normally, we create 10 players per team for the game, but we made an exception for Cleveland State by listing all 16 players from their memorable Sweet 16 run in 1986.

The reason for this exception is that Cleveland State played at such a fast tempo that our standard 44-possession Value Add Basketball Game expands to 54 possessions when they are involved. Their relentless pressure defense revolutionized the game, as they averaged more than 12 steals per game while holding opponents to just five. In many ways, they helped turn steals into a defining statistic across the NCAA. With that pace came increased foul trouble, so this expanded roster allows backup players to share player cards with combined stats. If one player fouls out, another can step in seamlessly as needed.

We previewed the other new teams in the previous blog, highlighted by NC State’s miracle championship run under Jim Valvano in 1983. The group also includes two of the original New York powers—Long Island (1939) and the City College of New York (CCNY) 1955 team, the last program to win both the NIT and the NCAA Tournament. Finally, we added two surprise teams from this century: Hampton (2001), an HBCU, and Oral Roberts (2019). We also added two teams from this century that were surprises in the tournament and coincidentally have covered the whole political spectrum with - Hampton 2001 and HBCU that hosted Kamala Harris multiple times and Oral Roberts 2019, where Donald Trump was the latest of many conservative politicians to speak. But these pages are just about the basketball..