Mizzou-Kansas: Statistical Holy Crap

Recently, I've been watching games like I'm watching a 10-round boxing match.  Each 4-minute TV segment is a round.  Let's go to the scorecard from last night.

Round 1: 10-10.  Nerves, feeling each other out, no action.

Round 2: 10-10.  Still quite a bit of nervous action.  (Actually, my buddy and I agreed at this point that the first team to get things together and land some punches could suddenly be up by 10.  Sure enough...)

Round 3: 10-7 KU.  Two knockdowns (and a 10-point lead) for KU.  KU catches fire and Mizzou panics.

Round 4: 10-9 KU.  KU controlling the action now.

Round 5: 10-9 KU.  Mizzou treads water without things getting really bad, but they still lose ground.

Round 6: 10-9 MU.  Thanks to Kim English, MU finally lands some blows.

Round 7: 10-9 MU.  Strong blow from MU almost leads to a knockdown, but not quite.

Round 8: 10-10.  This was a Gatti-Ward esque round right here.  I think you could probably say that there were four knockdowns in Round 8.  MU gets two knockdowns and has the KO punch cued up...and doesn't see the counterpunch and uppercut to the chin coming.  KU almost lands its own knockout punch at the end of the round, but Mizzou lives to fight Round 9.

Round 9: 10-8 MU.  Mizzou chips away the lead once again, and this time doesn't give any of it back.

Round 10: 10-8 MU.  Mizzou needs a huge round to steal the decision...and does just that.

Final: 95-94 decision for Mizzou.  The ups and downs here were ridiculous, and I'll be honest: I thought we had blown our chance in Round 8.

• BCI! BCI! BCI! BCI!  Seriously, nothing else even remotely favored Mizzou in this game, but ball-handling and pressure won the game.  That, and the clutch clutch clutch performances of Zaire Taylor and JT Tiller, anyway.
• In the "Expected Rebounds" category, an 8-board margin is about as big as you're going to see.  With as many shots as Mizzou missed in the first half, you figure they'd have had more "expected" offensive boards, and that was the case...and yet KU grabbed 5 more offensive boards.
• I have NO idea how Mizzou ended up making 66.7% of its FTs.  I realized they shot very well down the stretch and all, but...damn, I wasn't sure we even hit 50%.

And via request from a friend of mine, we'll take a 1st Half vs 2nd Half look after the jump.  The numbers are even more stark than you think.

First Half

• BCI still favored Mizzou...which is, I guess, what kept the margin under about 20 at half.  Actually, overall credit goes to Mizzou's hustle and defense for not letting this be a 40-16 game at half.  KU's offensive numbers just weren't that good.  Full blame for the halftime deficit came on the offensive side of the court.
  
• You simply will not see worse shooting numbers than this.  Wow.  1-for-10 from 3, 6-for-19 from 2, 1-for-4 from the FT line.  Mizzou's 2-point % would have been a bad 3-point %.  The good shots rimmed out, the bad shots barely drew iron.
  

Second Half

• Mizzou didn't really win the shooting battle in the second half, but they at least evened it up, allowing...
• ...the BCI, the number I created specifically to gauge how well Mizzou was playing Mike Anderson's style (which is why I haven't added offensive rebounds to the equation...yet), to single-handedly generate a 14-point comeback.  15 turnovers to 3 in the second half, 8 steals to 2, 8 assists to 3.  Complete domination by Missouri anytime there wasn't a shot in the air.
• They even evened up the rebounding to boot!
  
• I fully credit my halftime "meeting of the minds" with Michael Atchison as the catalyst for the second half comeback.  Just sayin'.

Player Stats

* AdjGS = a take-off of the Game Score metric (definition here) accepted by a lot of basketball stat nerds.  It does the same thing my previous measure of choice did (it takes points, assists, rebounds (offensive & defensive), steals, blocks, turnovers and fouls into account to determine an individual's "score" for a given game), only the formula is more used and accepted.  The "adjustment" in Adjusted Game Score is simply matching the total game scores to the total points scored in the game, thereby redistributing the game's points scored to those who had the biggest impact on the game itself, instead of just how many balls a player put through a basket.

• If you had to guess who finished #2 and #3 in the Game Score race for this game (I assume everybody would guess DeMarre #1), would you have guessed Ramsey and Goose?  Doubtful.  It figures that, in a game that made no sense, that the statistics would...well, make no sense.
• In baseball, there's an ongoing debate about whether there's such a thing as "clutch" play.  In basketball, I'm pretty sure the definition would be "Going 1-for-10 from the field in the first 39 minutes and 2-for-2 in the final minute."  Taylor and Tiller...Hustle & Flow...the Testicle Brothers...whatever you want to call them, they were absolutely, positively clutch last night.  Heading into the final minute, JT Tiller had more jump balls (2 or 3) than points (1).  And yet, there was absolutely no doubt that his shot with 0:48 left was going in.  And while there was a little more doubt about Taylor's shot, it went in...his second game-winner in six days.
• Mizzou made up the deficit on the round-by-round scorecard because of different guys at different times.  KU couldn't quite land the knockout blow in Round 4 or 5 because of guys like Matt Lawrence and Laurence Bowers, the water treaders.  Mizzou won Round 6 because of Kim English, Round 7 because of DeMarre Carroll.  DeMarre's offense and Keith Ramsey's rebounding won Round 9.  And then the Testicle Brothers won Round 10.
• Leo Lyons had one of the strangest lines I've ever seen.  13 points on 15 shots: bad.  1 rebound from a power forward in 24 minutes: BAD.  5-for-7 from the FT line: good.  2.50 BCI (3 ast, 2 stl, 2 TO): GOOD.  Two more assists than rebounding: whut?  I mean, the only way this line makes sense is if Leo Lyons were actually Clarence Gilbert.
  

vs Big 12
Mizzou: 8-2

• A 2-for-14 performance will put a nice little hit on your overall 3-point %.  Mizzou dips back below 40%, but since they won I can avoid accusations of jinxing them with a) my calling them a "good 3-point shooting team" after the ISU game and b) my being recorded in the Missourian predicting a victory.
  

• Yeah, DeMarre almost HAS to be 1st-team all-conference at this point, doesn't he?
  

Rachel Phelps Update: two pieces of the puzzle (i.e. wins to basically clinch an NCAA Tourney bid) to go.