Study Hall: Mizzou 87, Oklahoma 49

Your Trifecta: English-Denmon-Ratliffe. Your winners: the_k and, for the second straight game, Tigersintheheart. One more, and I guess we have to start calling it the Tigersintheheartfecta.

So this post is a bit later than I intended, primarily because I've been tears over the GIFs Of 2011 for the last hour. I will pretend that in some way this GIF reflects last night's game. That gives me an excuse to post it here.

Anyway. The game. Honestly, I thought about just saying "This is what Mizzou stats look like when everybody plays well at the same time" and leaving it at that, but I guess I'll attempt at least a little bit of elaboration (while I continue to laugh at the above GIF).

Mizzou 87, Oklahoma 49

I Mean ... This Is What Mizzou Stats Look Like When Everybody Plays Well At The Same Time

Hard to come up with anything more than that. Ridiculous shooting, BCI over 2.0, dominance on the glass ... the only place I can offer any sort of critique is in the Oklahoma turnovers column. Mizzou only forced eight of them. Just think if that had reached double digits...

Mizzou Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post.)

• When Kim English gets hot, this team reaches full-on Unstoppable Mode. He was serving as both power forward (nine rebounds) and wing (five 3-pointers), and Mizzou would have won easily with that even if everybody else had been cold from long range. That Mizzou players not named English made seven of 13 3's just made the score silly.
• After dabbling a bit too much in the shooting guard category in the Old Dominion game, Mike Dixon went back to his role as a 1.5, half-point guard (four assists), half-shooting guard who makes F*** You 3's and attacks the rim with abandon. He wasn't amazingly productive last night, but a) he didn't need to be, and b) this was still the role he needs to be playing.
• Matt Pressey has reached 9.0 Adj. GS points or better in five of the last six games. Consider that another in the list of "Mizzou is really hard to beat when..." ingredients.
• I really liked seeing Andrew Jones getting a couple of extra minutes. As I mention in the upcoming Roundtable, Jones is the new "In Case Of Emergency..." big man in Kadeem Green's absence, so he needs to be getting as many low-impact minutes as possible. And aside from the fact that he needs to be a couple of inches taller, he really didn't look out of place, did he? He's now 3-for-4 from the free throw line, he enjoys contact, and he grabbed himself an offensive rebound last night. If Ricardo Ratliffe or Steve Moore go down or get into major foul trouble, somebody needs to be ready to play some spot minutes. Jones, almost by default, appears to be that somebody.

To the checklist!

Marcus Denmon's Usage% needs to be 23% or higher. (Yes!)
Kim English's %T/O needs to be at 10% or lower. (Yes!)
Kim English's Floor% should be at 35% or higher. (To say the least.)
Ricardo Ratliffe's %Fouled should be at least 10%. (Yes!)
Phil Pressey's Touches/Possession need to be 3.5 or better. (Yes!)
Mike Dixon's %Pass should be 55% or higher. (Yes!)
Steve Moore's Touches/Possession should be at least 1.0. (Yes!)

Seven-for-seven. Everybody does their job, and Mizzou wins by 38. Funny how that works (though shooting obscenely well didn't hurt).

Three Keys Revisited

From yesterday's preview:

The Glass. Oh God, The Glass

This probably needs no elaboration, eh? Mizzou got torched on the glass against Old Dominion, and Oklahoma is capable of doing the same. Break even in terms of expected offensive rebounds, and Oklahoma will probably need to shoot about 55% from 3-point range to have a chance.

Expected Offensive Rebounds: Mizzou +1, Oklahoma -6.

Mizzou took on an excellent rebounding team and destroyed them on the glass. That is very much atop the "Mizzou is really hard to beat when..." list. Now they need to show they can do this on the road.

From Way Downtown

Mizzou opponents have made more than 33 percent of their 3's only three times in the last 11 games, and Mizzou's 3-point % defense has improved from 164th last year to 67th this year. And while Old Dominion made some key 3's in Norfolk last week, they still missed most of them, going 6-for-20 overall. Oklahoma wins by making 3's and eating glass; if they cannot get hot from long range, they probably won't grab enough offensive rebounds to win. And at the same tiime, if Mizzou shoots pretty well themselves (Oklahoma is a solid 65th in 3-point % defense), they will always be tough to beat, especially at Mizzou Arena.

3-Pointers: Mizzou 12-for-21 (57%), Oklahoma 3-for-11 (27%).

Um, advantage: Mizzou. To put it mildly. The Tigers made more than OU attempted and doubled up the Sooners in terms of 3PT%.

Which Flip?

Last year, I included Kim English's name in the Keys portion of previews about two-thirds of the time. I get the feeling it will be the same with Phil Pressey this year. Like alcohol to Homer Simpson, Flip seems to be the cause of, and solution to, most of Missouri's problems. Against two solid, if unspectacular point guards in Sam Grooms and Carl Blair, Flip will own enough of a quickness advantage that he can probably penetrate pretty well. But if he's turning the ball over after penetrating, or if he's launching more than one or two quick 3's, his head is out of the game, and Oklahoma could be ready to make a run.

I thought Flip was pretty quiet in this game ... and he ended up dishing seven assists and scoring five points in three shots. That's pretty good for "quiet."

Summary

Mizzou rose from 10th to seventh in Ken Pomeroy's rankings after this one. They are 14-0, and Pomeroy has them projected to go 14-4 and tie for the conference title with Kansas.

That was really in no way a summary of the Oklahoma game ... I just wanted to see it typed out. It's pretty.

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AdjGS: a take-off of the Game Score metric (definition here) accepted by a lot of basketball stat nerds. It takes points, assists, rebounds (offensive & defensive), steals, blocks, turnovers and fouls into account to determine an individual's "score" for a given game. 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.

Usage%: This "estimates the % of team possessions a player consumes while on the floor" (via). The usage of those possessions is determined via a formula using field goal and free throw attempts, offensive rebounds, assists and turnovers. The higher the number, the more prevalent a player is (good or bad) in a team's offensive outcome. As you would expect, someone like Kim English has a high Usage%, while Steve Moore has an extremely low one.

Floor%: Via Basketball-Reference.com: Floor % answers the question, "when Player X uses a possession, what is the probability that his team scores at least 1 point?". The higher the Floor%, the more frequently the team probably scores when the given player is involved.

Touches/Possession: Using field goal attempts, free throw attempts, assists and turnovers, Touches attempt to estimate "the number of times a player touched the ball in an attacking position on the floor." Take the estimated touches and divide it by the estimated number of possessions for which a player was on the court, and you get a rough idea of how many times a player touched the ball in a given possession. For point guards, you'll see the number in the 3-4 range. For shooting guards and wings, 2-3. For Steve Moore, 1.30. You get the idea.

Anyway, using the Touches figure, we can estimate the percentage of time a player "in an attacking position" passes, shoots, turns the ball over, or gets fouled.