Study Hall: Auburn 85, Missouri 79

Your Trifecta: Shamburger-Clark-Isabell.

Your Season Trifecta totals: J3 22 points, Shamburger 16, Clark 15, Teki 13, Gant five, Wright six, Allen five, Isabell five, Rosburg two, Post one. By class: sophomores 37, freshmen 34, seniors 17, juniors two.

In Friday's LSU Study Hall, I mentioned that Auburn does two things well: force turnovers and draw fouls. Bruce Pearl's team also plays at a pretty high pace. Auburn has a style very similar to that of Mike Anderson's teams, only more physical.

And ... well ... do you remember how Mizzou used to get tons of calls at home and absolutely none on the road? Let's just say that basketball officiating hasn't improved since Anderson left Columbia.

Auburn 85, Missouri 79

• Mizzou slowed the pace down, shot as well as it has all year, and rebounded as well as it has all year against a power-conference team. You hate to waste a performance like that, especially when it also includes you being up eight points early in the second half. But Auburn's two strengths were too strong. Auburn more than doubled Mizzou up in the BCI department and nearly doubled the Tigers up in free throws attempted. And while the officiating was worthy of scorn, so was Mizzou attempting 27 3-pointers. Auburn got home-town calls, and there would have been a severe officiating shift in Columbia, but only one team was seeking contact at times.
  
  
• Basically, you become a great ball-handling team with great ball-handling guards and not-completely-horrific ball-handling bigs. Mizzou is getting somewhere with the former, but ... hoo boy, the latter. Shamburger, Clark, and Isabell: 7 assists, 3 turnovers, 1 steal. Those numbers were better against LSU, but they're still a solid 2.67 BCI. Meanwhile, J3, Post, and Gant: 3 assists, 9 turnovers, 1 steal. A 0.44 BCI. J3 even had three assists and was still a liability in this regard.

Mizzou Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post.)

• Shamburger was one block away from filling the box score.
  
  
• Again, you hate to waste any game in which Shamburger, Clark, and Isabell combine to go 9-for-20 from the 3-point line. But 20 3s is a lot for them to attempt, and the rest of the team tried seven more (and made one).
  
  
• Two straight relative duds from D'Angelo Allen. I guess he was due.
  
  
• Keep your head, Namon.
  
  
• The bar is low, I realize, but I will actually say I was encouraged by Ryan Rosburg's 16 minutes. He should have had more than one rebound in that span, but two blocks and a made free throw? Progress, I say!

Summary

Technically, this loss didn't mean much; it isn't going to keep Mizzou out of the NCAA Tournament or anything like that. But ... man oh man, you hate to lose a shot at starting 2-0 in SEC play, especially when you're doing it without Teki Gill-Caesar, and especially when you're up two points with six minutes left.

At that point, Wes Clark missed a 3 that would have put Mizzou up five, and Tahj Shamsid-Deen made a layup on the other end, triggering a 9-0 run that eventually won (well, lost) the game. Mizzou ran out of gas, lost the plot, etc., and the Tigers lost one of the more winnable games (at least, winnable road games) remaining on the schedule. No fun.

As I've said many times now, the only goals for this season are improvement and happy moments. Put together as much or as many of these things, and you have a strong chance of keeping this team's nucleus in place for Kim Anderson's second season. In theory, freshmen become sophomores, sophomores become juniors, and young teams become seasoned, old ones. But you need positivity; you can't lose too much. And Saturday was a missed opportunity for another stellar moment. And now comes a trip to Lexington.

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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.

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 an offensively limited center, 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.