Study Hall: Kentucky 1,000,000, Missouri 0

Your Trifecta: Post-Shamburger-Gant.

Your Season Trifecta totals: J3 22 points, Shamburger 18, Clark 15, Teki 13, Gant six, Wright six, Allen five, Isabell five, Rosburg two, Post four. By class: sophomores 37, freshmen 34, seniors 17, juniors two.

For better or worse, Mizzou tried. I don't know if trying and losing by 49 is better or worse than simply laying a giant egg, but Mizzou tried. And we'll see what happens from here.

Kentucky 86, Missouri 37

You know how this works by now. After such an obviously, irrevocably negative game, we try to point out some positives.

• Semi-positive point No. 1: the ball-handling wasn't bad! Mizzou had nearly as many steals as turnovers, and ... well ... nine assists isn't bad when you only make 16 shots from the field. Against Kentucky's impossible length, Mizzou couldn't find any uncontested shots, but at the very least, the passing and ball-handling could have been worse.
  
  
• Semi-positive point No. 2: Effort on the glass! Yes, Kentucky owned the offensive glass, grabbing a pretty ridiculous 16 offensive rebounds while missing only 29 shots from the field (and only six free throws).
  
  
• Semi-positive point No. 3: Mizzou didn't waste a good shooting performance! It wouldn't have mattered, so you might as well save it for a tighter game. (Okay, this one's a bit of a reach. Let's move on.)

Mizzou Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post.)

• Semi-positive point No. 4: J3 tried to lead. That's the only happy thing I can say about his game, of course. He was so bad on Tuesday night that he actually broke the Adj. GS formula. I've mentioned before how Adj. GS is calculated, and you can find some links at the bottom of the post, but the general idea is this: I take the Game Score formula linked below, and I adjust it so that the team's cumulative Game Score (adding each individual performance together) matches the team's actual score. So if a team scores 70 points, and its individual Game Scores add up to 58, I more or less multiply everything by 1.21 (70 divided by 58). Negative game scores are possible, however, so things get a little weird if somebody has a particularly bad game ... and in my years of Study Halling, I don't think anybody has ever had a game as bad as J3 did last night.
  
  J3 made just one of 13 shots from the field and missed three of four free throws. He grabbed only one offensive board to offset his misses, and he contributed no blocks, assists, or steals to offset his three turnovers and three fouls. That's amazingly awful. And when you add his Game Score to the Adj. GS formulas, he ends up with an Adj. GS score of minus-55.8 points
  
  This means everybody else's scores are skewed, too. For scoring 10 points and grabbing six boards, Keanau Post ends up with an Adj. GS of 43.1, Shamburger with 30.4, and Jakeenan Gant with 24.3. That's too screwy. So above, I simply removed J3's contributions (I feel like using air quotes there) and calculated Adj. GS without him. Hence the "N/A."
  
  I feel bad for saying anything negative about J3, by the way. He's good, and he's getting better overall. And as Kim Anderson said after the game, his problem wasn't a lack of effort -- it was the opposite. He wanted to be the reason why Mizzou beat Kentucky in Lexington, and he tried to do way, way, way, way, way too much. If you have to watch your best player play the worst game of his life, you at least want it to happen for those reasons. As long as he responds well, this will be a growth experience. And of all the players on the team, I'm least concerned about him responding well.
  
  
• Semi-positive point No. 5: Keanau Post had 10 & 6, and it already almost feels semi-normal. What a week Mr. Post has had. He was a calming force for a team that needed about six more of them. More of that, please.

Summary

Semi-positive point No. 6: Kentucky does this. The Wildcats beat Kansas by 32 points and UCLA by 39. When the Wildcats are on, they are untouchable. And I would say "62% true shooting percentage and 16 offensive rebounds" constitutes the On version of Kentucky. We knew a result like this was possible if Kentucky was dialed in and Mizzou's 3-pointers weren't falling, and wow, were Mizzou's 3s not falling.

This game doesn't even remotely matter in the grand scheme of things. But the response to this game will define the rest of the season. The SEC schedule makers were cruel to Missouri, not only putting this game early in the year (and after two lackluster UK performances, no less ... not that schedule makers had anything to do with that), but then following it up with a pretty tough stretch. Arkansas and Kentucky will be visiting soon, and next week's visit to A&M comes on the heels of A&M's best performance of the year (the overtime loss to UK). That's not fun. But if Mizzou responds well and either beats a mediocre Tennessee squad or at least shows well in a loss, there could still be hope for growth, chemistry, et cetera, moving forward. But if a less-than-confident Mizzou squad lays an egg at home against the Vols, things could get a lot worse before they get better. Kentucky can do what it did to Missouri; what can Mizzou do in response?

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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.