Study Hall: Ole Miss 67, Missouri 47

Your Season Trifecta: J3 29 points, Shamburger 27, Clark 21, Teki 16, Wright eight, Isabell six, Gant six, Allen five, Post five, Rosburg three. By class: sophomores 50, freshmen 41, seniors 32, juniors three.

For about 10 minutes, Missouri's energy was where it needed to be. The Tigers were managing Ole Miss' pressure and tempo well and were creating a lot of open looks for themselves. And jumpers by Wes Clark and Teki Gill-Caesar gave Mizzou a 15-14 lead nine minutes in.

But the open jumpers -- usually 3-pointers -- just kept rimming out. And you could just see the metaphorical balloon deflating. And then Stefan Moody got hot, Mizzou lost the plot, and the balloon popped.

Ole Miss 67, Missouri 47

• Ole Miss is a strong ball-handling team that moves pretty quickly. Mizzou slowed the pace down dramatically -- as it is wont to do -- and basically drew in terms of steals and turnovers. Rebounds, too. But the Tigers simply couldn't make a damn shot. Covered or uncovered, short or long, the shots just didn't go in. Mizzou shot a bad 24% from 3-point range (6-for-25) and an absolutely horrific 36% on 2-pointers (13-for-36).
  
  
• This team desperately, desperately needs one of those crazy, ridiculous, unconscious, hot-shooting games. Even bad offenses have them at some point, and ... has Missouri had one this year? This team needs one of those games, not only because those games are simply good, but because they have completely lost confidence. It's all gone. The fight is usually there, and the game plans seem decent, but fight dissipates when belief does. And belief vanished yesterday.

Mizzou Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post.)

• Boy, you hate to waste a J3 performance like this. He scored 14 points on 10 shots and did quite well on the defensive glass (though he didn't grab a single offensive board), but shots NOT attempted by J3 were incredibly awful -- non-J3 2-pointers were 10-for-29 (34%), non-J3 3-pointers were 4-for-22 (18%), and non-J3 FREE THROWS were 1-for-8 (13%). ONE FOR EIGHT. Just horrific. Even for a bad shooting team, this was almost impossibly bad.
  
  
• Ole Miss was clearly completely okay with anybody not named Williams shooting the ball, but I can't say I hated the shots Shamburger and Clark took for the most part. They just didn't go in.
  
  
• D'Angelo Allen's last six games: 0-for-22 on 2-pointers, 0-for-2 on 3-pointers, 2-for-8 from the line. I said he had hit a wall about five games ago, and he just keeps getting defeated by that wall. He grabbed four offensive rebounds against Ole Miss and still ended up with minus-4.5 Adj. GS points.
  
  
• When I realized Keanau Post hadn't been in the game for a while, I actually began to assume he had fouled out. Not actually sure why he only ended up with eight minutes. It didn't really matter, but they were eight decent minutes. And hell, Ryan Rosburg was competent as well. They combined for 9 & 9 in 25 minutes, with two steals, five offensive rebounds, and only four fouls. That's far from amazing, but if they offered to do that each game the rest of the year, I wouldn't complain.
  
  
• Teki's five games since his return from the back injury: minus-8.1 Adj. GS points, minus-8.3, 16.4, minus-1.5, and minus-7.5. Despite the good Arkansas performance, that's a minus-1.8 per game average. He was 3-for-3 on 3-pointers against Arkansas and 1-for-10 otherwise. Like a good teammate, he is right alongside D'Angelo on that wall.
  
  
• Poor Jakeenan Gant. He was trying really hard. Stefan Moody flies in for a putback dunk, so he tries the same thing on the other end and misses. In the second half, he misses a point-blank putback, then goes down to the other end and blocks a shot right to an open man, who makes a 3-pointer. Sound, fury, and awful results.
  
  
• No Tramaine Isabell in this one because of, as Kim Anderson put it, "his ongoing behavior." I've been comparing Tramaine to Clarence Gilbert for much of the season, and it probably bears mentioning that Clarence and Keyon Dooling both clashed with Norm Stewart and almost transferred, then became more mature leaders as juniors and seniors. Tramaine has all the confidence in the world, but we'll see if he's able to mature before his rope runs out here and he either transfers or is asked to leave. There's a lot to like about him, but he's evidently got some growing up to do. Hopefully he does it.

Summary

Don't lose faith in US... WE will get to where WE know we can be.

— Montaque Gill-Caesar (@Tekihwbt) February 1, 2015

I know this is where I'm supposed to write about the 'big picture' and 'where things are headed' and whatnot. But the big picture hasn't really changed, and where Mizzou is headed still depends wholly on off-season work, not on current results. This team is demoralized and sad. It fought hard for 10 minutes, then faded when the effort didn't produce results.

It has lost seven games in a row, and according to Pomeroy, its odds of winning any of the next three games are nine percent (at Alabama), 28 percent (Texas A&M), and nine percent (at South Carolina). It's probably going to get worse, and there's no fast forward button. The desire is still there, but this team is quickly losing hope, and there's really nothing Kim Anderson can do about it midstream. As I have said quite a few times this year, just keep fighting, guys. In theory, the payoff will come at some point, even if it's about 10 months from now.

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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.