Study Hall: Alabama 62, Missouri 49

Your Trifecta: Post-Shamburger-Rosburg. Huh.

Your Season Trifecta: J3 29 points, Shamburger 29, Clark 21, Teki 16, Wright eight, Isabell six, Gant six, Allen five, Post eight, Rosburg four. By class: sophomores 50, freshmen 41, seniors 37, juniors four.

So this might be the most amazing single stat this season: Missouri players not named Keith Shamburger made 16 shots from the field yesterday. Shamburger had an assist on 11 of them. But he still didn't finish first in the Trifecta because, like everybody player in a Mizzou uniform shorter than 6'10, he shot horrifically -- like, unsustainably bad -- from the field. We're into "I can't believe how bad this has gotten" territory with our stats and tidbits this year, but that's ... well, it's not good, but it's good-bad. Or bad-good. It's very tough to do, at least.

Alabama 62, Missouri 49

• Hey, everybody! I have great news! Missouri's offense almost literally can't stay this bad! Mizzou's eFG (effective FG%, which is basically FG% plus extra credit for 3-pointers) for the last two games has been 36.1% and 35.7%. For the season, Grambling currently ranks last in the country at 38.6%. Alabama and Ole Miss are pretty good defensive teams, but they're not that good. In theory, at some point Mizzou is going to stop missing makable shots! So we have that going for us!
  
  
• It was almost a broken record last night. For every three Mizzou possessions, we were pretty much guaranteed 1) a good possession and points, 2) a good shot that somebody simply missed (often badly), and 3) a really stupid possession. In theory, (2) should change at some point. Because, again, we're talking about unsustainably bad shooting percentages here.
  
  
• I liked the energy, though! Granted, Alabama's offense was limited by the Tide missing their leading scorer, but Mizzou was still playing hard, minimizing second-chance opportunities, and winning the ball control battle (thanks to Shamburger). After the "oh crap, here we go again" fade against Ole Miss, energy was important, and they brought that to Tuscaloosa. They just couldn't get the rims to cooperate (well, when they hit the rims, anyway), not even a little bit.
  
  
• The foul numbers got skewed a bit at the end. Through 35 minutes, the total foul count was Mizzou 17, Alabama 11. Then Mizzou committed seven fouls in the last five minutes. Alabama wasn't committing fouls no matter what (which certainly tells you something about the shots Mizzou was taking), but Mizzou didn't really start until the end, at least by "college basketball in 2014-15" standards.

Mizzou Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post.)

• Post and Rosburg: 7-for-12 from the floor (58%)
  Everybody else: 11-for-44 (25%)
  
  Even if you take out 3-pointers, Everybody Else was 7-for-21 (33%). Wow. Poor Wes Clark was 0-for-5 on 2-pointers, and if I recall correctly, only one was a dumb/bad look. One was a layup.
  
  
• Clark played a prominent role in the most "Sigh..." portion of the game. Mizzou had fallen down by six early in the second half and was losing the plot offensively -- Rosburg missed something other than a chip shot (and he should probably only be taking chip shots), and J3 missed a 3-pointer with plenty of time left on the shot clock. But after a timeout, Mizzou came out focused. Rosburg made a layup, and Shamburger got a steal, but Clark missed a mid-range jumper he's made plenty of times in his career. Alabama missed a shot, Mizzou came down, and Namon Wright missed a pretty open 3. After a media timeout, Clark missed basically the same mid-ranger. Alabama made a much tougher shot to push the lead to six, then after a Shamburger imss, Clark got a steal and an easy layup ... that he missed. Levi Randolph made a 3-pointer, and the lead was nine. Mizzou would cut the lead back to three a couple of minutes later and would hang around for most of the game, but in a season in which we're getting pretty good at picking up on "yeah, this isn't our night" cues, that was a pretty clear one.
  
  
• Freshmen: 5.0 Adj. GS points, 13 actual points (albeit on 5-for-16 shooting). As sad as it may be, that's demonstrable improvement. That Teki took more 2s than 3s is actually a good sign long-term -- he's been understandably tentative since his return from the back injury, and the only good game he's had came because he got hot from 3-point range (which won't consistently happen). Teki didn't have a good game per say, but it was better. And while Gant still had a couple of silly fouls, a couple of actually good things happened when he touched the ball. He needed that.

Summary

Even before the UMKC game, I said my primary hope for this season was that Missouri would be playing better in February than it did in November. That hasn't happened thus far. I do still think that can be the case, as, again, there's almost no way the offense can maintain this horrific a level of output. It will improve. Of course, that's probably not going to matter much -- six of Mizzou's final nine regular season opponents rank 59th or better according to Pomeroy. So Mizzou could start playing top-100 caliber ball, and it would only result in maybe three wins down the stretch.

Still, improvement would be lovely for everybody involved simply as a reminder that improvement and decent play are possible. The rims will at some point cooperate again, and the hope is that Mizzou will still be playing hard enough to take advantage when that happens.

As I said in today's Links post, results don't really matter at this point. Mizzou is probably going to finish between 3-6 and 0-9 no matter what, and while 3 > 0, it's not really going to make a difference long-term. This is still going to end up Mizzou's worst season since, what, before Norm, I guess? All that matters is that the nucleus continues to develop, and while the win total probably isn't going to change much no matter what, it would be lovely to see this team get some bounces and continue playing with the energy we saw last night. They've done that for the most part this season -- Ole Miss game aside -- and if they can continue to do it, that will say good things about the team's leadership moving forward.

But seriously, Shamburger had 11 assists, and Mizzou only scored 49 points. That's amazing.

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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.