Study Hall: South Carolina 63, Missouri 54

Your Trifecta: Rosburg-Shamburger-J3. Rosburg!

Your Season Trifecta: Shamburger 44, J3 40 points, Clark 24, Teki 20, Wright 14, Post 13, Gant 13, Allen nine, Rosburg eight, Isabell seven. By class: sophomores 64, freshmen 63, seniors 57, juniors eight.

Rosburg! The season ends with Ryan Rosburg topping the Trifecta while grabbing just two rebounds in 21 minutes. That's ... fitting? Strange? Just sad?

South Carolina 63, Missouri 54

• In terms of expected rebounds, Mizzou out-boarded a Frank Martin team by 5.4 ... and lost by nine. I wouldn't have thought that possible. But when you make barely 40% of your 2s and one-quarter of your 3s, anything is possible.
  
  
• As poor as the shooting was, ball control seemed like the biggest culprit to me in this one. South Carolina simply tried to play tight man defense and wait for Mizzou to get impatient. It was pretty easy to do. With no go-to option to lean on, Mizzou simply passed the ball around until someone had to force the issue. That usually resulted in a bad jumper (J3: 2-for-10 from the field, 1-for-4 from 3-point range) or a turnover (Teki and Wright: eight turnovers, two assists). And with Keith Shamburger limited to 19 minutes because of both a brief suspension and four fouls ... yeah.
  
  
• A 58-possession pace. It is so hard to love college basketball right now. I'm trying, but it's hard.

Mizzou Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post.)

• Rosburg and Post combined for three defensive rebounds in 31 minutes, and Mizzou still kept SC off the glass. I don't get it. (And yes, I'm even talking about expected rebounds, not actual rebounds -- obviously SC's offensive rebounding opportunities were limited by the fact that they were actually making baskets. That, and the snail's pace.)
  
  
• We'll obviously talk more about this in the coming weeks, but item No. 1 on the to-do list for both Teki and Wright: Attack. Drive. Draw contact. Do things that open up shooting opportunities on the perimeter for both you and your teammates. That Teki actually attempted four free throws last night was encouraging to me, and that's sad. Teki's 6'6, 215 pounds. He's one of the only players on the team that has decent size for his position. The back injury he incurred near the basket in December completely changed his attacking mindset, but even before that, it wasn't like he was living at the line.
  
  
• D'Angelo Allen over the last six games of the season: 102 minutes, six points, six shots from the field, no free throws, four offensive rebounds, three turnovers. He's never going to be an offensive threat, nor is he really intended to be. But you still have to exist on the offensive side of the court. Otherwise your team's playing 4-on-5. And Mizzou doesn't have enough good offensive players to play 5-on-5 at the moment.

Summary

I don't have any lasting words to share here. We'll talk about plenty of "Fixing Mizzou" things in the coming weeks. But this game played out like a Mad Libs version of most of the season's losses: "[Player A] played well, and [Player B] wasn't bad, but that was about it. Mizzou didn't get to the line enough, and while the Tigers actually did pretty well at [Category C], [Category D] and [Category E] were nightmares, and in the end, there just wasn't enough offense to get the job done."

Player A: Rosburg.
Player B: Shamburger.
Category C: Rebounding.
Category D: Shooting (a frequent Category D).
Category E: Turnovers.

And now we move on.

---

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.