Study Hall: Mississippi State 52, Missouri 43

Your Trifecta: Shamburger-J3-Wright.

Your Season Trifecta: Shamburger 42, J3 39 points, Clark 24, Teki 20, Wright 14, Post 13, Gant 13, Allen nine, Isabell seven, Rosburg five. By class: freshmen 63, sophomores 63, seniors 55, juniors five.

I think I've more or less written this exact line already this season, but Missouri lost yesterday because Mississippi State wasn't scared of any of Missouri's offensive threats. Early on, I saw pretty crisp ball movement around the perimeter and occasionally inside. You could tell everybody was doing what they've been drilled to do. But the point of crisp ball movement is to force the defense to lose its shape. And it only loses its shape if it's scared of something you're trying to do.

MSU was focused on keeping Keith Shamburger in check, watching J3 on the drive, forcing Namon Wright and Teki Gill-Caesar to drive ... and that's about it. Jakeenan Gant gets the ball at the top of the key? Go ahead, shoot it. You too, J3. Want to dump it into Keanau Post? He's bobbling every pass he touches, so go ahead there, too. Wright and Teki went 3-for-6 from 3-point range but 4-for-13 on 2-pointers, with five turnovers, one assist, no free throws.

In the end, the ball movement did nothing but eat up clock before an iffy jumper. And MSU's own sketchy offense had just enough successes to win the game. Bleh.

Mississippi State 52, Missouri 43

• J3 picked a pretty bad day to stink from the line. He was the only Tiger getting to the line (10 attempts to everybody else's five) ... and he made four of them. When your team is shooting a hilarious 30% on 2-pointers, you need to make your freebies. (He still made the Trifecta, by the way.)
  
  
• But hey, the defensive rebounding was pretty good.

Mizzou Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post.)

• Only one Tiger averaged more than one point per FG attempt: the guy who missed six of 10 free throws. That's ... I'm not sure I've ever seen that before. One point per shot is pretty awful.

Summary

Not sure there's anything to say. We'd seen a version of this episode before. It really did seem like the physical energy was there. Mizzou made the occasional dumb mistake on defense, but the effort was where it needed to be to beat a pretty bad team. But when Mizzou doesn't have an outside shooter knocking something down, there's no offense whatsoever.

As I wrote when he was hired, Kim Anderson was a pretty damn strong offensive coach at Central Missouri, albeit in a different level, where elite, tall athletes don't really exist. He has obviously had his own learning to do in terms of what works and what doesn't, and he'll still have some raw talent at his disposal next year. We'll see what he comes up with when he builds another offense from scratch next year. This one just doesn't have much to offer.

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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.