Rebounding and another drought turned a winnable game into another Missouri loss

Your Trifecta: Wright-Puryear-Phillips.

Your Season Totals: Your Season Totals: Puryear 23, Phillips 17, Wright 13, Clark 12, Gant 10, Walton 9, Isabell 9, VanLeer 7, Woods 5, Allen 2, Rosburg 1. Freshmen 56, sophomores 34, juniors 17, seniors 1.

Georgia 60, Missouri 57

• Forgivable: Georgia's 2PT% is wretched, and the Bulldogs assure that yours is, too. That Missouri struggled to put the ball in the basket made sense.
• Less forgivable: Georgia is a mediocre rebounding team, and Missouri got absolutely wrecked on the glass. In 40 minutes, Ryan Rosburg and Russell Woods grabbed all of five boards (all from Rosburg).
• Even less forgivable: Georgia is a wretched ball-handling team, and Missouri got wrecked in the BCI battle (and only partially because of the lack of assists).
• Mizzou got to the line more than Georgia (a legitimate Mizzou strength at this point) and broke even when it came to actually putting the ball into the basket. But the Tigers lost yet again because they lost battles they shouldn't have.
• (And, yes, they also lost because of that pesky 17-0 run. In the last two home games, Mizzou has given up second-half runs in which they were outscored by a combined 44-4. That's ridiculous, even for a team this young.)

Mizzou Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post.)

• Georgia's big run (followed by a subsequent Mizzou rally) made this one feel familiar in a lot of ways. But the ball-handling issues were relatively unique, as were the per-player stats: six players finished with negative Adj. GS totals, and the other six finished with 68.1. Mizzou's biggest problem has been a lack of steady contributors, not a ton of bad ones. Not so here.
• Man, if Wes Clark just has a mediocre game instead of a bad one, Mizzou probably wins.
• It's a shame to waste a nice game from Namon Wright. The sophomore has gotten his shot back a little in the last two games. He and Phillips were a combined 5-for-10 on 3s. But they were 1-for-7 on 2s, and Mizzou generally couldn't get a shot off close to the basket without Yante Maten blocking it.

Summary

An optimist could note that super-young teams are more prone to droughts and opponent runs, and that the resilience the Tigers have shown in each of the last two games (especially following the home disaster against Arkansas) could point to happy things once this team isn't made up mostly of freshmen and sophomores.

But damn. These runs are just so big, and it's costing the Tigers so much. If Georgia only goes on a 10-0 run in the second half, not 17-0, the Tigers probably win. If Arkansas' run last week was cut to something like 13-2 instead of 27-4, Mizzou still loses, but the work of the first half isn't completely overshadowed. These droughts, be they at the start of road games or in the second half of home games, have to stop. It's approaching late-January -- freshmen and sophomores almost aren't freshmen and sophomores anymore. This was a horrendously ugly game (Georgia games usually are), but it was exceedingly winnable. And Mizzou didn't win.

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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.