Missouri is finding that basketball is pretty hard when you can't shoot

Your Trifecta: Rosburg-Gant-Puryear.

Your Season Totals: Your Season Totals: Puryear 29, Phillips 22, Clark 18, Wright 17, Walton 12, Gant 14, Isabell 10, Rosburg 8, VanLeer 7, Woods 5, Allen 2. Freshmen 70, sophomores 43, juniors 23, seniors 8.

MUtigers.com: Rosburg's Career Night for @MizzouHoops Highlights Road Setback at Vanderbilt

The Trib: Slow start, poor shooting doom Missouri in ninth straight loss

Post-Dispatch: Mizzou starts cold, loses at Vanderbilt

Vanderbilt 86, Missouri 71

The numbers don’t make any sense, Mizzou basically played Vandy to a draw, just shot bad. They always shoot bad.

— Sam Snelling (@SamSnellingRMN) February 11, 2016

In a way, that actually makes perfect sense. Vandy shoots well, prevents opponents from doing the same, and hopes that iffy rebounding and ball-handling don't result in tons more shots for opponents. So this basically played out like a Vandy game. Mizzou won the ball-handling battle and basically broke even on the glass (which is rare, to put it kindly), but the Tigers took seven more shots than Vandy, made four fewer, and, as is customary, made five fewer 3-pointers.

Of course, it also played out like a Missouri game.

• ~first 6 minutes: Vandy 15, Mizzou 2
• ~next 8 minutes: Mizzou 14, Vandy 13
• ~next 6 minutes: Vandy 20, Mizzou 10
• ~last 20 minutes: Mizzou 45, Vandy 38

Drought, rally, drought, rally. Missouri is forever swimming upstream. They were outscored 35-12 over 12 minutes and outscored the Commodores 59-51 in the other 28.

Mizzou Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post.)

• Rosburg, Gant, and Puryear: 50 points on 20-for-37 shooting (54%), 10-for-17 from the FT line (59%), 20 rebounds (eight offensive), three steals, one assist, one block, no turnovers, 59.0 AdjGS points. AND MIZZOU LOST BY 15. Life is unfair.
• Everybody not named Rosburg, Gant, or Puryear: 21 points on 7-for-35 shooting, 4-for-7 from the FT line (57%), 19 rebounds (five offensive), two steals, 12 assists, zero blocks, six turnovers, and 12.0 AdjGS points. Tramaine Isabell and Wes Clark: 1-for-15 from the field.
• Now, granted, most of Rosburg's baskets are assisted, and that assist usually comes from a guard. So it's not like they're not doing anything right by any means. But the shots just aren't falling. Wow, are they not falling.

Summary

Somehow this losing streak has figured out how to get more frustrating. I didn't think that possible, but with the way Rosburg (last 8 games: 10 PPG, 4 RPG) and Puryear (last 7 games: 11 PPG, 5 RPG) have played of late, for Missouri to still be comfortably whipped almost twice a week is demoralizing, if only because it so completely drives home the point that the one thing Missouri was supposed to be decent at (perimeter play), the Tigers are actually horrific at.

A lot of that has to do with pure shooting -- Clark, Wright, Isabell, and Phillips are due a lot of progression-to-the-mean nights at some point -- but shooting has held Missouri back so dramatically. I didn't expect Mizzou to be great in this area, but ... wow.

Mizzou is now 235th in 2PT% (despite Rosburg shooting 60% and shooting more frequently of late) and an incredible 333rd in 3PT% (reminder: there are only 351 teams). In conference play, they are 11th and 14th, respectively, and they're 14th in 2PT% allowed, which was looking like it might become a strength a month or two ago.

Basketball is awfully hard when you can't make shots and your opponent can.

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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.