Sports and Numbers

Radford at Kansas (Lawrence, KS)

PSAN-Related Player Ratings - Cumulative This Season

(PSAN-O = Offensive impact, PSAN-D = Defensive impact.  For PSAN-D, lower ratings are better.  PSAN70 ratings are just PSAN expressed as "per 70 possessions" to reflect efficiency.  The difference between ePSAN and PSAN is that "e" is enhanced and weighs recent games more - used for Kansas only.)

Player Analysis:

(largely in context of ratings above)

The story on KU's players is pretty well known by now.  All the starters except for Taylor are having great efficiency numbers.  Markieff Morris has been the most efficient of all, however.  Tyrel Reed has finally come around on the season, while Conner Teahan's numbers have been good in very limited action.  Thomas Robinson's struggles on offense are the only thing keeping him from a solid rating, while Elijah Johnson has room to improve on both sides of the ball.  Taylor's offense has been atrocious on the whole.

For the Highlanders, it's really all about one man, Artsiom Parakhouski.  The 6-11, 260 pound senior center takes nearly 32% of the shots while he's on the floor and accounts for 31% of possessions used (31st most in the country).  Fortunately for Radford, he has had a stellar season so far shooting 53 eFG% and grabbing a whopping 18.3 OREB% (that's #11 in the country) and 22.3 DREB%.  He also swats shots at a 6.7% rate, which rates him at #129 in the country.  Cole Aldrich and the other bigs will have their hands full with the guy, but no one else really poses a threat based on early season results.  If you're looking for the guys who can keep it close with a barrage of three's, that would be Amir Johnson based on last year but Blake Smith based on this year.  No one but Smith has shot it anywhere near a good percentage from behind the arc.

Similar Opponent Game Analysis

Down to the Wire?

 Margin of game was less than 1 point in 0.4% of simulated games from "Last 7 Game Analysis."  Many of these would be "overtime" games.

(Methodology of Similar Opponent Analysis: Here, we look at games against opponents with similar offensive and defensive profiles to the opponent of interest to see how the teams are performing.  For Kansas, we would look at its offensive performances against teams that have a defense that is within 5 pts/100 possessions efficiency above or below that of the opponent in this game.  If this does not result in at least three appropriate comparisons, the threshold will be adjusted until it finds three.  If there are more than three that are within the original threshold, all of those will be used.  The same is done for defense but using offensive profiles of opponents.  The analysis splits offense and defense.  Teams often are more or less consistent on one side of the court than the other.  This analysis will reflect that.  Those numbers are then plugged into a simulation of 8,000 games.  The results are what you see in the table.)

Opponent Four Factor Analysis

Based on the cumulative season boxscore for the opponent, we can look at the Four Factors to see where the team has derived the bulk of its (dis)advantage in terms of scoring margin versus its opponents to date.  Team 1 is KU's opponent, while Team 2 represents that team's opponents.  Here is the breakdown for KU's opponent this game:

ANALYSIS:  Crashing the boards and getting fouled seems to be the MO for this Highlanders group.  Far and away their biggest advantage is getting to the line.  They supplement it with some good offensive rebounding.  Otherwise, on offense, they really can't seem to make baskets despite holding opponents' eFG% down nicely.  And they turn it over too often to watch those ugly shots bounce away.

Game Projections

(Not a prediction.  Read more details in "FAQ & Terms" section.)

Manual adjustments: None.

Projected Boxscore

Projection Summary