Kansas 80 - Missouri 77

My Observations

When archrivals meet, you can sure throw out the record book.  And forget about where the game is being played, because these Missouri Tigers weren't fazed by the boisterous Allen Fieldhouse crowd at all.  Battling the Jayhawks to a draw on the backboards, where KU should have easily had their way, the Tigers showed a national audience that they can play hard all game long against a championship contender on the road.  In the end, it was an entertaining basketball game, plenty of running and scoring, and ultimately an impressive breakout party for a freshman I'll talk about in my player analysis below.

Four Factor Analysis

• eFG% - 56-45% advantage for Kansas, but the Tigers shot way more, compensating for that and then some.
• TURNOVERS - 22-15% of possessions, in favor of Missouri.  Second straight game that KU turned it over more than their opponent.
• OFFENSIVE REBOUNDING - Shockingly, 24-19% advantage for MU.  This was supposed to be a walk in the park for KU on the boards.
• FREETHROW RATE - 28-16% advantage for KU, as the Jayhawks scored four more points from the FT line.

CONCLUSION - The biggest difference in this game was that KU shot better than MU.  The table above adds up to a significantly bigger margin of victory for Kansas (12) than the actual score.  This just means that some things happened even more favorably than my methodology assumes.  For example, the value of an offensive rebound takes into account the average value of a possession to a team.  Let's say all 11 offensive rebounds MU had resulted in second-chance points, then my methods would undervalue those offensive rebounds, because it assumes that MU would score a little under 1 pt/poss with those offensive rebounds, when in fact they resulted in let's say 2 pts/poss.  So, what the difference between adding these numbers up and what actually happened in the game tells me is that MU probably did a great job of actually converting on TO's and O-Reb's to score.

Player Performance Analysis

After the first 5 games this season, I wonder how many KU fans thought that by the time this Missouri game was finished, the freshman playing the best ball would be Sherron Collins?  No disrespect to Darrell Arthur, but Sherron Collins is just playing some incredible basketball right now.  When his outside shot is on, he's an all-around dynamite offensive player.  Inside or outside, Collins can do it all on offense, and against Missouri he took the team on his back and carried it to victory.  Many have been wondering when he would finally supplant Russell Robinson in the starting lineup or in overall playing time.  But the interesting thing here was that, in crunch time, it wasn't Robinson who came out for Collins ... it was Mario Chalmers.  Perhaps what's really happening is that Coach Self has three talented guards, and he's going to play them all enough to get a feel for who will be most successful that game.  Just an acknowledgement that players can have ups and downs.  Of course, that's just a theory.  Maybe he was ticked off at Chalmers' lazy turnovers in this game and sat him down more as a disciplinary move.  Either way, it gave us all a chance to watch as a star was born.

Collins finished with 71.4 eFG% shooting (4-7 on 3FG's), 5 REB, 1 AST, and only 1 TO on a night when KU was turning it over way too much.  Robinson's most memorable (forgettable?) moment was the unnecessary pass that he threw away with just 11 seconds left, giving MU one last chance to tie.  But prior to that, he had a game-high 7 AST, 3 STL, 3 TO's, and also hit 2-3 on 3FG's.  Robinson was the man who set up Collins' key 3-pointer and a huge layup by Arthur in the last few possessions of the game.  Fault him for the terrible pass at the end, but give him credit on the other good things.  It is, however, becoming painfully obvious that Robinson makes questionable decisions when the clock isn't showing any digits to the left of the colon.  Chalmers played his worst game of the season, managing to turn the ball over 5 times (usually when nothing was even happening), 6 PTS, 3 REB, and 2 STL.  He wasn't a factor down the stretch, as he sat on the bench.

No other Jayhawks stood out much, positively or negatively, from an overall numbers standpoint.  Rush had 16 points, but he shot only 43 eFG%.  He did have 3 BLK, just 1 TO, and 7 REB.  Unfortunately, his defense didn't shut down Matt Lawrence most of the game.  On the last shot of the game though, he bothered him enough to force an airball.  Julian Wright had 10 REB, 5 AST, 2 STL, 2 BLK, and just 1 TO.  But he made only 3-of-8 shots, and only 2 of his rebounds were offensive.  His and others' ratings suffered partly because KU's performance as a team wasn't all that great.  Same story for Sasha Kaun, who had a fairly efficient game.

When adjusting for quality of opponent, it wasn't Sherron Collins who came out on top in this game, it was Missouri's Leo Lyons.  A glance at his boxscore stats doesn't appear terribly impressive at first, but you have to account for his 3 O-REB being very important.  From the analysis above, it probably means they were even more important than the average offensive rebound.  He shot 50 eFG% (made one 3FG), 3-4 FT, 6 REB, 2 STL, and just 1 TO in only 21 minutes of play.  Naturally, given Missouri's impressive performance, his adjusted rating benefited more than any KU player's rating.

Matt Lawrence was a very close second to Lyons, with a team-high 19 PTS on 67 eFG% shooting and 3 REB but not much else.  He did exactly what was needed from him, but he came up about one 3FG ("layup" for him) short.  Volkus did a little of everything in just 11 minutes of play, while Grimes swiped the defensive glass clean.  This was huge, as KU was expected to have a huge advantage in offensive rebounding.  It's not very sexy to think of defensive rebounding as a big stat, but Grimes' efforts were monumental in keeping MU close in this game.

The Jayhawks probably braced for a huge second-half performance from Marshall Brown and were relieved that it didn't come.  After averaging over 20 pts in the second half of his last few games, Brown ended the game shooting only 38.5 eFG%, 4 REB, and 3 TO's.  KU couldn't contain Hannah from scoring around his average, but they certainly kept him from being efficient.  Hannah shot only 1-7 from 3FG (40.6 eFG% overall), 4 AST, and 2 TO.  Finally, Jason Horton struggled with zero points on 0-3 shooting but had 4 AST and 3 REB.