Miscellany

Thanksgiving is a time for turkey and stuffing and maybe some other family tradition dishes that you crave all year. Then we get to eat leftovers for several days gorging ourselves on these wonderful culinary delights. The KU game yesterday was not on the menu for my Thanksgiving day delight. The bad news is, of course, that we lost the game. The good news (not really good news but it seemed good after I looked it up), is this loss is not nearly as bad as it at first seemed. "Why would you say that?" you ask. Well, it is early in the season and my DPPI is still getting attenuated. I had Kansas as a 25 point favorite. If that stood, that would make this one of the 15 worst losses in KU history (at least back to the 1948-49 season). And having epically bad losses is never anything other than depressing. We should all know that feeling since 2 of the 8 worst losses in KU history were last season. Yes, last season KU got trounced twice by epic proportions. It is a demoralizing feeling. But as I said, as it turns out, this games adjusted the ratings of both Kansas and Dayton resulting in this game simply a very bad loss but not epic. There, do you feel better already? Me neither. But just for your edification, which edifying is my major stock-in-trade as master of the DPPI and all things Jayhawk stats, below is the table of the 25 worst KU losses in history. Recall, I spent a good amount of money and immense amount of time last year acquiring the data and attenuating the DPPI back to the 1948-49 season. So here is a walk down a not so happy memory road. You may recall some of these losses. Bear in mind, this data set comes from the last 2195 KU games.



Ten of these 25 have come under coach Self. Two have come in the NCAA tourney including the worst loss in KU history which was last season against USC. That was an epic 32 points below projection. I actually had us as a 3 point underdog in that game. So I projected we would likely lose but not by 34 points. And of course, who can forget the 2001 tourney game against VCU? We were favored by more than 11 but lost by 10. That ranks as the 25th worst loss in KU history. Also last season, recall the Texas game in Lawrence? KU was favored by 3 points but got annihilated by Texas 84-59. That is good for the 8th worst loss in KU history. The loss yesterday was 17.6 points below expectation. Heck, that makes it only the 57th worst loss in the last 74 years or 2195 games. Aren't you feeling better all the time.

While I am nerding out here with numbers, I would like to introduce you to another stat. It is the consistency stat. It is actually an important stat in several ways. Without going into the gory detail, suffice it to say that consistency plays a large role in determining the probability of winning calculation. So a very consistent team is going to have a significantly higher probability of winning for a given projected scoring margin. So consistency is a pretty important measure for a team. Going into the Dayton game, KU was one of the most consistent teams in the country. Certainly among the top 60 teams KU was right there at the lead in consistency. This single game nuked that rating. KU went form one of the most consistent teams to one of the least. That can happen early in the season. We are currently ranked 293rd out of 358 teams in consistency. I suspect that will ameliorate over time.

The player ratings for the Dayton game were obviously not stellar. Well, that is for about half of the players. Braun, Martin and McCormack had pretty strong player ratings? How could McCormack have a strong player rating you ask? Without going into gory detail, the player rating has multiple components. One fairly significant component making up 33% of the player rating is the +/-. +/- is a very good stat for gauging a players performance relative to making the entire team better. Obviously it has it's limitations. That is why is is only 33% of the player rating. But in McCormack's case, it helped him pretty significantly. Also, Big Dave did have 5 rebounds and even bigger he had 5 steals. Those 5 steals were huge for his player rating. You know, his flaws are pretty obvious right now, and it seems everyone, myself included, is on the Dave has to get better bandwagon. But the beauty of a thorough and objective player rating is that it tends to weed through the biases and fairly measure everything. Dave does need to improve, but he did some nice things yesterday. He is not the reason we lost the game.

If I were looking for players that cost us the game I would lean heavily to Jalen followed by Dajuan. Their player ratings were abysmal. In fact, Jalen had the dubious honor of having a negative player rating, which takes some work since simply being on the court gets you a positive player rating. Measured by rating relative to expectation, Jalen (-10.9) and Dajuan (-9.3) had the two worst games by any KU player this season thus far. Dajuan played 28+ minutes and managed 2 points and 1 assist with 1 turnover. And Jalen missed all 4 of his shots and grabbed only 2 rebounds (supposedly his main contribution ability) in 23+ minutes. The real nail in the coffin was Jalen had a +/- of -10 and Dajuan's was -8. That means we did better when they were on the bench and by a pretty good amount. Compare that to Remy's +/- of 15. That means when Remy was on the bench, KU was outscored by 16 points. Also, once again, Clemence and Yesufu come away with positive +/- metrics even in limited minutes. I keep wondering why not ramp up their minutes. I'm not necessarily advocating starting them or even giving them major minutes. But when they consistently deliver in the few minutes they are in, should their minutes not be increased somewhat? Well, here is a dump of all the player ratings and +/- for your hearts content for you to make of it what you would like.

If you are wondering what happened to KU's DPPI ranking with this loss, well, it took a major hit. I had KU ranked 4th in the DPPI before this game. They dropped all the way to 21st. Dayton went from 193rd to 155th. Still, even with the new rankings, no matter how you slice it, this was a pretty bad loss. Oops, after all that talk above about how it wasn't epic, and now I am calling it a bad loss. No, it wasn't epically bad but it was very bad. So enough about bad losses. Can KU recover? Well, we have been down this road before and of course the answer is yes. I think a better question at this point is just how good is KU. Are we No. 1 seed good or is our current 21st ranking more indicative. If you would have asked me before the game yesterday, I would have honestly answered that I questioned whether we were No. 1 seed (top 4 teams) good but I thought we were definitely top 10 good. But after that major letdown, I am not so sure where we stand. I have made it pretty clear that I (rightly or wrongly) am not convinced we can be elite with Dajuan Harris and Mitch Lightfoot getting more than scant minutes. I thought that before and think that even more now. I think we need Clemence getting at least 8-10 minutes every game and Yesufu getting a chance to play more as well. And I am in agreement with everyone that unless and until David starts pulling his head out of his butt, we will struggle. Look at the efficiency numbers by game and by season. Thus far our offense on the season has been the best under coach Self in terms of PPP (points per possession). A PPP of 1.170 is excellent. I think that is skewed, though since it has come against a relatively weak schedule. So it will certainly fall as we play tougher opponents. But our defensive PPP is against those same opponents and while 0.934 is not in the horrendous category, it is not particularly good. In fact, it is right about average for a Self coached team at Kansas. But again, this is against a relatively weak schedule. So I am certainly not excited about our defense at this point. Nor am I super excited about our offense although I think we certainly appear to have some offensive capability.



Looking at the game by game, You can see that the defense against Dayton was downright pitiful. Of course, you don't need all this extensive and brilliant statistical analysis to get that. The eye test would suffice. But a defensive PPP of 1.087 is abysmal, especially against a team ranked 155th. Just horrendous defense with a capital "H" yesterday. We will lose a lot of games if we play defense like that. And our offense was no great shakes either. This would be considered one of our weakest opponents yet we muster an off PPP of 1.058? Too many missed FT's for starters. Making 75% of our FT;s would have improved the off PPP to 1.145. Still not great against a weak opponent but at least decent. There is a lot for coach to work on over the next couple weeks.



Are you feeling overwhelmed with the stats and analysis yet. Imagine how I feel having to download all this data, process and proof it and then upload all the analysis. I sure hope someone is getting something of value from this.

Next up is Iona and the HOF coach Rick Pitino. Love him or hate him, Rick Pitino is a very good basketball coach. His victory over Alabama is proof of that. But before you get to thinking that was some sort of Epic upset, consider that Iona is currently ranked 78th. This is a pretty decent team. I mean, look at these teams that are ranked similarly.

Maryland -- 74th
Virginia -- 80th
North Carolina -- 85th

Yes, UNC is currently ranked 85th in the country. There has be be great pearl clutching going on in Chapel Hill right about now. Could they miss the tourney in Hubert Davis's first season? There is a lot of college basketball so I will not jump the gun on that. But UNC is not looking very good at this point.