Defensive Score Sheet: Missouri@Kansas

If you’re unfamiliar with this series, check out my first Project Defensive Score Sheet post. This one’s a day late, but these numbers are pretty ugly, so I doubt anybody was exactly giddy with anticipation.

Let’s start with the table:

And, my thoughts…

• Congratulations are in order to Steve Moore and Kim English, the only two Missouri players who managed to rate above average in Stop%.
• The best defender for Kansas? “Team.” Awesome. That essentially means that Missouri shot poorly on their open shots, so Kansas’s bad defensive game could have been even worse.
• Tyshawn Taylor’s perimeter defense was pretty bad at times. I recall one play where he was within arm’s length of a Missouri guard, yet stood nonchalantly as the player rose and drained a three. He didn’t even look like he considered raising a hand.
• Markieff Morris was the better twin, as seems to be the norm.
• Fraction of each team’s turnovers that were created through the efforts of only a single player: 8 of 11 (73%) for Missouri, 2 of 8 (25%) for Kansas.

This is only tangentially related to defense, but since I thought of it, I’m sharing it… one of the reasons Missouri had such a bad defensive game is they everybody on Kansas was hitting threes. Seven Kansas players hit at least one three point shot, and the only players who didn’t were the two that didn’t attempt any: Thomas Robinson and Elijah Johnson. Keep in mind that Josh Selby was sitting injured on the bench. The Jayhawks have 8 players who shoot at least 35% from deep, and average at least 1 3PA per game. They have another guy shooting 53% on 15 attempts (Mario Little), and one more shooting 32% on 25 attempts (Tyshawn Taylor). Really, the only rotation player you can safely ignore is Thomas Robinson.