Defensive Score Sheet: UK vs South Carolina 2

For an explanation of the Defensive Score Sheet go here.

If I had to summarize the defense in this game in two words or less, I would say "open shots".  Both teams got several: UK hit theirs at an enormously high rate, South Carolina not so much.  I've included some charts for Lamb in response to some discussion in the last DSS.

This first chart shows the difference between Lamb's Defensive Rating and the Team Defensive Rating for the seven games I've tracked.  A positive value shows that Lamb's rating was higher (worse), a negative value shows it was lower (better).

There's no particular trend here.  Overall Lamb's rating is pretty much even with the team rating for these seven games combined.  I haven't done this for the other players, but I would guess that many of them show the same kind of up and down performance.

Now here's Lamb's Stop% compared to the Team Stop% as well as his DPoss% (the percentage of defensive possessions used).  Recall that Stop% is the percentage of time that the player or team prevents the opponent from scoring any points at all in a possession.

Here again Lamb is up and down, but his "ups" tend to be much better than the Team and his "downs" only somewhat worse.  Interesting to see that his two games against SC are at opposite ends of the chart.  His DPoss% hovers fairly consistently around 10% indicating that his man tends to not have a direct impact on offense.  I can think of only two primary reasons that would account for this:

1. Lamb does a good job of keeping his man from getting the ball or forcing him to give it up when he does have the ball.
   
2. Lamb guards players who are not among the top options in the opponent's offense.

I don't know which of these is more of the cause, though against SC Lamb was mostly guarding Richardson and sometimes Galloway.  Richardson isn't very involved on offense though Galloway is.  Worth noting is that the 3 missed shots that Lamb was involved in, 2 were by Galloway (the other was by Ellington).

Here are the charts.  A couple of things to mention: because of the technical difficulties in the TV broadcast there was a 2 minute period where I have no idea who did what on the shots.  I've put those in their own category of "UnKnown" for each team.  Second, I decided to stop tracking deflections, they don't happen often and it's frequently a pain to try and determine who caused them.  They aren't used in any of the calculations so nothing is lost on that end.

click to see a larger table

• Knight and Liggins took turns guarding Ellington and harassed him (with the occasional cameo by other Wildcats) into a 1-11 shooting performance.  It really shows up in Knight's line though.
• This by far was Brandon's best game of the seven in terms of forcing missed shots.  He also grabbed 5 defensive rebounds which is always nice to see from your point guard.
• Jones once again forced a lot of missed shots although this time some shots were scored against him too. Overall though another excellent effort by Terrence.
• Darius Miller's offense got all the headlines, but his defense was superb with 7 defensive boards, 3 blocks and 7 forced misses.
• Look at all the open shots the Cats got (the SC TEAM line).  Kentucky didn't miss an open shot until the 2nd half and their 18 open shots are a testament to their transition game and the Gamecocks' inability to get out on shooters.
• Although UK only forced 10 turnovers, nearly every player had a hand in at least one of them.  I think that's an indication of good team defense.
• UK did give up 12 open shots which is a few too many.  Some of those came from offensive rebounds right at the goal, but it looks like they still need to work a bit more to get out on shooters - something that will be especially important against Rotnei Clarke at Arkansas.