I don't have a DSS for the Florida game thanks to it being on CBS and hence no online replay available. If someone knows where one can be found please let me know. In its place I offer a few graphs that look at UK's stop % based on whether they scored on their offensive possession or not and then an individual look at Darius Miller.
In the Arkansas DSS, Cameron1 and kydamcat both mentioned looking at how well UK was able to stop their opponent from scoring based on what the Cats were themselves able to do on the offensive end. The idea is that when the Cats score they get more energy on the defensive end and that might show up in an improved Stop %. The question is an interesting one to explore because I think this is something that a lot of basketball fans think about at some point during a lot of games, particularly when their team is playing well defensively.
What I did was look at the Cats' last 7 opponents and break down their Stop % into two categories: stops that occurred after UK scored and stops that occurred after UK was prevented from scoring. Below I've graphed the stop% for each situation along with the overall stop% for each game.
What we see here is that with a couple of exceptions UK was much better at stopping their opponent immediately after they (the Cats) scored then when they didn't. A couple of thoughts:
- Overall, UK stopped their opponent 56% of the time after they scored and 46% of the time after they failed to score
- These are raw totals that don't reflect defensive momentum where the Cats get several stops in a row. This is where as a fan I think we start to notice an extra bounce on the defensive end. Looking at it this way would require a more sophisticated analysis than what I'm ready to do, but I thought that it should be acknowledged.
- One reason the Stop% after failing to score could be lower is because of turnovers. When the ball is stolen it can lead to transition opportunities for the opponent that are harder to defend than when UK forces them to go against the half court defense.
The last point is worth considering more because turnovers can cause transition opportunities where we don't get to see that extra energy (or lack thereof) because the play is over so soon. So I went back through and for the "Stops after not scoring" category I only looked at what happened after missed shots and empty trips to the free throw line. Below shows what happens to the Stop % after no scoring situations when turnovers are removed:
As we might expect, the Stop % gets a lot better in most cases when the other team isn't able to run down to the other end and dunk the ball. Not all turnovers result in plays like that of course but I don't have an easy way to separate transition from non-transition so this will have to do. Interestingly, the overall stop % for the 7 games combined doesn't change - it's still 46% even after removing turnovers.
- Vandy hurt UK the worst: of the 8 turnovers UK committed against the Commodores, 7 were converted into points.
- Tennessee was at the opposite end: only 5 of 15 turnovers were converted into points by the Vols.
Now here's a look at Darius Miller, starting with a comparison of his Individual Def Rating to the Team Rating. (negative numbers are better, positive numbers are worse)
Up and down results. The elephant in the room was that first game against Florida where Miller was just as bad defensively as his rating difference would suggest. That game looks to be an outlier though. Darius has mostly been right around the team average otherwise.
Here is Miller's Stop % and Usage % for these games:
Not surprisingly this matches up with the graph above with a really bad game against Florida, but otherwise he's around the team average. It's interesting that in addition to a bad Stop % Miller also had a big bump in his Usage Rate on defense against Florida but otherwise has been pretty consistent in this category.