For an explanation of the Defensive Score Sheet go here.
Here is the DSS for the Florida game along with composite totals for the Cats for the entire tournament. Again, nothing fancy, just the tables with a few comments.
First here's Florida. Click the image for a larger version.
- A mostly strong effort by the Cats, led by DeAndre Liggins. I say "mostly" strong because UK did allow Florida to get 17 open shots, a combination of open jumpers, transition baskets, and putbacks after offensive rebounds.
- UK gave up a lot of open shots, but it was mostly a first half issue. 11 of those shots came in the first period (Florida shot 7-11 in the first half on open shots).
- UK did a good job of forcing turnovers. Of particular note is Josh Harrellson. Josh's line shows him with 2.83 forced TOs, but he actually had a hand in 6 different turnovers during the game, splitting credit with teammates on each one.
- One thing that is interesting is how evenly distributed the forced misses are across the team. Usually we see one or two players with big numbers and everyone else pretty low, but this game they were evenly spaced out.
- For the people who dislike Parsons, the list of Wildcats who victimized him are Miller (3 times), Liggins, and Lamb (split with Murphy).
Now here are the composite results for the tournament for the Cats. I didn't include Polson and Poole since they didn't have any defensive numbers. The Overall Team numbers for Stop% and Defensive Rating are included also.
- With all due respect to Vargas, Liggins gets the Tournament Defensive MVP from me, both for his outstanding Defensive Rating while guarding some exceptional perimeter players, but also for his very good Stop%.
- The 6 primary guys all had Defensive Ratings that were better than the Team average, but that's a bit misleading because of all the open shots they allowed.
- Doron Lamb is notable for his low DPoss%. I noticed during the tournament that he was in the game and Liggins was not, Lamb tended to guard the same player that Liggins had been guarding. I think this leads to one of two conclusions. Either Lamb is pretty good at ball denial, or he loses his man a lot which results in a "TEAM" marking on the DSS. I can think of a few instances where the latter happened during the Florida game, but Lamb's ball denial is worth watching closely during the tournament.