For an explanation of the Defensive Score Sheet go here.
Today seems like as good a time as any to present some composite results for the DSS for this season. What follows are the combined results for most of UK's players for the 13 games I charted. Stacey Poole and Jarrod Polson are not included since they were not really involved defensively in these games.
First off, here are the totals for the 13 games, sorted by Defensive Rating. Click for a larger image.
- I don't put too much stock in Hood's rating or Stop % because he played so few minutes.
- Terrence Jones and DeAndre Liggins were the two best defenders on the team during these 13 games. Given the uncertainty and approximates involved in the calculated values (the stuff in yellow) I think it safe to say that the overall difference between them is negligible.
- Everyone came out with a pretty solid rating, as anything below 100.00 for Defensive Rating is pretty good. What we might conclude from this is that collectively there are no weak spots in the Wildcat defense.
- Having said all that, one thing I am still not sure about is the degree to which the overall Team Rating influences the player ratings. The individual ratings use the Team Rating as a starting point, so there is a tendency for everyone to get "pulled" towards it and I am not certain whether that is good or not. I have some ideas to try and correct for this, but they need more thought and experimentation.
- I wonder if the close clustering of players is due to UK concentrating so many minutes in so few players? For comparison, David Hess wrote about his composite results for Kansas and Kansas had a much wider spread. Kansas also plays a lot more people. I will be interested to see how things look next year when presumably UK will be giving minutes to more people.
Here are some per-game averages for most of the same categories. There is some difference, as I have included total Field Goal Attempts Defended per game (FGA/G) and the average number of times each player sends opponents to the free throw line (FTA/G). The list is sorted by number of Defensive Possessions Faced per game.
- Remember when Terrence Jones was always in foul trouble? In the latter part of the season that has really not been an issue and TJ has continually played good defense without sending opponents to the line. I don't know if the value of that ability can be overstated.
- Not surprisingly, Jones and Harrellson are involved the most by virtue of defending around the basket. Liggins is 3rd though, and that is good to see. You want your best defenders to be involved the most on that end of the floor - teams aren't able to avoid the long arms of DeAndre.
- On the season Knight is 5th on the team in defensive rebounds per game, but for this subset he's 4th and really not appreciably different from Liggins. I had to double check box scores to make sure that number was correct - I was surprised by it.
- The Cats give up around 9 uncontested baskets per game: mostly open 3's and put-backs after offensive rebounds. I have no idea if this number is "high" or not. Every team is going to give up some number of uncontested shots and at this point I don't think anyone knows what an average number of such shots is.
To further emphasis the growth in Terrence Jones this season, here are his fouls per game from the start of the season to the end. Notice the steady decline as the season goes on, indicating that he is fouling less and less as the season progressed.
Lastly, here are some shooting percentages against the Cats. This is what opponents shoot when defended by a player (FG%) or after being sent to the line by a player (FT%)
- Again, I don't put a whole lot of stock in the numbers for Hood and Vargas because of how little they've played.
- Terrence Jones is very difficult to score against. He doesn't let guys shoot a high percentage and he doesn't send them to the line at all.
- I don't have a breakdown between 2's and 3's, that is something I will work on for next season.
- For the most part I think the FT% are interesting but not particularly illuminating. To gain any useful information we would want to compare these percentages to those of the players who actually shot the Free Throws, but that's a lot of work that I don't want to do right now.
- Having said that, Liggins FT% is lower than I would have expected from guarding a perimeter player - a "Liggins" effect perhaps? Maybe this is a result of getting into the heads of the players he's guarding? That would require a lot more work to give anything close to an informative answer, but I think it's interesting none-the-less.
Thank you to everyone who read these things this year and for all your comments. I know these charts are a beast to read and if anyone has any suggestions on how they could be made easier please let me know.