Defensive Scoresheet: Belmont

Team Defense

Reading through the comments in the post game thread and postmortem, a lot of people thought the 2nd half defense was much better than the 1st half. I thought the same but in looking back at overall numbers there actually is not a lot to support that notion. True, they held Belmont to 33% shooting on threes in the second half after allowing 39% in the first half, but you can see from the eFG% numbers above that it didn't hurt their overall shooting too much. Belmont is an excellent shooting team and, at the risk of joining the tautology club, good shooting teams shoot well.

The 80 points given up by the Cats is the 2nd most all season, behind the 82 scored by North Carolina last week and Belmont's offensive efficiency of 114.3 is highest allowed this year. The Cats did do some really good things: this was their best defensive rebounding game of the year on a percentage basis and they continued to defend without sending opponents to the free throw line. The rebounding comes with an asterisk though as Belmont's season average indicates that this element of the offense is not a priority for them. On the downside, forcing a mere 7 turnovers against a team that would normally commit 13 or 14 is just the most recent example of this deficiency. Cal's teams traditionally don't force many miscues, but this season has been pretty extreme even by his standards.

Really, Kentucky's defense was pretty much the definition of average in this game. If you compare Belmont's season averages to what they did against the Cats you'll see that they hit their average in points and shooting while coming pretty close in efficiency. They were much better taking care of the ball, offset by being much worse in offensive rebounding and getting to the line. There were moments when Kentucky defended better, but the overall results do not yet reflect any real improvement.

Individual 4 Factors

• While the Cats gave up a lot of shots, it wasn't the guards fault (for the most part) as they collectively did a fair job getting a hand up and pressuring their guy
• The bigs on the other hand had a very tough time Saturday due to the nature of Belmont's offense. Of the 30 three point shots attempted by the Bruins, Willie Cauley-Stein, Julius Randle, and Marcus Lee accounted for defending 14 and had 7 made against them. WCS himself defended 9 threes.
• Dominique Hawkins and Alex Poythress did force turnovers, combining for 3.5 of the 7 forced by UK.
• Andrew Harrison committed 4 fouls but managed to do so without sending anyone to the line.
• Speaking of A1, he really did not impact the defensive box score. He had 1 forced miss and 2 defensive rebounds and that was all.

Individual Ratings

• A really, really strong defensive game by Aaron Harrison. When you combine his DSS results with Cal's praise for his defense you arrive at a player who is unquestionably Kentucky's best defender at the guard position.
• More A2: his 24.6% usage is an insanely high number for a guard and almost certainly due to the opponent. The combination of rating and high usage yields what I believe is the best individual defensive game by a guard since I've been doing the DSS.
• Dominique Hawkins also had his best game of the year.
• James Young also with a strong game and his usage is also really high for a guard. Between Young, A2, and Hawkins I think Cal has 3 strong choices for perimeter defenders, it's just a matter of getting all the pieces to work well together at the same time.