Study Hall: Mizzou 89, Coastal Carolina 51

Nov 24, 2022 - 1:30 PM

If you were going into this game with any trepidation, it was understandable. Coastal Carolina profiled as a team who could score the basketball, and they came into town with the one thing Mizzou lacked: A true inside presence.

Essam Mostafa was averaging a double double, and 6’9 and 250 lbs he is a load on the interior. Missouri, as we know all too well so far, does not have an inside presence. What they do have is a deep group of pesky defenders, and the ability to score the ball. So far this season Mizzou has a top 20 offensive possession length, and a top 30 offense by Adjusted Efficiency on KenPom.com.

This was shaping up to be a Mizzou win, but one that was probably a little uncomfortable.

Instead it was a shellacking, courtesy of the Missouri Tigers. Welcome to CoMo, here’s a 38 point loss.

There were a few keys to the blowout. The first was Mizzou starting out hot, getting an 8-point lead before the first media timeout. The next move was the Tigers extending that lead to 20 off the back of Isiaih Mosley’s 11 points in about 5 minutes. The next was a 3-point barrage from D’Moi Hodge and Mosley to push the lead to 32 with 11:09 to play. Then finally, four dunks and a layup in the span of around 90 seconds of game action which pushed the lead to its final margin.

Mizzou took away Coastal’s height advantage by just pressuring out front. The Chanticleers guards were never comfortable, as starters Jomaru Brown and Henry Abraham combined for 11 of the team’s 27 turnovers. What Dennis Gates showed tonight was Mizzou’s recipe for success once the competition level steps up.

Team Stats

• This BCI difference is just ridiculous: Mizzou had as many assists as Coastal Carolina had turnovers, and you can say the same for Mizzou’s turnovers versus CCU’s assists. Basically Mizzou was 9.19 times better with the basketball.
• Another part of the ball handling that we look at is the possession difference once you factor out turnovers: I mentioned in the last Study Hall how Mizzou was +40 on the season, well they had 18 more last night. When you value the basketball and turn your opponent over, it helps you overcome things like... not being able to rebound the ball.
• If you turn over your opponent that much, and take care of the ball: It really doesn’t matter how well you shoot. This was their second worst shooting performance by eFG on the season. They missed a lot of chip shots around the rim, and didn’t shoot all that well from distance either. They were 23 for 42 from 2FG, and if you take away the explosion of the 4 dunks and a layup away they were just 18 or 37, or below 50% on the night.

So it really says something about the defense and the energy they played with that Mizzou did not shoot particularly well and still won a game against a decent mid-major squad by nearly 40 points.

Yes, small sample sizes, yes. Data points. Yeeeesssssssss. Assists Rates and Turnover Rates are great great great stats. Mizzou has to do this stuff against kansas and Illinois and the SEC. But they’re right now doing the things you need to do to cover up their very real issues on the inside.

Player Stats

Your Trifecta: D’Moi Hodge, Isiaih Mosley, Kobe Brown

On the season: D’Moi Hodge 10, Kobe Brown 8, Nick Honor 5, Noah Carter 5, Tre Gomillion 3, Sean East II 3, Isiaih Mosley 2

Isiaih Mosley, welcome to the trifecta! It feels like it’s been a long road to get here, but you’re here and in a place I think we all expect to see you with more frequency. After giving Mizzou 18 points in 20 minutes against Mississippi Valley State, Mosley played 2 more minutes, gave Mizzou 5 more points, committed fewer turnovers, and had a lower usage rate. Mosley’s usage was around 37%, which is still a touch high, but he’s finding his role. His role is going to be fewer minutes than he played at MSU, and quite possibly more usage if you can imagine that.

D’moi Hodge is, in some ways, the perfect basketball player. It remains to be seen how he maintains once the schedule picks up, but for now he’s the kind of guy you want on your roster. I just checked KenPom.com and Hodge ranks 13th in Steal rate after another 5 steals last night. He’s hitting 40% of his 3FGA, and his offensive rating has ballooned to 137.0. It seems like his shot attempts are either from outside the arc or at the rim, and there is no in between. A truly modern basketball player.

In the most recent press conference, Dennis Gates mentioned wanting to find a way to get Ronnie DeGray III on the floor more frequently. Before the season this blog was a proponent of using DeGray in some ways in the rotation. He’s just, for a lack of a better term, useful. DeGray does a lot of little things, like rebounding! DeGray buried a big 3 during the 15-0 run in the first half.

Without belaboring the point, I’m sure that game was much more what Gates has in mind for DeAndre Gholston. Obviously you want a little more offensive success, but he only attempted 5 shots and just one of those shots is what I would’ve considered a poor shot. The rest were catch and shoots. We’re starting to see the roles of Gholston and Mosley sort of flip, and that’s an overall net plus for Missouri. If I need to restate, this isn’t to rail on Gholston, who I believe is a very useful player. But if you’re running a ton of possessions through him it’s probably not going to be very efficient.

From a game perspective, this came down to Mizzou doing all the things they absolutely needed to do in order to combat the Coastal Carolina advantages. One of those things is value the ball. Nick Honor, god bless that guy, has gone two games in a row without a turnover. He also passed 1,000 points for his career last night as well. Just a really good player.

The competition next game is a step down, but as we saw against MVSU anyone can stick around for a bit. But in less than a week Mizzou will be on the road for their first real challenge at Wichita State. We should learn a lot more in that game than we have the last 6.

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True Shooting Percentage (TS%): Quite simply, this calculates a player’s shooting percentage while taking into account 2FG%, 3FG%, and FT%. The formula is Total Points / 2 * (FGA + (0.475+FTA)). The 0.475 is a Free Throw modifier. KenPomeroy and other College Basketball sites typically use 0.475, while the NBA typically uses 0.44. That’s basically what TS% is. A measure of scoring efficiency based on the number of points scored over the number of possessions in which they attempted to score, more here.

Effective Field Goal Percentage (eFG%): This is similar to TS%, but takes 3-point shooting more into account. The formula is FGM + (0.5 * 3PM) / FGA

So think of TS% as scoring efficiency, and eFG% as shooting efficiency, more here.

Expected Offensive Rebounds: Measured based upon the average rebounds a college basketball team gets on both the defensive and offensive end. This takes the overall number of missed shots (or shots available to be rebounded) and divides them by the number of offensive rebounds and compares them with the statistical average.

AdjGS: A take-off of the Game Score metric (definition here) accepted by a lot of basketball stat nerds. It takes points, assists, rebounds (offensive & defensive), steals, blocks, turnovers and fouls into account to determine an individual’s “score” for a given game. The “adjustment” in Adjusted Game Score is simply matching the total game scores to the total points scored in the game, thereby redistributing the game’s points scored to those who had the biggest impact on the game itself, instead of just how many balls a player put through a basket.

Offensive Rating (ORtg): Similar to Adjusted game score, but this looks at how many points per possession a player would score if they were averaged over 100 possessions.

Usage%: This “estimates the % of team possessions a player consumes while on the floor” (via sports-reference.com/cbb). The usage of those possessions is determined via a formula using field goal and free throw attempts, offensive rebounds, assists and turnovers. The higher the number, the more prevalent a player is (good or bad) in a team’s offensive outcome.

Floor%: Via sports-reference.com/cbb: Floor % answers the question, “When a Player uses a possession, what is the probability that his team scores at least 1 point?”. The higher the Floor%, the more frequently the team probably scores when the given player is involved.

Touches/Possession: Using field goal attempts, free throw attempts, assists and turnovers, touches attempt to estimate, “the number of times a player touched the ball in an attacking position on the floor.” Take the estimated touches and divide it by the estimated number of possessions for which a player was on the court, and you get a rough idea of how many times a player touched the ball in a given possession. For point guards, you’ll see the number in the 3-4 range. For shooting guards and wings, 2-3. For an offensively limited center, 1.30. You get the idea.

Anyway, using the Touches figure, we can estimate the percentage of time a player “in an attacking position” passes, shoots, turns the ball over, or gets fouled.