Recap: Kansas 67 Oklahoma 65
I’m not sure there’s much to be drawn from the box score that wasn’t visible to the eye last night. It was, as they say, a game of two halves.
1st HALF
| Team | eFG% | OR% | TO% | FT Rate | FT% | PPP |
| KU | 48.4 | 23.5 | 12.2 | 6.3 | 100 | 1.00 |
| OU | 25.9 | 21.7 | 20.8 | 20.7 | 66.7 | 0.56 |
Unable to get the ball in the basket during the first half, Oklahoma made a concerted effort to attack the rim in the second half. This was a sound tactical decision (they can’t guard you if you’re shooting free throws and all) and happily (for Oklahoma, who tend to make free throws) coincided with the officials’ decision to call fouls on any and all contact. At least until the last two minutes when a couple of Jayhawks knocked a driving Nate Carter to the floor without repercussion and Sasha kaun got smacked across the face while laying the ball in the basket. No blood, no foul transmuted in the latter case into, Blood, no foul.
The officials turned a free-flowing if not especially well-played game into a free throw shooting contest and a free throw shooting contest chills the blood of any Kansas fan.
2nd HALF
| Team | eFG% | OR% | TO% | FT Rate | FT% | PPP |
| KU | 41.2 | 40.0 | 32.4 | 117.6 | 62.5 | 0.92 |
| OU | 50.0 | 40.9 | 18.7 | 61.3 | 78.9 | 1.23 |
Perhaps the officials were carrying out a subversive mission to undermine tempo-free stats. Each team had four more possessions in the stop-and-start second half but I don’t think anyone watching would be comfortable describing the second twenty minutes as the game’s “faster” half.
Kansas managed but five more field goal attempts than turnovers in the second half, and, aided by Oklahoma’s intentional fouling in the final minute, shot almost twice as many free throws as field goals in the second half.
GAME
| Team | eFG% | OR% | TO% | FT Rate | FT% | PPP |
| KU | 45.9 | 31.3 | 22.9 | 44.9 | 64.7 | 0.96 |
| OU | 38.3 | 31.1 | 19.7 | 31.7 | 76.0 | 0.92 |
That’s five games in a row that opponents have failed to shoot even 39 eFG% against Kansas. Preventing the other team from making shots covers up a lot of ills, especially when you rebound the vast majority of those missed shots. Oklahoma had a good night on the offensive glass relative to Kansas’s opponents, but were still 16% off their own offensive rebounding average in conference play.
On a night when Sherron Collins and Darrell Arthur post a double ziggy and Brandon Rush appeared not to want to have the basketball in his hands for any length of time, I’m not convinced that Jeff Capel found a formula for slowing down Kansas. Then again, it’ll only take one bad night against some team’s collection of junk defenses for us to ask ourselves all over again why Kansas can’t win in mid-March.
As unpleasant as it was to watch, either one or two more made shots in the first half, or a couple more made free throws or a couple fewer turnovers in the second half and the Jayhawks would have won by a similar margin as in Manhattan.
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11 Responses to “Recap: Kansas 67 Oklahoma 65”
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February 27th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Wow, from watching, I definitely noticed what seemed like a ton of FT’s in the 2nd half, but seeing the FTRate broken down by half like that is startling.
February 27th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
The adjusted efficiencies from last night’s game:
Only problem is, a game between teams with those actual ratings, played at the pace of last night’s game, predicts to be a 65-63 OU victory. Should I be doing some kind of further adjustment in order to made the game efficiencies correspond to the actual scores? I’m thinking so.
It just hit me that the way I’m calculating these currently, both teams are getting ALL the credit for any difference between projections and results. Maybe I should be giving both teams half credit instead… I think this would reduce the extreme variation seen on the game-by-game graphs. I’ll have to mess around with this later.
Anyway, if I make that change, then KU’s ranks for Off/Def/Pyth change to 33/2/4, and OU’s are 65/6/15
February 27th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
9 Thoughts from the game.
1. Officials are handing out T’s to coaches way too often.
2. They need to call the games consistantly. As Hoopinion touched on, at some points whistles were blowing if the defender breathed wrong; other times drawing blood wasn’t enough to warrant a call.
3. Kansas needs to work on breaking the press… and of course free throw shooting.
4. If Oklahoma hit open shots in the first half, they would have won in doulbe digits.
5. Oklahoma would be competing with UT, A&M and KU for the conference title if Kelvin and all of his recruits had stayed.
6. Carter, a (relatively) big man who can hit free throws? 12 of 13?? As a Jayhawk fan, I didn’t think that was possible.
7. I guess Collins and Arhtur stayed in Lawrence last night.
8. Darnell Jackson needs more playing time.
9. At the end of the day, toughing out a road big 12 game is always a good thing.
February 27th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Hello all from Arkansas…Looks like they are going to fire Stan Heath when he dosn’t make the tourny this year….All the talk down here is that Bill Self and Bill G. from A&M are the two candidates. I don’t see why Bill will want to go to UofA but the story is he does not get along with Lou the AD. Is any of this True? What is the word in KS? Let me know I am fighting these rumors down here but need some info to back me up.
February 27th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Support for my 8th thought.
Top 5 in Rebounds per 40 minutes in Big 12
(min. 15 games and 300 minutes)
Kalen Grimes (MU) 13.62
Darnell Jackson (KU) 13.60
Kevin Durant (UT) 13.02
Julian Wright (KU) 11.62
Aleks Maric (NU) 11.53
According to Pomeroy, Darnell Jackson is 2nd on the Jayhawks in Offensive Rating and eFG% (behind Sherron Collins in both), and leads the team in OR%, DR%, and FTRate. Jackson also leads the team in traditional FG% (4th in the Big 12-minimum 15 games and 300 minutes)
February 27th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
i still say that free throw shooting is what will beat us in the tournament. How can a D-1 top team shoot SO badly from the line.
as for the Self rumors, i havent heard anything like that. Self is a hell of a recruiter but i dont care for him as a coach.
February 27th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Yeah, the FT shooting is pretty bad. KU is 56th out of the 73 BCS conference schools. Although a full third of the SEC is worse (Miss St, Tenn, SC, Auburn). And so are a couple of top 10 level teams (UCLA, Memphis).
February 27th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Coaches want to win. And even if they have a subpar relationship with their AD, which I don’t think is even true in Self’s case, they do not voluntarily take a step down a rung on the coaching carousel. They either move up, or are pushed out and down. If you want to win games, where would you rather coach? Those rumors are absurd.
February 27th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Wasn’t there something in Self’s most recent contract that essentially voided his contract if Perkins left or was fired? I remember him talking about how he wanted to be tied to Perkins. That seems to be fundamentally at odds with the idea that he would leave because there’s tension with Perkins…
February 27th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
I believe I recall Self saying in his first year at KU in an interview with Jay Bilas that this was the only place he would have left Illinois for. Of course, sometimes coaches say things like that when they’re not all true. I think Self is here to stay for a while. I don’t think that Gillespie would take that job either.
As for the game, just glad they got out with a W. I think it’s safe to say that will probably be the only time that Sherron Collins and Darrell Arthur combine for 0 points in their careers. I think they’ll be fine. I’m more worried about Brandon Rush though. I just wish he would play with confidence all the time and play trying to make plays instead trying not to make mistakes, because when he plays with confidence, he is a really good player. Good to see Russell back on the court too.
One big one left then its tournament time!
Rock Chalk!
March 6th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
I saw on an email from Alumni Assoc. that the KU game on Friday will be shown on ESPNU DirectTV Ch. 609