A Rough Draw for the Kentucky Wildcats
UK has feasted on poor defensive rebounding teams this year
Kentucky ranks 8th in the country in offensive rebound percentage, by far their highest rank in any offensive statistic. That ranking was not earned by facing down a gauntlet of rebounding titans, however. Kentucky only faced 2 teams all season who rank in the top 50 nationally in defensive rebound rate: Vermont and Harvard. The highest ranking SEC team in defensive rebound rate was lowly Vanderbilt, at 120th. Kentucky only faced one NCAA tournament caliber team all year who also ranked in the top 100 in defensive rebounding; that was UCLA, who ranked 90th in defensive rebound rate, and beat the Wildcats by 8 points. While UK did a good job on the offensive glass, getting 38% of their misses, it came at the expense of allowing easy transition shots. They allowed UCLA to take 28% of their shots in transition, compared to the 18% UK usually allowed to opponents.
The UCLA game wasn't exactly an anomaly. Vermont held UK to a 28% offensive rebound rate, and Harvard limited the Cats to 25%; this was significantly below the Wildcats' season average of 35%. UK struggled against both opponents, although they eventually pulled out wins thanks to the talent disparity.
Going by these trends, Davidson is a very bad matchup
Davidson is probably the best defensive rebounding team UK will have played this year. Davidson ranks 18th nationally in defensive rebounding rate, and have only allowed three opponents to surpass a 35% offensive rebound rate in a game (UK's season average). Davidson is taller than most mid-major teams, rating 24th in effective height, with 3 rotation players above 6'8".
Davidson also has been fairly effective at limiting opponent free throws, which could negate another strength of Kentucky. Davidson ranks 59th nationally in this category, During their conference tournament, Davidson faced a St. Louis team that ranks 2nd nationally in the rate of drawing free throws. The Billikens were held to less than half their usual rate of earning free throws.
UK is not a great shooting team, and is prone to turnovers. If Davidson is able to limit UK's offensive rebounds and free throws, Kentucky is likely to have stretches where they struggle to score. They are going to have to be very sharp defensively to avoid the upset.
Looking ahead, Kentucky will face more strong defensive rebounding teams
Kentucky could face Arizona in the 2nd round and Virginia in the Sweet 16. These teams are both also among the better defensive rebounding teams in the country, with Arizona ranking 39th and Virginia 50th. If UK is going to make a deep run in the NCAA tournament, they will have to face possibly the 3 best defensive rebounding teams they've faced all year. While Vermont and Harvard ranked higher on the season, neither has the talent of any of UK's prospective NCAA opponents, or played as strong of a schedule.
A healthy Jarred Vanderbilt may be the difference-maker
As I wrote about in my last UK newsletter, the opponent's defensive rebounding performance on the season has been the strongest single predictor of UK's game-by-game performance. If UK was playing a stronger defensive rebounding team, they were more likely to struggle. However, there is a bit more to this story.
As I mentioned earlier in this article, no SEC team ranked above 120th in defensive rebounding. This means that UK's poor games against stronger defensive rebounding teams all came early in the season. UK has a young team this year, and they may be more likely to improve during the season than a typical team. More importantly, there is a significant factor that improved their rebounding: Jarred Vanderbilt.
Since Vanderbilt made his season debut on January 16th, UK has been a much better offensive rebounding team with him in the game. When he is in the game, UK gets 39% of their own misses, compared to 31% with him out and 34% before he debuted. However, given that Vanderbilt is not expected to play this weekend, UK will not be able to depend on him to save the day.
More importantly, if you just look at UK's performances since conference play began on December 31, the impact of opponents' defensive rebounding on predicting UK's game-by-game performance changes dramatically. While that stats is the most influential on predicting UK's performance for the full season, it drops to the 3rd most predictive stat (out of 8) when just looking at conference play. The opponents' season-long ranking in eFG% and offensive rebounding rate become more predictive of UK's performance in this sample. The rate at which opponents allow free throws also becomes a stronger predictor when focusing just on SEC play, although not as strong as the other three.
When using this to analyze UK's matchups, the Davidson and Arizona games look much more favorable. While Davidson is among the elite at defensive rebounding and eFG%, they are among the worst in the nation at offensive rebounding. Arizona also forces turnovers at a very low rate, and is just average at keeping opponents off the free throw line. Virginia remains a very tough matchup, but they are the #1 team in the nation for a reason...I don't think I would trust an analysis that found them to be a good matchup for UK.
It remains to be seen if UK truly improved as a team as the season progressed, or if much of the improvement was due to Vanderbilt being a dominant rebounder. If the Kentucky team we get in the tournament is more like the non-conference version, they will likely struggle to make it through the first weekend. But, if UK's performance in SEC play can be sustained without Jarred Vanderbilt, then UK may sustain their recent strong play and set up a possible Sweet 16 matchup against Virginia.
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