How UK won vs LSU, and why I'm concerned

Offense carries the Cats, but the results were much better than the process.

First things first….I want to recognize 2 subscribers who were contest winners in December!

First, amadison04 was one of the subscribers who joined in December and was the lucky winner of a drawing for a $50 Homefield Apparel gift card.

Then, Kevin M was the winner of the UK vs UofL Pick’em contest and a $25 Homefield Apparel gift card.

Congrats to both of them, and a big thank you to all my subscribers! Watch out for more contests coming up…..

Kentucky has played 4 straight games where they’ve largely been carried by their offense. They’ve done it despite largely ignoring spacing concepts, playing multiple non-shooters at once. Looking at just the overall game data, it seems reasonable to conclude the offense has been fixed. In fact, one of the foremost names in college basketball analytics did just that on Tuesday evening.

Ken Pomeroy @kenpomeroy

If I was a Kentucky fan, I'd be encouraged by tonight's performance. 74 points in 59 possessions = 1.25 points/poss, best against LSU this season. LSU made 11-25 3's to keep it interesting.

Ken Pomeroy is brilliant, but this is a case where just looking at data doesn’t tell much of the story at all. Yes, Kentucky scored more points per possession than any other LSU opponent. The way they did that may not be entirely replicable going forward, and I’m not sure it will hold up anywhere near this level against most of their remaining quality opponents.

In a game with as much randomness as basketball, I believe in Process > Results in evaluating any individual game. When I refer to “Process”, I mean many of the strategic decisions around a gameplan like how to counter an opponent’s strengths, exploit their weaknesses, and establish your team’s offensive and defensive footprint. “Results” are the points resulting from these strategies. For example, Kentucky could come up with dozens of creative sets to generate nothing but open three pointers all game long; generating open three pointers is a very good process. If the team hits 20% of them, that’s a disappointing result.In an elimination game only results matter, but over the course of a season good processes tend to produce the kind of results you’d expect. If Kentucky took 50 open three pointers every game, they’d usually hit so many that they’d rack up blowout wins. The website ShotQuality.com evaluates teams this way by assigning quality scores to shots based on whether it was open, who was shooting, and the areaon the floor. The core idea is if you’re doing things that are likely to generate points, the results will match that much more often than not.

The LSU game was a good example of this. The result was that UK got a win, but the process wasn’t a great one. When John Calipari states that the late game issues are “fixable”, I agree but I also am not sure he and his staff are identifying what all of the issues are.

After the paywall break, I’ll detail how UK won against LSU and why it might not hold up.