You all REALLY need to tune into the radio broadcasts. Listen to Tom Leach call the last second block by Davis.
Tom Leach is the man.
December 3, 2011
December 3, 2011
Best non-tournament game I’ve ever seen. SO lucky to have been at Rupp today!
December 2, 2011
On the Basketball Weekend
Quick and easy, just the way Silky Johnson likes his ladies:
Wife and I are going to the Vanderbilt at Louisville game tonight in the horribly-named Yum Center. I hate to say it, and I mean really hate it, but I’m afraid Vanderbilt’s going to get their doors blown off in this game. Losing to Xavier the way they did makes me very skeptical of this Commodores team, and Louisville plays a style of in-your-face defense that I don’t think Brad Tinsley can handle. Hoping I’m wrong.
Tomorrow we’re heading for Lexington for the UK/UNC game. Kentucky looked absolutely dominant against St. John’s last night defensively, but had an off night offensively. Tomorrow they’ll need those missed threes to fall because UNC is certainly going to be prepared to play. Everyone says Kentucky will win, and I agree, but I’m still not confident that it’ll be that easy. There have been games in the past two years where I think Kentucky will struggle and they end up murdering the opponent, and there have been games where I think they’ll struggle and it’s hard to watch thanks to all the missed shots and rebounds.
In all honesty, matchups in this game are a wash. Anthony Davis is almost a carbon copy of John Henson but better. Tyler Zeller is good, and Terrence Jones will have his hands full, but I don’t think Zeller can guard Jones without help, leaving another scorer open. Not sure about Teague and Marshall. Harrison Barnes will obviously be a handful, but Kidd-Gilchrist and Miller should be a headache for him.
Should be a fun basketball weekend. Go Dores, go Cats, let’s go get drunj.
November 21, 2011
Is Assist-to-Turnover Ratio a fair way to judge a point guard?
Above: Marquis Teague, probably throwing the ball out of bounds. I KEED
I made the godawful mistake of wading into the comments section of Kentucky Sports Radio this afternoon when I followed a link from A Sea of Blue mentioning Teague’s progress measured against Kentucky’s last two starting freshman point guards, John Wall and Brandon Knight (note: he’s doing okay). Aside from the general conclusory dumbassery that is prevalent in KSR’s comments section, one guy paused to say that the best way to measure a point guard’s effectiveness is the assist-to-turnover ratio.
Is that true, though? Think about what the PG’s job is: run the offense and defend the perimeter. Involved in that is taking care of the ball and doing your best to ensure that your team scores when it has the ball and making sure the other team doesn’t score when it has the ball. Turnovers mean that the guard didn’t help the offense score; assists mean that he passed the ball to someone who made a basket. I think that’s too narrow a metric, though. Shouldn’t made baskets by the point guard count? What about steals? Plus-minus?
I’m a lawyer, not an accountant or some other kind of statistician, so I don’t know the answer, but I think that steals and made baskets should have some influence on how we rate a PG’s effectiveness, not just the assist. Sure, passing the ball to the guy who’s open is an important skill, but what if the PG is open and scores, and he called or initiated the play that got him open? Shouldn’t he get credit for that? I think so. So from here on out, I’m going to chart Marquis Teague’s over-all performance in games in a statistic that looks like this: (Assists + FGM + STL)/(TO).
Yes, these are solely derived from the box score. Other factors could and probably should play into it, such as plays on defense where he bottles up a scorer or gets scored on, but that takes too much time and paperwork. AFGMS/TO it is for now, and bully for the guy who comes up with a way better name for that.
Teauge’s AFGMS/TO in the four games so far:
Marist: 4 assists, 7 FGM, 3 STL, 3 TO; 4.66 AFGMS/TO
Kansas: 3 assists, 4 FGM, 0 STL, 6 TO; 1.16 AFGMS/TO
Penn State: 2 assists, 3 FGM, 1 STL, 3 TO; 2 AFGMS/TO
Old Dominion: 2 assists, 3 FGM, 1 STL, 6 TO; 1 AFGMS/TO
Okay, so he’s regressing a little bit. I have to think, though, that these numbers will improve to some kind of median much closer to the Marist game as the season goes along. At least let’s hope so. If you have any suggestions or tweaks to the formula, let me know. For example, should missed field goals count against him? I’m bad at this.
November 21, 2011
The Sporting Weekend
Quick recap of games I watched:
I didn’t know Okie State lost to Iowa State until like late Saturday afternoon. I didn’t know Oklahoma lost until Sunday morning. Clearly, I have checked out of college football EXCEPT I will totally watch LSU play Arkansas this weekend. That will be awesome.
I tried to come up with an analogy for Kentucky football involving an idiot savant, but it would have done a lot of discredit to the savant part. Kentucky 10, Georgia 19.
Vandy fans are pissed about the officiating at the end of their overtime loss to Tennessee Saturday night. They should be pissed about their O-lineman Jelesky who cost them a third quarter touchdown when he clipped some dude who was approximately 40 yards away from the play. That and other penalties are what cost Vandy the win, not some dipshit ref who wouldn’t own up to a whistle. Tough loss, though.
Kentucky basketball steamrolled Penn State on Saturday on the internets, but when they came back Sunday on real TV (but with fake/complete moron announcers), they were not good. It’s a basketball, not a hot potato, Marquis Teague. I can write that in the first and second person because I know he reads my tumblr! No, no he doesn’t.
I’m going to watch Kentucky play Tennessee in the final college football weekend on Saturday. I have every expectation that Kentucky’s defense will give them a good chance to win, but the offense will take Thanksgiving a little too seriously and giftwrap the 27th straight UT win in the series. I am bringing a half pint of Town Fork with me for the occasion. Hooray!
November 17, 2011
Hotdoggin’?
I was on the road all day yesterday so I didn’t get a chance to post my reaction to the Kentucky game, but my guess is it would have been just like 30 other peoples’ post-game writeups. Instead, I listened to sports talk radio all day, which made my brain hurt. Aside from talking about the actual basketball game, a popular topic seemed to be old white people bitching about what Cats fans know as “the three goggles” thrown up by Doron Lamb and Marquis Teague when they made three pointers and Terrence Jones flexing after he crammed a dunk in on Kansas’s Thomas Robinson.
Note again that the only people complaining about this stuff are old white people, including Dick Vitale. “Stop showboating and go play defense,” old white people said. Why do they care? Don’t you like to celebrate when you do something good? Even old white guys like to awkwardly high five when they roll in birdie putts at the country club. So why is it wrong to celebrate when you drop the hammer on a guy that’s been beating the shit out of you in the paint all night?
It’s not. Old white people just want to see the game played like Bobby Knight coached it: where the players fear the wrath of the choke-slam after the game if they ruffle the coach’s feathers. The NFL and NCAA football have gone so far as to totally ban this sort of stuff, with no justifiable reason other than to avoid upsetting old white people. These are kids, they’re playing the game. If you don’t want to watch the kids play the game, do something else. They’re having fun. Get over it.
November 14, 2011
Stacey Poole to leave UK. Good luck.
I said this earlier, but we never saw him on the floor. Like, ever. I would have liked to keep him around because he might have been a contributor as an upperclassman, but when Jarrod Polson’s getting more clock than you are, maybe it’s time to part ways. Best of luck to him, wherever he goes.
November 11, 2011
This Weekend in Sports
None of you care what I’m doing this weekend, but I’ll tell you anyway. Tonight I’m packing my wife, my kid, and my dog in the car and driving to Nashville. We will listen to Kentucky play Marist on the radio. I will enjoy listening to everything Tom Leach and Mike Pratt have to say about the game. My wife will enjoy it for a while until she gets bored and wants to listen to Fleetwood Mac. My kid will sleep through the entire thing, because he is still just 18 months old. My dog will jump from my lap to my wife’s lap approximately 70 times.
We will get to my in-laws’ house, drop off the kiddo, and go to Memorial Gym for the Vanderbilt vs. Oregon basketball game. That will be fun. We will be tired, but we will get chicken tacos from San Antonio Taco Company before we head back to the in-laws. We will sleep.
We will wake up and my father-in-law and I will go to the Vanderbilt vs. Kentucky game at Vanderbilt Stadium. I will try to find out whether I have any friends in town, but, most likely, we will sit in my father-in-law’s car and drink Bud Light until we can go to the game. I’m pretty sure the only friends that will be there are going to watch the game at a bar, which is okay because, to be honest, there are more fun places to watch football than Vanderbilt Stadium. Nonetheless, we will watch the game until one of the two teams is playing badly enough that my father-in-law wants to leave and watch better sports on TV at the house, along with keeping up with other stuff on the computer. He’s the best over-60 IT multi-tasker I know. I will sit on the couch continue to drink Bud Light until my wife, kid, and mother-in-law return from shopping to tell us what we’re going to do Saturday night.
It’s gonna be a fun weekend.
November 10, 2011
This bears distant relevance to the beginning of the Kentucky basketball season.
November 8, 2011
Anthony Davis unibrow shirts at UK.
i seriously love my school. some guy made anthony davis shirts LOL. with his unibrow. (which might i add also has a facebook page.)
LOL, SMH
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