___________ Really Makes The Jayhawks Go

Often when you watch a college basketball game, commentators will bring up that a specific team really seems to go how a certain player goes. The player most brought up for us is no doubt Sherron Collins. But with him struggling against Missouri and us still winning by almost 20, I wanted to see if this was the case.

How did I go about doing this? Glad you asked. Serendipitously enough, I saw a post on nearly the exact same topic on a random Twitter link, and happened to read all the way through. For the life of me I can't find the post right now, but if I find it or if someone else finds it via the magic of the internets I'll make sure they get proper credit. Now, to my methodology.

What criteria did I use to determine who influences our success the most?

For these purposes, I am using offense only since it is much easier to show who is the most influential on a team offensively via stats. I could say "man Cole Aldrich is a beast inside" but it's tough to show that outside of block rate and Defensive rebounding percentage. Offensively however, I can do this:

1. Tabulate the offensive rating for each of our games. This is expressed simply as points per 100 possessions. The D1 average is currently 100.4.

2. Tabulate the offensive rating for the 5 players who play the most. Well, not really the top 5 since I added Morningsleeves when he came back, so 5 and a half.

Why individual offensive rating?

Excellent question. I was going to do eFG%, but that (as the name implies) only takes shooting into account. I wanted something that took shooting, rebounding and assists/turnovers into account. Enter offensive rating. It is an extremely complicated formula developed by statistician Dean Oliver that to be honest I couldn't even begin to explain. But it works. If you do want the explanation, google his name and buy his book.

The other main reason that I did it is that it is on the same scale as team offensive efficiecy, and thus should make our charts that much cleaner and easier to read. A little disclaimer: Individual offensive efficiency isn't exactly meant to be a game by game comparison, but it will work for this exercise cause this isn't meant to necessarily be a game by game thing but more of a measuring the trends type thing.

Apologies for the tremendous amount of graphs. I wanted to do just one big one, but it was really messy to look at. Thanks to everyone who actually makes it through this whole thing.

Let's get it started with Sherron Collins

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As you can see, Collins has gone up and down for much of the year, but his average is at 145, which is very good. The correlation between his O rating and our team's O rating is .593. If you know statistics, you know that the closer you get to 1 (or negative 1), the better the correlation.

Next, the big man Cole Aldrich

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The first think you will notice is that Cole's O-Rating is often lower than ours for the game. The next thing you will notice is that the correlation between his efficiency and our team's efficiency is -.13, which confirms what we all knew anyways: Cole is a much more valuable defensive asset than offensive asset.

Next up, Marcus Morris

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Although we have talked at length about McMorris's improvement over the last couple weeks, his two highest values came earlier in the year. But the biggest thing in my mind is that he is doing it much more consistently over the last few games. Morris's correlation is just .42, but I expect that figure to be higher when the season is over as he learns to stay on the floor (and hopefully makes his bunnies)

Next, our precocious Frosh, Xavier Henry

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Bad news bad news with X: First, the bad news: you can pretty much draw a straight line through his first game and his last four games. He has really regressed. Hopefully he is just hitting a bit of a wall and will trend back up as conference season continues. The second bit of bad news is that his correlation with our team's efficiency is .631 which (spoiler alert!) is actually the highest on the team. Although it's not really statistically relevand, so I wouldn't get your collective panties in a bunch.

Mr. Facebook is up next

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Taylor's correlation is a paltry .22, which pretty much confirms my belief that he is in there for his defense. Although it was nice to see him handle the ball in crunch time last night, even if he didn't acquit himself terribly well. He did have the 2nd highest rating in last night's game however, so there were plenty of positives to go around. And, although he has been frustrating at times, his season long average is 17 points higher than Morris.

Last but not least, one of my favorite players on this year's team and probably our unsung hero, Brady Morningstar

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The first thing to notice is how high his ratings are. Brady has just one game under 100 (well, 2 if you count that zero, which I think is a math error). His average is 172, which is highest on the team and pretty much confirms what HCBS stated about him coming back improving everyone else. His correlation is just .44, but when he has been playing as well as he has been, it can bee whatever he damn well pleases.

So what does this tell us? Well, although it seems like it would be catastrophic to lose Sherron (and I think it would be bad, especially from a mental standpoint) no one player carries this team. Everyone does their fair share and we can absorb a bad offensive game from anybody. The emergence of McMorris has given us a two headed monster down low, and if Henry picks his offense back up, this is going to be one dangerous team.