KU vs Northern Iowa: Plus/Minus

Here's the final plus/minus postgame of the season.  The numbers ended up fairly close, just like the score.  When I ran the numbers for the first half, Northern Iowa was at +23 and Kansas was at +9.  In the game thread, some of us felt pretty decent when we saw that.  Down 8 after a half like that?  The second half was better but as we all know, not quite enough.  There are a lot of questions right now about the game and about what happens to the roster as we head into next year.  But for today, here's my last look at the numbers from yesterday's game.

Cole Aldrich ended up leading Kansas at +15.  He finished with a double-double, scoring 13 points and grabbing 10 rebounds.  Xavier Henry was second on the team at +8.  Honestly, that's higher than I expected him to be for this game.  He finished with 8 points along with 8 rebounds, not a bad game at all.  Northern Iowa finished with seven guys that were all at +4 or better but nobody with a double digit number.  For a few advanced stats, Kansas finished the game with 62 possessions and scored 1.08 points per possession and Northern Iowa scored 1.11 points per possession.  The one stat that was just screaming out at me is TO%, Kansas turned the ball over on 24% of their possessions.  That's just awfully tough to overcome against a team like UNI.

• The defensive pressure wasn't as good as we hoped it would be.  Northern Iowa only had five turnovers in the first 37 minutes of the game.  They have been pretty good at taking care of the ball all season but that's an incredibly low number against a defense that has better athletes at each position.  They almost doubled their turnovers in the last 3 minutes of the game...
• Piggybacking off my first comment, until the last five minutes of the game did it ever look like Kansas was superior athletically?  UNI's a very good defensive team and a very deliberate offensive team but my memory sees KU guys chasing the ball and UNI's guys always in front of the ball.  Seems like of perfect example of the coaching line "defense is played with your head and heart".  I'm not saying that Kansas didn't have the heart to do it, but something was missing yesterday.
• A total of -9 from Collins, Taylor, and Morningstar just won't get it done.  One of the things I thought was a strength all year was KU's depth and how they didn't have to rely on one guy to lead them because another guy would always step up.  I'm beginning to wonder if that didn't come back to hurt them last night.  All year when everyone was cold, they turned to Collins to carry the load and he didn't do it yesterday.