Going for the Knockout: Part 2, Players Ed.

Earlier this week, we looked at scoring margins broken down into 5 minute periods.  Along the way, we learned that Kansas has a very explosive offense when things are clicking.  We also noticed that the last 5 minutes of a half haven't been especially productive. 

Today, we're going to look at those individual 5 minute periods and try to figure out any patterns on the court either in gameplay or in personnel that could be playing a significant part in what we see.

This is the same picture from the previous post, used here for reference. 

Ran into a pretty big wall in trying to draw conclusions about the runs.  Basically, looking through the play by play data for different sets of runs was really hard.  So I'm turning back to old faithful, my plus/minus.  Remember, this is only +1 for positive things and -1 for negative things.  It's not perfect but I think the results do show guys that did a lot in these mini-runs.

Player chart and notes after the jump.   

If player a cell is blank, the player wasn't on the court for the vast majority of the 5 minute period. 

Honestly, I'm surprised by some of this. 

• Markieff has been in beast mode the last few games (pre-UMKC) and this matches up well with that.  When he gets locked in, a lot of things go well.  He rebounds and scores, a huge bump. 
  
• Really expected to see more from Robinson doing this.  He seems to be the energy guy and I thought that would show up here a little more often. 
  
• Reed also disappointed me here, again I just assumed that he was a part of these with some key 3 pointers but that doesn't seem to be the case.  He hit some shots in here but nothing out of the ordinary. 
  
• Nice to see Releford with the +3 against UTA during the second half run, that confirms what a lot of us saw with his energy in that game.

In the end, I'm not sure if we see anything in particular here.  Markieff looks great but Marcus doesn't really show up in the recent games.  You can probably go to the bathroom when Withey's on the court.  Might confirm a little bit of what we see and show how valuable MkMorris can be to this team, other than that I'm just happy knowing that over 40 minutes this team is better than most teams.