Kansas-Florida Defensive Scoresheet

As always, for an introduction into what the heck is going on here and what all these numbers mean, read this. And as always, thanks to David Hess for the formulas.

Kansas allowed just 1.047 points per trip against the Gators, a mark that, quite frankly, should have been good enough to win the game and would have been good enough but for KU's penchant for throwing the ball away.

This is one of those games where I am disinclined to believe the stats, however. Wiggins was definitely the best defender on the floor (with a slight argument for Embiid) but ranks down the list in defensive rating. Part of that is because of the fact that he had to intentionally foul twice late in the game and Florida made all four of the free throws, and part is because a lot of the things he does won't show up on a sheet like this. I mentioned this in the Colorado post, but Wiggins guarded Florida's leading scorer Casey Prather for large parts of the game, and for at least 75% of the time Wiggins matched up against him Prather was afraid to even look at the basket.

Inside, Joel Embiid has been positively Withey-like (Witheyian? Witheyesque?) with a 12.4% block rate despite spending the first half of KU's games learning how to play defense.

Elsewhere, Jamari Traylor shows why he continues to play, even if he's generally a negative on offense.

As for the point guards, I think this number is a bit unfair to Tharpe (there were a couple makes where I hemmed and hawed about whether it was his fault or the big man's for not hedging well, and he could have gotten credit for a couple turnovers that I ultimately decided against) but Mason has really improved defensively. It unfortunately has seemingly come at the cost of a lot more turnovers, but it's nice to see him improve so much on the defensive side of the floor so quickly.