All over St Louis….All the Cats wanna dance with Sweet Little Sixteen. — Chuck Berry

If I may rearrange the lyrics slightly and apply them to Saturday night’s college basketball game, in Davidson NC:  the Cats danced all over Saint Louis U in game number sixteen.

This was a decidedly non-musical shellacking, capping a week-long roadtrip and ending the Billikens’ moral victory streak at two games.

Jerry Falwell Scoreboard

SLU is now 0-3 in the Atlantic 10 by conventional measure.  But in this space, we are keeping track of moral victories, looking for the team to stay competitive enough in at least half the conference game to achieve our version of a Moral Majority.

SLU moves to 2-1 on the Jerry Falwell Moral Majority scoreboard.

A surprisingly good Davidson team — #44 KenPom after being picked to finish last in the A-10 — has ridden a potent offense to quickly make a name for themselves as newcomers to the league.

Lineups

Starters:  Bartley, Yacoubou, Roby, Yarbrough, Manning

Same starting five as the previous outing against George Washington, earlier in the road trip.  Swapping Bartley in and McBroom out was not just a one-game experiment.

Minutes Leaders (non-starters in Bold):

1. Roby (27)
2. Yarbrough (26)
3. Bartley (26)
4. Austin McBroom (21)
5. Tanner Lancona (20)

With the game out of hand early and often, we saw a more balanced distribution of minutes.  That may not have been by design, as Roby finished with his quota of 4 fouls, and Yacoubou and Bartley mercifully fouled out.

DNP-CD:

• NONE

Everyone got a chance to run around on the Wildcat floor and do some stuff.  If we all hold our noses and squint hard enough, that can pass for a positive.

Four Factors

Leverage

The darker the pie, the worse for the program.  Lack of Leverage means lots of garbage time and little upon which to build, at least in the short and medium term.  Longer term, I am sure the coaches will keep this in their pocket for the next time SLU faces Davidson and they will rally around the notion that we owe them one.

SLU Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post)

• Yarbrough again shines as a bright spot with an efficient offensive performance — 18 points on just 11 shots
• Lancona with his first appearance this season up near the top of the charts.  Interesting here to contrast what the WAB supercomputer thought of TanLan’s performace (above) with the less-sanguine view of Brian Hank Haenchen.  Hank’s contention seems to be that Lancona’s numbers are skewed in that they only came in garbage time when the game was out of hand.  The WAB supercomputer — with the immense power of hindsight plus modern chip technology — knows that the entire game was garbage time and boldly rates Lancona’s use of that time more highly.
• Very limited minutes for Manning and I wonder what the story was there, as a five minute stint for a Starter is strange even in this season of spinning dials and carousel combinations.
• Gillmann and Jolly were the main beneficiaries of Manning sitting, logging 18 and 17 minutes respectively.   I again view this as an investment in the future, for the next encounter with Davidson, when hopefully some of the possessions matter.  That could be this year’s A-10 tournament, for all we know now.
• Bartley making 2 of 4 three point attempts goes down as another positive, as the rest of the team was catastrophic from deep.

Summary

Davidson had no trouble handling the young Billiken team just learning the ropes and the rigors of the road.

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AdjGS:  variation on the Game Score metric created by John Hollinger, detailed here.  Hollinger’s original formula is Adjusted to reallocate the points in the game by ratio of the player’s overall impact.  Credit to the team at Rock M Nation for this improvement.

True Shooting %:  Per Basketball Reference, true shooting percentage is a measure of shooting efficiency that takes into account field goals, 3-point field goals, and free throws.

Leverage:  Per Ken Pomeroy, measures how much is at stake on a particular possession.  Leverage is not based on what happened during the possession, but is the range of win probability based on what could have happened.  Learn more here.

DNP-CD:  Did Not Play – Coach’s Decision.  Healthy and otherwise eligible player who did not see any action in the game.