Championship Game Preview

If Wooden Award winner and soon to be #1 pick in the NBA Draft Cooper Flagg is as competitive as people say, he is never ever going to forget how his Duke team lost to Houston in their epic Final Four battle Saturday night.

Houston (51%) vs Florida – 7:50 PM CDT on CBS

No time for a comprehensive write-up today — work — so let’s talk for a minute about depth. Teams with lots of veterans and/or lots of talented players can bring in substitutes and get some production off of their bench. Teams like Duke & Houston would both be considered relatively deep. But a very good defense will severely limit that depth, exploiting the inadequacy of the replacements and/or convincing the coach through their own Eye Test results to cut short their minutes and rely more on the starters.

The chart below illustrates how this phenomenon played out in Houston-Duke. Generally solid substitutes Mylik Wilson & Terrance Arceneaux — who usually perform right around average for a Houston Cougar — were rendered entirely unproductive by the Blue Devils defense. Emanuel Sharp is simply a rock of consistency so he did what he was going to do anyway. And LJ Cryer broke out for another great game — his third of this tournament. He and the defense carried them to the comeback win.

Current Cougs in Bold. Big red dots are the Game Score Per 40 Minutes in the Cougars’ exhilerating Final Four win over Duke 70-67. Smaller black dots are the same metric for Rounds 1-4.

We don’t have the Duke chart, but it tells a similar story in reverse: Houston severely limited contributions beyond Cooper Flagg, and coach Jon Scheyer could not get anything out of big men tandem Khaman Maluach & Patrick Ngongba. What appeared to be a pretty deep team was pruned down to Flagg, Kon Kneuppel and a bit of Maliq Brown by the swarming Houston defense.

Florida also seems like a deep team, with a higher quality of depth. Their top seven contribute at a higher level than a typical Gator squad — with Tempo Bias certainly contributing. Florida particularly benefits from rotating four productive bigs – starters 6’11” Alex Condon & 6’10” Rueben Chinyelu backed by subs 6’9″ Thomas Haugh & 7’1″ Micah Handlogten. Will Houston be able to trim all these trees and force Florida to ask more of Denzel Aberdeen?

Current Gators in Bold. Big blue dots are the Game Score Per 40 Minutes in the Gators’ Final Four win over Auburn 79-73. Smaller orange dots are the same metric for Rounds 1-4.

Data courtesy Kenpom.com and Basketball Reference
Game Score metric created by John Hollinger detailed here
Plot format by Aaron Baggett
Inspiration from Ken Pomeroy
Inspiration from Rock M Nation

Team colors courtesy:
Benjamin S. Baumer and Gregory J. Matthews (2020). teamcolors: Color Palettes for Pro Sports Teams. R package version 0.0.4