Cuz I’m Eighteen!  And I don’t know what I want. – Alice Cooper

Dayton took a punch from the young Billikens early in the second half and responded with a vengeance to win going away.   Game Eighteen saw the Bills drop back to .500 overall at 9-9.  Dayton improves to 5-0 in the conference, following an improbable run to last year’s Elite Eight with an impressive run to start this year’s campaign.

Jerry Falwell Scoreboard

SLU opened the second half with a pair of three pointers to tie the game 27-27.   It looked for a minute as though the Flyers had let the young Billiken team hang around too long to put them away.  Dayton whipped the Bills 34-18 to win going away.

Some solid moments in the first half, but we can’t call this one a Moral Victory.  So SLU falls to 1-4 in Atlantic 10 play, and down to 2-2 in quest for a Moral Majority.

Lineups

Starters:  Bartley, Yacoubou, Roby, Yarbrough, Manning

Five straight for this starting five.

Minutes Distribution (non-starters in Bold):

1. Yacoubou (33)
2. tie- Yarbrough, Mike Crawford (23)
3. Manning (20)
4. Bartley (19)
5. Roby (18)
6. Reggie Agbeko (13)
7. Miles Reynolds (12)
8. Tanner Lancona (10)
9. Austin McBroom (8)
10. Austin Gillmann (7)
11. tie- Grant Hollander, Stephen Lezear (1)

Four Factors

 

Dayton beat SLU decisively in the Four Factors, reflecting the final score.  SLU made six 3-pointers to Dayton’s four, but the Flyers tilted the abacus their way on everything else.

 

Leverage

Remember those glorious 37 seconds when it looked like we just might make a game of it?   The rest of the game did not feel like that, at least to the KenPom computer.  After coming into the game with such a large disparity in rank (#33 Dayton at home vs #261 SLU), the Billikens were going to have to stay close much deeper into the second half to impress the cyber-skeptics.

SLU Player Stats

(Definitions at the bottom of the post)

• The numbers are completely tricked out and junked up.  I would like to apologize to Mathematics, and to Basketball.  Yacoubou showed as the only Billiken who could hold his own against this opponent in this environment.  And he posted a very Ash-like line with big helpings of good (12 pts, 5 reb, 3 Ast) to go with a few spoonfuls of not-so-good (3 turnovers).   With so much negative drag from Reynolds on down, the WAB supercomputer wanted to give Yacoubou an AdjGS of 43 in a game where the Bills totaled only 45.
• Crawford again picked his spots and hunted shots.  Most of his points came in a brief burst, so a large chunk of those 23 minutes were spent taking the Hippocratic Oath of Basketball and simply doing no harm.
• Reggie responded to a PA announcer not calling him “Edge Beck Oh” with one of his stronger performances.  Dayton, having dismissed two bigs from the team earlier in the season, came into the game with a size disadvantage.
• Roby once again is not favored by the AdjGS metric.  He is the defensive leader on a team that does not encourage gambling for steals, so until we can properly measure hurries, close-outs, help, recovery, ball pressure over time he will remain digitally underappreciated.
• Lancona.  Oh, Lancona.  12 minutes and a triple doughnut — 0fer from 2, 0fer from 3, 0fer from the line.

Summary

Dayton is a good team and showed poise in the face of a (very brief) challenge.  This win was good for the league — losses to sub-200 teams serve to stain an NCAA resume — but bad for a SLU team looking for the seasoning a competitive game offers.

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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.