How do you describe yesterday's game? It was a "Perfect Storm of Crap."
UNC, under Roy, traditionally struggles this time of year. I don't know why this is, other than that his teams generally have a season-long focus towards performance in March.
UNC traditionally struggles at FSU.
FSU is a talented team who had grossly under-performed this season.
Put it all together and you get... well you know what you get. The margin is surprising, the loss is not.
Four Factors
Looking at the stats, there is only one thing that comes to mind: statistical aberration. UNC produced season lows in EVERYTHING. And oddly enough, that actually makes me feel better about it. With the GT game last year (the last time UNC had an OE under 80.o), there were definite warning signs leading up to it, as UNC had produced OE's under 100.0 in each of their first 2 ACC games. That was not the case this year, for example:
- UNC came in with a Roy-Era record 4-game streak of gathering at least 80.0% of defensive rebounds. Yesterday, it was a season's low 58.3%.
- UNC came into the game turning the ball over in a remarkably low 16.8% of their possessions. Yesterday, it was a season's worst, 29.3%.
- UNC came into the game assisting on more than 60.0% of its field goals. Yesterday, it was a measly 36.4%, again, a season's low.
- And perhaps most importantly, after holding teams to 30.5% from three for the season, yesterday the Seminoles hit 44.4% of their attempts.
Nothing suggested this could happen, and nothing really suggests that it will continue.
Statistical Highlights
This is simple: there were none. Moving on.
Beyond the Box: Player Impact Ratings
[table id=167 /]
If there was one bright spot in yesterdays debacle, it was Tyler Zeller's performance against a very physical team. Zeller was the only starter to produce an ORtg even close to his ability level, and he also produced a season's best (at least I got to type that word once) Block% of 13.8. Additionally, Zeller was very active on both the offensive (OR%: 20.2) and defensive (DR%: 23.5) glass leading to a career high, 14 total rebounds. The biggest downside to Zeller's performance was that his possession % was a very low 17.7, which is 5.9 percentage points lower than his average, and was 5th on the team, behind Barnes, Hairston, Henson, and Marshall. I am not suggesting that had Zeller been used more the results would have been dramatically different, but the fact that the one player who appeared to be productive on the offensive end was not used more heavily certainly indicates a lack of execution (and possibly a level of panic) that had not been seen in games prior to this.
Season P.I.R.
The cumulative impact ratings for each player can be found below. A player’s average P.I.R., both for the season and the last five games only considers games in which the player officially logged at least 1 minute of game time. The C.V. is a measure of variation; the smaller the percentage, the more consistent the player’s performance has been. While it is not technically correct to use in this instance, because P.I.R. is an interval scale (it can go into the negative), it still has some value for the top-tier players, who will likely have a positive P.I.R. in every game.
[table id=168 /]