Iowa-MSU by the Numbers
The big question coming in to yesterday's game was how Iowa's offense could handle the loss of leading scorer Pierre Pierce. Conventional wisdom said that Pierce's contributions were irreplaceable, and Iowa's offense would struggle without him.

While the Hawkeyes did struggle to penetrate at times, and shot very poorly from the field, the offense was just fine. Defense cost them their game this weekend.

Let's do the math (here's the box score) -
MSU = 55 FGA - 12 Oreb + 9 TO + 0.4 x 29 FTA = 63.6 possessions
Iowa = 52 FGA - 13 Oreb +8 TO + 0.4 x 42 FTA = 63.8 possessions

So there were roughly 64 possessions in this game.

Iowa scored 64 points on their 64 possessions. That's an offensive rating of 100, compared to Iowa's 102 through its first 7 Big Ten games. Keep in mind that that 100 came against the Big Ten's second-best defense. MSU's current defensive rating is 98, compared to the league average of 104. So I don't think there's any reason to panic about Iowa's offense.

Iowa's defense was lit up to the tune of a 117 defensive rating. That was mostly due to MSU limiting its turnovers and shooting well on a high number of free throws.

A quick look at some other notable numbers -

adjFG%
MSU - 47%
Iowa - 31%

TO/poss
MSU - 14%
Iowa - 13%

Oreb rate
MSU - 34%
Iowa - 32%

FTA/FGA
MSU - 0.53
Iowa - 0.81

I was worried coming into the game that MSU would crush the Hawks with offensive rebounding, but that didn't turn out to be the case. The Spartans grabbed 12 offensive boards to Iowa's 23 defensive rebounds, a rate below their third-in-the-Big-Ten 37%. So it was a good effort by the Hawks on the glass (hmmm, Erek Hansen plays only 14 min, Iowa does OK on allowing offensive rebounds......is there a correlation?).

So as you can see, Iowa dug itself a huge hole with its poor shooting, but closed some of the gap by shooting a lot of free throws. Haluska and Horner shot almost half of the free throws, leading to a very respectable 76% for the day.

Here's how the players did individually -

Player....................Min........Floor%......Off Rtg.....%Poss
Greg Brunner........23...........0.633...........132........28.0%
Erek Hansen..........14...........0.379.............95........17.0%
Adam Haluska.......35...........0.615...........131........29.0%
Jeff Horner............38............0.393............97.........21.1%
Mike Henderson.....33............0.296............55........12.0%
Alex Thompson.....14............0.325............72.........26.7%
Doug Thomas........22...........0.217.............38........18.3%
Carlton Reed..........17...........0.077.............17..........6.7%
Seth Gorney............4............0.000..............0..........0.0%



PermaLink |