Drake Bulldogs 74, Upper Iowa Peacocks 58

WOW, what a blast! It was so great to see the guys play live again. Hearing Larry and Dolph on 1350 on the way to the game got me all nostalgic and ramped up to go as well.

I wasn't the only one as well. The attendance figure I saw was just over 3,600. To me, that's fantastic given (a) it was an exhibition game and (b) we're still in College Football season. Maybe I'm looking at this wrong, but I feel like great turnouts before November are fantastic when you consider that lots of SportsNation still has its collective mindset on College Football.

Altogether, Drake took care of business and downed the Peacocks 74-58. The game was tight at points, but it just felt like Drake was going to go on a big run sooner or later and really put the game away. That came early in the second half where Ryan Wedel tried to relive his finest high school moment, draining two threes and a nifty reverse layup to pound out 8 quick points in a short time in the second half. After that, you knew it was pretty much over. Drake got up by as many as 22 points, and coasted to a victory.

I'm going to take this post in a direction that's a lot in tune with my analytical/statistical roots. In case you didn't see the Monte Carlo Simulation post from last season, I'm always interested in taking a look at things a different way -- even if that means breaking out some advanced statistics. While I'm not going to do anything crazy like that, I do want to break out some of Dean Oliver's stuff I have been reading recently, specifically the "Four Factors" of basketball.

His Four Factors essentially say that there are four key factors to winning in basketball, shooting being the most important. From there, the other three important factors are taking care of the basketball, giving yourself multiple opportunities, and getting to the foul line. When you apply my estimate of the posessions on Saturday night (which are fairly reasonable) with some rough formulas, below is the scorecard of the four factors from this particular game:

There should be enough here to talk yourself through the calculations, but I'll describe them at a high level for now. Let's walk through them in order:

1) Effective FG %. How well does a team shoot? This is the most important factor to a basketball game. This particular metric is similar to the field goal percentage that the typical basketball fan is used to looking at, with the one exception that three point makes are given extra credit in the numerator due to the fact that you receive three points instead of just two.

By my calculations, Drake shot an astounding 61.7% EFG for the game. This is primarily driven by the fact that we shot almost as well from three (50.0%) as we did for the game (51.1%) and both were very good. Upper Iowa shot a fairly average 49.1% EFG for the game -- solid but clearly not as great as the Bulldogs.

If you were there, early on you would have been surprised to see this. In the first few stretches of the game, Drake really took some time to find its stride and Upper Iowa was really drilling threes. But once we hit halfway through the first half, Drake really started consistently shooting the ball well and the long ball started slipping away for the Peacocks.

2) Turnover %. This pretty much tells you what % of the time a team turns the ball over.

With Drake's press giving the Peacocks fits (to the tune of an incredible 31 turnovers), Upper Iowa really struggled to take care of the basketball, turning it over about 40% of the time. Drake turned the ball over 21.3% of the time. If you're looking for a point of reference, we turned the ball over 20.2% of all of our posessions in the 2008-2009 season.

You couldn't be happier about the way the press worked for Drake, but you would certainly like to see them take care of the ball a bit better against an inferior opponent. We shouldn't have a game where we turn the ball over (on a percentage basis) more than our average last year, against a team we're so much more athletic than.

That said, I do think you have to give a bit of a pass because there were some clear situations where guys made passes expecting a guy to cut one way and they'd go the other way -- things where they just weren't familiar with one another. Those fix themselves over time. In addition, I couldn't have been happier with the way that Wedel and Wiseler played. Wedel was more of a scoring threat, but I liked how he pushed the ball in the second half. Wiseler showed exceptional ball handling in my opinion, and his fast break lead pass over the pack to Aaron Hawley in the first half was one of the better lead passes I have seen live in quite some time. I wasn't the only one giving him props. In the post game show, Ben Simons talked about how he has "crazy Euro moves" when describing Frank's handle.

3) Offensive Rebound %. Big stinker here from the guys, and it shouldn't be a huge revelation to anyone that was there on Saturday. Drake was outrebounded by 15 (36-21) and even failed to get more defensive rebounds than Upper Iowa offensive rebounds (15-16, also inferred by the OR% for Upper Iowa being above 50%).

This is significant cause for concern. To a certain extent, if opponents keep getting second (and third, and fourth, etc...) chances, it really drives the propensity for the posession to just keep extending until they do score. With Craig Brackins just a few weeks away (or, heck, IUPUI next week), if we rebound at this rate, we will significantly undermine our chances to win.

I think we all knew coming into this year that we weren't going to be a rebounding juggernaut. And I don't expect us to even be above average on the glass, but we can't lose the rebounding edge that poorly.

4) Getting to the Line. This is basically how many free throws we make over how many field goals we attempt. Do we get to the line and make them? We certainly pushed the issue and got to the line a lot more than the Peacocks, making more free throws (16) than they attempted (7). That said, we shot 64%, so there is certainly room for improvement there.

Overall -- The numbers back the story (DU wins 3-1), but surfaces the obvious issue of our rebounding. It will be interesting to see how we fare on that regard against a challenging opponent in IUPUI next weekend. Despite the downfalls, I'm real excited about our freshmen and how well this team can shoot the basketball. There will be plenty of growing pains, but I really think we'll be a fun team to watch.

Final Unrelated Thoughts:

• Keith Steffeck (#45, Upper Iowa) was a treat to watch. Real tall, REAL skinny, but rangy and talented. Dropped 20 on 8-15 shooting and 4-8 from the three, tying Alex Kramer for lead rebounder with 6. Made a headsy backdoor cut but couldn't handle the alley-oop. Also made a pretty slick no-look feed to a cutter. Really gave us some fits, especially early on before he got into foul trouble.


• Ben Simons showed some flashes of being downright dangerous with his feet set. They ran some double screen plays for him and he absolutely stroked two threes in a row. Too early to make comparisons, but seeing such a tall guy move and stroke it from three made me think glimpses of Adam Morrison. He's already my favorite player on this year's team.


• My wife attended the game with me and provided the unintentional hilarious reaction of the night. For those of you that attend games frequently, you know that the PA announcer will sometimes get into it when he indicates the scorers name after big shots. Well, Bill Eaddy hit a pretty snazzy fadeaway from the top of the key to which he yelled "Bas-Ket! Billlll Eadddyyy!"... however my wife thought he yelled "Nass-Tay! Billlll Eaddddyyy!" instead. Absolutely hilarious. Going forward, I don't think I'll ever be able to refer to him in any other way than "Nasty" Bill Eaddy.


• That zone defense is a lot more imposing when its full of 6-8 bodies. They're all so rangy it makes it real tough to make an entry feed. Now if we could only get a rebound...