Kugel 19 minutes

The most recent Florida Basketball Hour podcast they talked about the fan base being completely wrong on Kugel and not being emotional. I'd recommend a listen if you haven't heard it yet.

 

I have no idea what his emotional state is from one game to another.

I'm just saying he looked more engaged tonight. More like the Riley from last year

 

Oh yeah. I don't mean you. Just in general. It was interesting. Fans harp on him looking down all the time. They said he is the biggest cheerleader in the locker room, etc.

 

starting at zero is irrelevant and wasted space and there is no distortion of differences. If there is a differnce of say 3, starting a zero or 50, the difference is still 3.

 

There's a lot of industry wisdom that says it isn't irrelevant. Easy to Google. But, we've both said our positions, different strokes for different folks.

 

Okeydokey

Getting back to Kugel, played better last night but still seems to pass when should shoot and vice versa. At least he took better care of the ball and played good D.

 

He is our best on ball defender, IMO, and that's why he gets called for more fouls. We are not a good defensive team overall, but Riley plays hard on that end of the floor.

 

Riley is much more of a distributor than I would have thought. There are some times when I'd rather he shoot it than pass, but I suspect he is sometimes concerned about finishing around the hoop. He makes some excellent high-level passes that honestly, I don't think his teammates are expecting or ready for... probably because they don't think he could make that pass without it getting stolen. He's looking more like a PG than SG to me with each game. He'd need to tighten up a bit to be a viable starting, PG. Obviously, that job is already solidly locked up by Pullin this year but next year it might be between him and Aberdeen... or a transfer. Riley has a lot of talent... I think he's still trying to figure out who and what his on-court persona is.

 

I totally agree I wish sometimes he just go to the basket than pass.

 

Not shocking to be honest. He's usually up off the bench congratulating guys and will celebrate with guys after big plays. Fans will see what they want to see.

 

That was definitely his best game in a while, IMO.

Seems like he's had the yips around the basket. Looks like he makes 'em when he isn't thinking, and misses badly when you can see him thinking. He's so quick and elevates so quickly and so high that he finds himself in the air with a moment to think - clank. I've been there myself and you just have to play your way out of it.

If the above is true - he seems to be trying to do just that: play his way out of it by focusing on playing D and distributing more. 2/4 from deep may help him regain his swagger.

 

Riley Kugel, a consensus preseason All-SEC selection much maligned by many in the fan base for a sophomore offensive slump, has carved out a role as a defensive stopper. At UK, with 9 minutes to play, Kugel was given the unenviable task of guarding the prolific Reeves. After Golden moved Kugel onto Kentucky’s star scorer, Reeves went 2-for-6 from the field, committed 2 turnovers, and was denied the ball consistently in overtime when the Wildcats were desperate for makes. If Kugel can continue to impact winning defensively, Florida has other pieces offensively that give the sophomore time to figure things out on that end.

In win at Rupp Arena, Todd Golden and the Gators show once-proud Florida program is trending up

 

Agree with your description of NBA play, but I give our very own Jason Williams (and Webber's, and maybe some others on those Sacramento teams) on those great Kings' teams some credit for bringing "showtime" and great passing offenses back to the NBA from the dark ages of Riley's Heat versus Van Gundy's Knicks being the pinnacle of "rock fight" NBA basketball. Seemed to me that other NBA teams quickly followed the Kings' lead in becoming much more reliant on passing offenses as well as the passing flair that Williams brought into the league.

And, of course, the 3-point shot revolution has added to it. It's amazing what levels long-range jump shooting has reached in today's game. There are great shooters on most teams with range that's unbelievable.

The international game probably had some influence as well, but for the record, "the world" never beat the USA's NBA players without NBA players of their own leading the way.

 

Yes those Kings teams with JWill were great. Some of his passes were so incredibly creative and he still thread the needle and got the assist. He left them the year before one of the most controversial series of all time in 2002. They had the Lakers beat but was one of the most crooked ref jobs in the history of professional sports. Still, the Kings (the “Quuens” as Shaq so eloquently put it) had some great teams with CWeb and Jason Williams I agree, and yes a little like Showtime. Agree with Riley too, first with the Knicks then with the Heat. Anthony Mason was easily as thuggish as anyone on the Bad Boys Pistons (except maybe not as dirty as Lambeer)

yes the 3-pt shot revolutionized the game, but it had been in existence for over 2 decades before teams like the Suns started using it as a main focal point, up until then it was more passively guarded as everyone stacked the paint. We can thank Shaq for that too. It wasn’t until the Euros and Argentina that made ball movement, cutters and 3s their game - and yes they had a couple NBA players but most of them played in the Euro leagues. That was their style there, and that style is far more prominent in today’s NBA than the former NBA pack the paint style is. A lot of the guys that lit up the all-NBA players in the Olympics were Euro players (Argentina who won in ‘04 had a ton). It really hasn’t been until recently that Euro players dominated the NBA, now Jokic, Doncic, Giannis and Embiid (though now a US citizen) are easily the top 6-7 players in the league. It’s so much more of an international game than it used to be. We can thank Michael Jordan for that; then guys like Kobe and Lebron after for really elevating the NBA worldwide. It’s fully international now, and it’s frankly a much better league and far more watchable because of it

 

Production and turnovers!

 

Plays hard, just out of control often. Never seen someone with his high skill set miss so many lay-ups. He's a stud, just something missing right now.

 

Thanks for bringing up this subject. My best friend's father died soon after the UK game, so I couldn't answer right away. This is interesting & I don't want anyone to feel misled, so I'll elaborate my thoughts a little bit.

I agree that the visual representation can exaggerate effect sizes (the relationship between variables) in some graphs. This is notable/usually seen in a partial y-axis of a bar/column graph when comparing categorical data. The reason is that the shaded area in a bar should be in direct proportion to the number it represents.

You should be able to overcome this by using a datapoint & placing the player names next to the dots rather than along an axis. There's no visual perception of magnitude conveyed by the distance from the axis to the dot.

When you zoom in/truncate graphs, doing so can be helpful or harmful, depending on your intentions & what you want to communicate. Zooming in can over-emphasize minute differences while the opposite can hide meaningful information. Nothing has been falsified in either presentation of the data. The only thing that really changes is your perception of the relative differences. The mathematical relationship between the numbers doesn't change.

So here's the original graph with zero included. Does it change anything? For me, it's more difficult to see the absolute numbers when zoomed out so I'm seeing less helpful information. In fact if you scaled the axes out further you'd lose more & more information until they all blended into a single point.

 

When you think about logarithms, they're used for data that have large differences in values. They compress the scale so that you can interpret over that range. I wish we had a player that would require it, lol. Even if we did, logarithms just aren't intuitive for many people.

 

I worked in combustion modeling and chemical kinetics I think in log-log.

For fun they should have kids play with slide rules. Then logs make sense.

 

Well if you looked at just offense or just defense, you'd always have a counter-claim that you need to see both sides. For me it's easier than looking at a table.