There was no better illustration of how random chance can affect a game than on Patrick Sparks’ successful three-pointer to send the Kentucky\/Michigan State game to overtime. There were three main variables that could have flipped the other way from what actually occurred. <\/p>\n
1) What if Patrick Sparks’ foot is a micron closer to the basket, and so it’s only a two- point attempt?<\/p>\n
2) What if Kelvin Torbert (or "Torbit" as Jim Nantz says) is called for a foul on Sparks?<\/p>\n
3) What if Sparks’ shot falls off the rim instead of through?<\/p>\n
Then consider each of the eight possible combinations to the yes\/no answers of the above questions. Only one of those – Sparks makes a three, foul is called – potentially results in a UK win. Nonetheless, these are the things that will keep me up at night if the Spartans win two more games.<\/p>\n
And that is not a far-fetched notion. If MSU only commits 13 turnovers against UNC, as they did against Kentucky, they are going to score a lot<\/em> of points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was no better illustration of how random chance can affect a game than on Patrick Sparks’ successful three-pointer to send the Kentucky\/Michigan State game to overtime. There were three main variables that could have flipped the other way from what actually occurred. 1) What if Patrick Sparks’ foot is a micron closer to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}