GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Mere seconds after Stefan Moody buried a 26-foot 3-point shot to silence the O’Connell Center and ripped what was left out of the Florida Gators’ collective hearts, this item was posted on Twitter by basketball analyst and sabermetrics savant Ken Pomeroy.

Thousands of UF fans, no doubt, were thinking the same thing. But Pomeroy, or "KenPom" as he is known in the expanding stratosphere that is sports analytics, wasn’t just thinking anything about yet another last-second UF gut punch.

He was computing it.

According to KenPom.com, the advanced metrics website that crunches tempo-free statistics and is a bible for basketball offices throughout the country, the Gators rank dead-last in luck among Division I basketball’s 351 programs. And that’s not a subjective statement, but rather a quantitative statistic backed up by real data.

Florida (12-13, 5-7), mired in a four-game losing streak that marks the program’s longest in seven years, puts its chance quotient on the line again Wednesday night against Southeastern Conference foe Vanderbilt (14-11, 4-8) at the O’Connell Center. The Gators have lost two straight one-point games. They’ve dropped eight of 12 games where they’ve been within four points inside a minute to go. Six of eight that went down to the final possession.

But what makes them "#teambadluck," rather than just "#teamcan’tfinish," according to KenPom?

"The idea of measuring luck is based in that no team has total control of what happens at the end of the game," explained Pomeroy, who has a civil engineering degree from Virginia Tech and a masters in atmospheric science from Wyoming, to GatorZone.com earlier this week. "If you have 10 close games, you’re not going to win all of those games. In fact, even the greatest teams wouldn’t be expected to win more than six out of 10 games that are one-possession games. So those that do win more than you would expect, that’s where you can assume the result came with some good fortune. Losing more than you would expect? That would be the result of some bad fortune."

The KenPom.com definition for luck is "a measure of the deviation between a team’s actual winning percentage and what one would expect from its game-by-game efficiencies."

Florida’s "luck" figure is a minus-.162, a measurement that is determined by a complicated mathematical model that takes in a multitude of statistics — such as offensive and defensive efficiency, turnovers per 100 possessions, offensive rebounding, free-throw attempts, etc. — and spits out a baseline number for an expected winning percentage. It’s called the "Pythagorean winning percentage" and for the eggheads out there is derived from (AdjO^10.25)/(AdjO^10.25+AdjD^10.25).

Got that?

Now to understand (maybe) the luck measurement you have to know (and accept, as difficult as it might be) that Florida this week checked in at No. 34 among all 351 teams in the winning percentage column. Remember, this is purely statistics-based and has nothing to do with wins, losses, NCAA resumes, RPI and McDonald’s All-Americans. At 34, UF is the fifth highest-ranked SEC team in the KenPom Pythagorean category, trailing Kentucky (1), Arkansas (28), Mississippi (30) and LSU (31), with Georgia (35) and Texas A&M (49th) right behind.

"After Kentucky, the measurements of a bunch of those SEC teams are pretty much equal," Pomeroy said. "In the case of Florida, what’s happened at the end of those close games has dictated [the Gators] have a worse record than the others."

Translation: When matching UF’s Pythagorean — or expected — winning percentage against those of its opponents over the course of the season, the Gators should not have lost as many close games as they have.

How much a team deviates from the 50-percent mark — in Florida’s case, that number being minus-.162 — is the luck factor. And the Gators are the unluckiest team in the nation by a substantial margin, ahead of No. 350 San Francisco (minus-.136) and No. 349 Cal-State Bakersfield (minus-.130).

For what it’s worth, Wednesday night’s opponent — Vanderbilt (minus-.126) — checks in at No. 3

In the interim, Gators coach Billy Donovan isn’t buying all this mega-misfortune stuff.

"To me, those are kind of excuses," said Donovan. "You can sit there and say it’s bad luck or ‘we’re snake-bitten’ and all those things, but I’ve never, ever believed that. I believe that you put yourself in position — maybe if you want to use the word lucky — to be lucky. And if you look back and analyze those games, somebody from the other team made a shot against us. That’s really what’s happened."

Has it ever.

"Look, if I was a head coach, I wouldn’t come out and say, "Hey, we’re unlucky." Fans don’t want to hear that. You don’t want to tell that to your players, either," Pomeroy said. "But from a statistical standpoint, it’s pretty clear those kind of things do exist."

But Donovan is right in that, yes, those killer losses usually came down to someone making a shot. His point is the Gators could have done a better job not allowing those shots to happen. Same with some other game-altering plays that led up to those shots.

Those things were in his team’s control.

"We’ve been undisciplined, we’ve been out of position and we’ve not made the plays that have cost us down the stretch," senior forward Jake Kurtz said. "It just gets magnified because so many bad things that happened were at the end of the game and we’ve not been able to recover from them."

No argument there. And Kurtz, as UF fans can attest, should know.

Here’s a look at some of those shots — and the endings — that went against the Gators and how statistical data backs up KenPom.

— Nov. 17 (Gainesville): Miami guard Angel Rodriguez swished a 3-pointer with 16 seconds left that proved the difference in a 69-67 win for the Hurricanes. Rodriguez scored 22 of his 24 points in the second half, went 5-for-7 from distance, with all five of his treys coming in the final five minutes. Now put those numbers up against Rodriguez’s current numbers, which show he’s averaging 12.7 points to date, hitting just 31.2 percent from the 3-point line and has not made five in a game since that night at the O’Dome.

— Nov. 26 (Paradise Island, Bahamas): Six seconds after UF guard Kasey Hill gave the Gators a one-point lead, Georgetown guard D’Vauntes Rivera-Smith rained in a 21-footer (just inside the arc) with 3.5 seconds to go and handed Florida a 66-65 defeat. Rivera-Smith was 0-for-5 from the 3-point line before that shot, so maybe he was due to hit a long one. A good player (Rivera-Smith is the Hoyas’ leading scorer) made a play for a good team (the Hoyas are KenPom’s No. 19 overall team). It happens, right?

— Dec. 30 (Tallahassee): With the score tied, FSU guard Devon Bookert received an inbounds pass in the baseline corner with 2.6 seconds left. Covered well, Bookert wheeled and heaved a desperation 3-pointer that was well short of the cylinder. Kurtz, in prime rebounding position and no one near him, jumped to grab the ball, but it grazed the rim and caromed off his hand and into the basket with fourth-tenths of a second remaining for a 65-63 Seminoles victory. That happens, right? No, not really. Hardly ever, actually. But get this: the circumstances of the play — bizarre as they were — do not factor into KenPom’s formula. But still, it’s another close loss.

— Jan. 3 (Gainesville): Just four days after the FSU debacle, Connecticut guard Rodney Purvis hit a trio of 3-pointers over a late four-minute span to lead a Huskies comeback and key a 63-59 Gators defeat. Three straight 3-balls over four minutes from a guy currently hitting at a 34-percent clip. UF went into the game shooting 66.8 percent from the free throw line. Not great, but significantly better than the 40 percent (8-for-20) it shot that day.

— Jan. 24 (Oxford, Miss.): Ole Miss guard Jarvis Summers drove, drew a foul and sank two free throws with 3.5 seconds left and Florida failed to get a last-second shot off in a 72-71 road loss. Ouch.

— Feb. 7 (Gainesville): Down two points to No. 1-ranked Kentucky with 1:41 to play, UF center Jon Horford stepped to the free-throw line with a chance to tie the game. Horford, who had made 26 of his 29 free throws to that point for the season (that’s 89.6 percent), missed both. The Wildcats came into the game ranked eighth in the SEC in free-throw shooting at 69 percent. They went 21-for-22 from the line (95.5 percent) for the 68-61 win.

— Feb. 12 (Gainesville): Florida led by one and played sensational defense on the final Ole Miss possession, but Moody rose up from four feet behind the 3-point line and bombed a 3-ball for the Rebels’ 62-61 win, their second one-point defeat of the Gators in three weeks. Cue the "#teambadluck" tweets. And retweets.

— Feb. 14 (College Station, Texas): The Gators used a late run to grab their first lead of the game, but a pair of free throws by Texas A&M forward Jalen Jones with 1:12 to play turned out to be the final points in a 63-62 loss that ended (like the road game at Ole Miss) with UF failing to get a shot off before the final buzzer. Happy Valentine’s Day, Gators.

For context, Florida made plays in crunch time to win some close games games. Free throws in a four-point win at South Carolina. A driving dunk by Dorian Finney-Smith and game-ending defensive stop to win by two at Alabama. An offensive rebound and clutch free throws with 1.6 seconds left by Michael Frazier II to beat Arkansas by one.

Worth noting relative to the metric, however, is that Frazier, the Gators’ leading scorer, rolled an ankle against Kentucky and has missed the last two and half games, all of which are included in the above hard-luck losses. His absence (or anybody’s, for that matter) is not factored into the KenPom "luck" equation any more than a bad whistle from an official or, in the Kurtz case, a bad bounce at the worst time.

It goes back to what Donovan said about someone making a shot. It’s true.

The fact that nearly all of them go in against the Gators is what puts them at the bottom of KenPom’s table.

"Say you were an impartial person just watching the Miami game and froze the screen right as Rodriguez released the ball and asked, "Hey, what are the chances this goes in?’ " Pomeroy said. "You would say there’s more than a 50-percent chance that shot is not going in. Obviously, it did go in. That’s where luck comes into play. You can say whatever you want about Angel Rodriguez. I’m sure he’s a fine human being who rises to the occasion when the pressure is on the line. Seriously, he could have all those characteristics, but you still wouldn’t say there’s 100 percent chance that shot is going in."

What’s that old cliche again? About it being better to be lucky than good?

Well, KenPom’s numbers say the Gators are unlucky and good. And there’s not much fun in that.

Or in 12-13, either.