basketball

Jordan Morgan will finish his Big Ten career 6-2 against MSU, Michigan now leads the Big Ten with four games left, and Nik Stauskas and Caris LeVert had wonder twin powers unite. Muppet/muppet.

And you can't have one without the other…

Won the game!

[Fuller]

It was a hot mess.

GRIII got Kaminsky'd, transition D was bad again, 3-pointers are raining on us...what was the most terrifying part about thing that was'ed at Crisler on Sunday?

Secondary question (optional): diaper bags. Is it true you need to buy a bag specifically for diapers? Is it important that it have a cooler? Why not a backpack? Why not my Jansport backpack from college? What's so damn important about Diaper bags that you need to shell out $150 at Buy Buy Baby for a satchel with lots of compartments?

Mathlete: I have so many answers for you about diaper bags and so few as to what happened at Crisler Sunday.

We've run the gamut. Started with a giant piece of luggage. Ditched that for a second piece of luggage and since have gradually gone smaller and smaller. We finally settled on the smallest possible container that can hold about 3 diapers, a package of wipes and a thing or two of baby food/snacks/apple sauce. I don't know if you could go straight to this, you have to go through The Process of using a big bag to truly appreciate how little you need.

The Skip Hop Versa transition bag clings to your stroller and prevents the little one from escaping when your back is turned.

As to basketball, this is a young finesse team. A game like Sunday was bound to happen. They can't consistently lock down on defense enough to stop the big runs. They are 89th in kenpom defense, the worst of the top 25. Only Duke and Creighton are above 45 and both of those teams are head and shoulders the best two offensive teams in the country. When you get in a hole and don't have a high likelihood of getting consistent stops in the future, that puts a lot of pressure on a team without a Trey Burke. Last year Burke was the singular talent who could impose his will regardless of setting. Michigan doesn't have that this year. Stauskas had his run but has been brought down to earth (nothing another year or two in college won't help!).

With all that said, this team hasn't rolled over. They cut the lead on Sunday to 3, won at Breslin in a game that never felt like theirs until the very end. The team is definitely incomplete and the Iowa and the Wisconsin games were as bad as they've looked in Big Ten play. With that said, better to have the vulnerabilities identified now as opposed to a month from now. With the make-up of this team, anything will be possible come March. Their offensive prowess and the Beilein touch could push them into another Final Four or their youth and lax defense could be a formula for an early exit. As frustrating as the recent losses have been, the Big Ten title can be all but clinched a week from today.

[jump]

[a Wisconsin player is now standing beneath you.]

lotta Walton

I pose the questions for these things on Monday nights or Tuesday mornings, so I was taking a guess that Ohio State would sic Craft on Michigan's alpha dog. He was surprisingly efficient but the question remains relevant:

We are now alarmed. What are teams doing to shut down Stauskas, and what can Michigan do to counter it?

BiSB: Like Seth, I was assuming Craft would be able to lock up Stauskas. Boy, are my cheeks red.

via [@JeffBoals]

The Stauskas shackles are complicated but revolve around the same principle: put a little guy in his face who can shadow him. Stauskas isn't extraordinarily quick, so if you get a Ferrell/Craft type who can get over every screen and stick with him through curls and such, you can deny him good looks. Moreover, if they do that, bigs can sag off a bit, and as a result the pick-and-roll game has sputtered.

There are a number of theoretical options to Liberate the Stauskas, but I'm not the Xs and Os expert. Ideally you'd see more back-cuts to take advantage of the overplays, but for one reason or another those haven't been there. They can also try to find ways to take advantage of the size mismatch, but Stauskas hasn't really demonstrated much of a post game.

This nearly got the cat called for a moving pick.

So that leaves stuff like off-the-ball down-screens that see Stauskas take a Family Circus-like route to a catch-and-shoot. Stauskas can also generate his own pull-up 3s on occasion, which are both fun and profitable. Basically, we might need to add a "Nik Stauskas is probably Rip Hamilton" tag to the site. That might breathe new life into the Not Just A Shooter debate, but even if he is Just A Shooter sometimes, that's okay because he's still a really really good shooter. Also, Ferrell notwithstanding, chasing Nik in circles all game will take a toll on a guy on the offensive end; Craft had to rotate off of Stauskas a couple of times, and by the end of the game he wasn't even strong enough to shoot a basketball all the way to the hoop from 22 feet.

via user harryddunn

------------------------

[After the jump, the spheroid of truth]

2/5/2014 – Michigan 79, Nebraska 50 – 17-5, 9-1 Big Ten

A demolition that was into Kenpom time as fast as any game I've ever seen, so straight to various things about various things. Highlights:

So that's what it's like when the other team is like "take my threes, please." Generally, basketball teams playing Michigan make it a huge priority to limit open three point attempts. This is because Michigan shoots a lot of them (almost 40% of their FGAs) and is quite good at knocking them down—25th nationally. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't, but everyone really tries to limit Michigan from long range.

For whatever reason, Increasingly Dangerous (At Least At Home) Nebraska™ decided against that. Michigan launched a whopping 31 threes—60% of their shots—and until things got sloppy late just about every one was a great look. Some of this was transition hurting Nebraska's ability to contest, and some of it was what looked like an ill-advised reaction to Michigan's pick and roll game where Nebraska bigs would hedge super-aggressively, forcing wing defenders to dip their toes into the paint to compensate. The ensuing passes beat Nebraska's rotation on almost every possession, and the threes rained in. Serendipitously, Luke Winn's latest power rankings address the adjustment Nebraska made to neutralize Stauskas at the expense of a billion wide open threes:

Thus assists. Michigan assisted on 21 of their 26 makes.

And thus Irvin. This was an Irvin game what with all the open looks, and Irvin took advantage with three consecutive threes in the first half, including a heat check that got a friendly roll off the front iron. He even took a couple dribbles(!) and made a couple of twos.

He is very much Just A Shooter right now, as he didn't add anything other than buckets to his stat line until after halftime and even then the only things tacked on were three rebounds and a foul. He is an endpoint for possessions only. His statistical profile is instantly familiar to anyone who's previewed a bunch of basketball teams using Kenpom as a crutch: miniscule assist, TO, and FT rates of 5.6, and 9.8 and 6.2, respectively, bunch of threes, few twos: corner gunner, corner gunner, corner gunner.

And he might stay this way. By this time last year we'd applied "Game, blouses" to Stauskas. He was getting to the bucket with some regularity. Just look at the FTAs: Stauskas had 87 last year; Irvin currently has 8. Even if his role is to be that gunner, previous editions of guys in that role have shown more diversity than Irvin is right now.

This is completely fine. If Irvin just turns into Bruce Bowen, that's a nice thing to have on  your team, and Walton and LeVert can drive play even in the worst case NBA pillage scenario.

Anyway.

Michigan is considerably more diverse from three than other teams with noted bombers. Via Luke Winn.

Not just a shoot—wait is he even shooting? Nine points on just three shots for Stauskas looks like a bit of a crisis even if that's really six shot equivalents with Stauskas going 6/6 from the line, but in this one Stauskas effectively found shots for other guys (eight assists) much like Trey Burke did in the first half of the Kansas game last March.

Four TOs is a bit steep, especially since he had another four in Michigan's previous home game against Purdue. Seems like teams are more cognizant of Stauskas's playmaking ability and are trying to jam passing lanes when he drives.They're trying to play him like Wisconsin plays everyone: two point jumpers for you.

LeVert had a similar issue or two on drives where the shot looked like the right move but his assumption was that someone was coming over; he got away with a couple deflections on passes that should have been shots.

With the way they're calling charges now, once either guy turns the corner they should be more aggressive, especially since picking up an offensive foul hardly sentences either to foul trouble 99% of the time.

Almost there. Michigan needs Caris LeVert to hit like 2/3 in Michigan's next game and have their other five guys hold serve, and then they will have six(!) guys hitting 40% from three. Robinson, at 29%, is the only guy on the roster who takes threes that are not obviously a great idea.

Walton has been crazy efficient in Big Ten play. [Fuller]

Quantifying Walton's improvement. At Michigan's 6-4 trough I noted that Michigan wasn't getting much out of either freshman and that turning that around was a major season key. Remember the brief period where people were wondering if Spike should be starting? It was around then.

Since, Irvin has established himself a shooter you have to reckon with; meanwhile, Derrick Walton has become a consistent double-digit scorer. He's doing this with much better efficiency. He went from bad 99 ORTG to 108 in the course of 12 games. While he is still the lowest-rated guy on the team in that stat, that's because Michigan's offense is bonkers. On a lot of teams—good teams, even—that's your #2 or #3 guy.

In Big Ten play, Walton's 18/31 from two and 12/23 from 3, a 66% eFG% that would place him third(!) nationally if that was his whole season. As it is he's now around 200th in both that stat and True Shooting %, which folds in free throws. Only Stauskas and the posts flushing excellent passes are above him in that department. The main thing holding him back is a TO rate that's a bit high for what you'd want, but a high TO rate for in a young guard is generally regarded a good sign as long as the rest of his game is solid.

Walton made a midseason leap; while he's still a complementary piece he's doing things that bode well for the immediate and long-term future.

Petteway could not get to the bucket like he did in the first game [Fuller]

Hey: defense. Michigan finally had a legit good all-around defensive game, holding Nebraska to 0.79 points a possession and 0.63 in the competitive section of the game. Terran Petteway entered the game the leading scorer in the Big Ten, scoring at least 15 in every conference outing and barely removed from a 35-point demolition of Minnesota. He ended up 2/10 from the floor and acquired five points, with four turnovers and one assist. That is locking a guy up.

Oddly, Nebraska did not do much of the pick and roll action that Petteway thrived on in the first matchup. Michigan was highly unlikely to provide the soft hedge they did in that game, but even so you'd think they'd poke around with the same thing that gave Michigan fits a month ago. Nope.

Our walk-ons need to get it together. In a game with some rich trillion possibilities, no one came through. Sean Lonergan and Andrew Dakich both turned the ball over; Brad Anlauf had a third TO and a couple of fouls. Cumong, men.

FWIW, Michigan's 13 TOs seems high for them but three of them came from the walk-on crew in the final four minutes, so ten over 36 isn't bad.

How did Walter Pitchford escape? The Nebraska big man seems like a great fit for Michigan what with his three point shooting (37%) and all-around offensive skill. He is also from Grand Rapids. He was a DePaul commit who opened it up when the coach there got fired and ended up signing with Florida after committing in April. Meanwhile, Michigan was in the process of adding a late signee in 6'6" PF/C Max Bielfeldt, who seemed like a bit of a weird fit then and is getting scant minutes now. A rare recruiting goof from this staff.

Spike Albrecht turnover watch. Albrecht's lone Big Ten turnover remains the held ball against Michigan State where he tried to call timeout for about ten seconds without actually getting one. In conference play his assist to turnover ratio is… 22.

"We did score 75?" Stauskas responded. "Well ... we've been doing a good job on offense. "What can I say?"