100% hot nerd action

THIS ARTICLE HAS A SPONSOR: It’s Nick Hopwood, our MGoFinancial Planner from Peak Wealth Management. We’re going to act like kids in this article but first some seriousness: I had a big health scare recently and I’m talking to Nick now because we were not ready for things to go pear-shaped, and also I have two kids and if everything goes just fine I really wasn’t preparing correctly for their futures.

Anytime you’ve got a financial question, let Nick know. And when you’re ready to figure out how you’re going to plan your retirement and pay for your kids’ college when you just got done paying for your own, don’t wait to do something about that.

Legal disclosure in tiny font: Calling Nick our official financial planner is not intended as financial advice; Nick is an advertiser who financially supports MGoBlog. MGoBlog is not responsible for any advice or other communication provided to an investor by any financial advisor, and makes no representations or warranties as to the suitability of any particular financial advisor and/or investment for a specific investor.

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The Question:

An exercise shameless stolen from someone who shamelessly stole it from someone else:

You're playing NBA Jam and have to pick 3 #badgers from the Bo Ryan era. Who ya got?

(Stole this from @tedvid)

— Phil Mitten (@hoopsmarinara) March 13, 2018

You get to pick three Beilein-era players for your NBA Jam team (two starters, one sub). As a bonus, you get to pick an unlockable player from the pre-Beilein era. For those unfamiliar with NBA Jam, this video should give you an idea of what we’re looking for here—there’s a strong emphasis on athleticism, dunking, outside shooting, blocking, and shoving other players to steal the ball.

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Seth: My favorite part about this topic is that there is a non-zero chance one of our readers can actually reprogram an NBA Jam rom for us.

Alex: There are eight stat categories: speed, 3pt, dunk, pass, power, steal, block, clutch.

Ace: I’m taking Caris/Stauskas/McGary/Rice, fwiw.

slackbot:

[ED: We’ve been programming secret auto-replies into our group IM system. If we trip a keyword, slackbot will interject itself. –seth]

David: Wait...is this a thing? I was at lunch.

BiSB: /WAITING FOR PLAYER DAVE. HIT 'A' TO START.

David: Let me plug in my Game Genie first.

Brian: This should be a draft.

Seth: Our readers do love it when we draft fantasy teams.

Ace: …he said, after I got halfway through my writeup.

Brian: Ok never mind.

Alex: I think a draft would be sensible as well.

Sorry, sorry I'm tryi--

Brian: Ace can go first because he's upset.

David: How many ppl are involved?

Ace: I’m always the bad guy.

/giphy diva

ty giphy

David: OH MAN

Seth: I'm sure that has nothing to do with how you sit in your lair and giggle all the time.

Ace: I actually am working in the basement right now.

Alex: I don't really know where I would put this in the post, but would like to mention it: Stella's in Grand Rapids—a whiskey bar with probably the best burgers in the city—has an arcade section with the OG NBA Jam game. It's as great as it sounds. Shout-out to Stella's.

@adam Catch me at Stella's sometime to get that work from the Stockton-Malone Jazz.

Seth: Our house rule was you couldn't take the Jazz.

Alex: That was just the first team that came to mind - I was going to be courteous and let him use the Pistons. I guess I'll go with the Hardaway-Mullin Warriors. I DON'T PLAY WITH THE STACKED TEAMS IN 2K I SWEAR!

Seth: Draft order:

Seth: I really didn't want to go first damn my eyes.

RULES: It's a snake draft, 3 rounds of Beilein players only, and a fourth round for a secret unlockable character.

BiSB: Then the 4 unlockable players are all in the 4th round Deal?

Seth: YES

Ace: cool

David: fair

BiSB: Seth, Venric Mark is waiting...

[After THE JUMP: HE’S ON FIIIIIIRRRE!]

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1 hour 23 minutes

SPONSORS!

The show is presented by UGP & The Bo Store, and if it wasn’t for Rishi and Ryan we’d be talking to ourselves.

Our other sponsors are also key to all of this: HomeSure Lending, Peak Wealth Management, Ann Arbor Elder Law, the Residence Inn Ann Arbor Downtown, the University of Michigan Alumni Association, Michigan Law Grad, Human Element, Lantana Hummus and Ecotelligent Homes

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1. Minnesota After UFR

starts at 1:00

You should probably block Khaleke Hudson. Minnesota’s approach to this game was bad. Not baffling—they were recycling ideas that worked once each for Penn State and Rutgers. Just…bad. It was bad. Offense things: JBB is obviously a good power blocker; when the offense was going to be a spread-to-Speight outfit in the offseason he probably was too bad at pass pro to be viable. Nice to see the running backs now picking up the subtleties of power running.

2. Hoops Preview LET’S GOOOOOOO

starts at 20:58

Who’s our point guard? Guessing Simmons will end up there, but it’s weird to go into a season without that spot settled—when was the last time that was true? Charles Matthews is the guy they trust to isolate and crate his own shot. MAAR’s usage up this year? Rebounding misses Derrick Walton; Moe Wagner knows he has to start grabbing boards to make the NBA. Teske is now Big Nasty (up from Big Sleep). Duncan Robinson is a coach out there. He might be the best shooter in the country; he might be the worst defender too.

3. Gimmicky Top Five: Thoughts About Board Games

starts at 44:50

We welcome special guest Reid McCarthy from Ann Arbor Elder Law to call Brian to task for calling out Settlers of Catan. This becomes a segment on all the board games we love and hate, and just put together once and thought it was cool but never actually played before losing a piece and now it’s worthless no YOUR childhood was ruined by MouseTrap. Also Brian realizes 5 minutes into talking about Wizards of the Coast buying out Dungeons and Dragons that he just went deeper into nerdiness than even this blog is comfortable with.

4. Maryland Preview w—once again relegated to—sg Seth Fisher

starts at 1:12:35

At least they have an excuse for their quarterback play. THE BORTENSCHLAGER experience might be over in favor of 5’11” Air Force kid. It’ll be like the Rutgers game but not the Minnesota game, basically. Come to me you precious easy passing yards. Come to meeeeeeeee.

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MUSIC:

If you or a friend made some good tunes and don't have a label out scrubbing for them we'd be happy to feature you. Tonight we return to the considerably more ravey stylings of WILSON, featuring his tracks “Roll on Your Wave”, “World Class”, and “In the Meantime” Also “Across 110th Street”.

THE USUAL LINKS

• Helpful iTunes subscribe link
• General podcast feed link
• Direct download link
• What's with the theme music?

[Coller/MGoBlog]

Most old posts are embarrassing. My takeaway in reading through old work for research purposes is usually some stupid line that I wish I had framed a different way or a dumb joke that I forgot I made and spend the rest of the day regretting. Occasionally, though, I’ll read something that makes me feel exactly what I was feeling when I wrote it.

When I dug through old Goal-by-Goal Analyses featuring Michigan Tech I came across the mini-column I wrote at the bottom of this year’s Great Lakes Invitational post and felt the still-too-familiar raging bewilderment that marked much of the 2016-17 Michigan hockey season. The piece ended with boiled-over frustration about Michigan’s offense and their inability to get the puck in the zone; there’s a mention of how badly Michigan was out-attempted, but the Corsi hamblasting from Tech wasn’t unusual enough to garner anything more than an unfeeling, fleeting mention.

furthest right column is Tech’s Corsi For %

That’s Warner Bros. DC movie-level destruction; that’s also reflective of how difficult to stomach the 2016-17 Wolverines could be. If Mel Pearson’s Michigan Tech teams are any evidence, however, Michigan fans are in for a rebalancing in their squad’s putrid possession numbers. College Hockey News has some advanced stats available from 2013-14 on, including Corsi. Remember that Corsi is every shot attempted: shots on goal, shots that missed the net, blocked shots. (There’s a more complete primer at the bottomr of the post.) The general idea behind this is that a team has to have the puck to shoot it, so Corsi is a puck-possession proxy.

thanks, Seth

Generally speaking, Pearson’s teams were good against very good teams and great against bad teams, at least in terms of possession. You can see from the trend line that they did exactly what you’d want a team to do against teams outside the PairWise top 16; the trendline drops below 50% on the doorstep of teams that would make the tournament.

[After THE JUMP: looking for surprises in Tech’s possession numbers]

Tourney sponsor reminder: HomeSure Lending is that. NMLS 1161358.

This began as a tool I made to fill out my brackets, then a few years ago I shared it and it became a thing. Much of the data are from Kenpom, though this year I also included ThePowerRank.com’s rankings, which Ed determines by expected margin of victory over an average opponent. Both he and Kenpom wound up pretty close, but it’s a bit more data when you’re deciding things like which should-be-a-6-seed do I choose in this 7-10 matchup? Alex Cook will have a thing later today that shows which teams got screwed the most in this year’s rather whacky seeding. Spoiler: Maryland and Minnesota shouldn’t be over the BTT championship participants.

The Tool The Tool The Tool:

To use this you:

1. Follow this link to make a copy of the spreadsheet.
2. Select the two teams you want to compare.

The site will be pulled from Team 1, fyi, so if you pull a match that doesn’t exist you’ll still get the distance each team will have to travel to their real site.

Thanks also go to the guy who wrote a google script to pull drive times with a formula.

NORTHWESTERN HAIL MARY pic.twitter.com/w86hoHaldH

— Kyle Boone (@kylebooneCBS) March 2, 2017

A grudging but heartfelt congratulations to Northwestern for making the NCAA tournament. Dissecting this gut-punch will wait until tomorrow.

[Patrick Barron]

In the beginning, it seemed like things might change. Michigan’s defense has been giving up more shot attempts than their offense has been generating from the drop, but the freshman class seemed to inject a bit more tenacity into Michigan’s forechecking. Opponents held the puck for long stretches, but it seemed that the prime scoring chances ceded by defenses in years past, the ones right in front of the net, may have been corrected. At least, that’s what this writer naively believed.

We’re now a bit past the midway point in the season and, thanks to some meticulous stat tracking, we have data to lean on that suggests the unchecked-man-in-front-of-the-net problem has not been remedied. An idea that’s gained popularity over the last few years among NHL advanced stats wonks is separating out from which area a shot is attempted. Those analysts have found what one might expect: more goals are scored from the area in front of the net than from the edges of the zone. Below we have scoring chance by shooting location via a Chance article by A.C. Thomas:

Based on information like the above, analysts have started to call the area with the two darkest shades of green the “home plate” area. The success rate above is based on NHL data, but the idea can be carried over to college hockey. With that in mind, David has been tracking shot attempts (in the Corsi sense; shots on goal+misses+blocked shots) all season. (Special thanks to Orion Sang and Mike Persak of the Daily for frequently providing us with shot charts.) Now that we’re past the midpoint of the season and solidly into Big Ten play, it seems that there’s enough data to see how Michigan’s defense has fared. It’s, uh…well, there’s a reason I called myself “naïve” above.

[After THE JUMP: cheery fun stuff]