autobench

dropped by drop coverage [Marc-Gregor Campredon]

3/2/2021 – Michigan 53, Illinois 76 – 18-2, 13-2 Big Ten

It does a body good to snap back to reality after a pleasant daydream. A splash of water; a bracing winter wind; a playful pinch from a person you love. All of these are ways to return to a full, unblinkered view of your surroundings. There are also other ways. Ways that are less good. Ways like being shoved out of a plane by a bear, and then having that bear jump out of the plane and plummet into you, flipping you off the whole time. This is guaranteed to make you hyper-aware of your surroundings for upwards of ten seconds.

Anyway, a basketball game. Technically. Yesterday's… uh… event felt less like a sporting contest and more like one of those nightmares where you show up to an exam with no knowledge of the subject matter, wearing only your underwear and maybe an unflattering hat. A fever dream of how Michigan bombs out of the NCAA tournament.  So bad it felt unreal.

I don't really know what conclusions to draw. It started off as an ugly slugfest where Hunter Dickinson and Kofi Cockburn took turns demonstrating that the other guy was pretty good on defense, too, and then Andre Curbelo came in and broke the game open. Curbelo got to the basket almost at will; he went 6/7 there. Michigan—the whole team—had a total of 7 makes at the basket, period. Three of those came from Austin Davis, who occasionally bamboozled Cockburn with sheer persistence.

Eventually it became clear that Michigan was getting Michigan'd.

The preview noted that Illinois was very similar to Michigan statistically: eFG kings on both ends, turnovers optional on defense, limit threes, limit assists, no post doubles. Illinois, unsurprisingly for a team that has a couple of lead-footed centers, is a drop coverage team that doesn't leave shooters. Jordan Sperber's diagnosis of what happened last night is almost word-for-word what Michigan did to teams like Wisconsin:

Michigan got up 7 threes, 15 shots at the rim, and had 27 midrange shots. Seven of the latter went down. That's a cool 0.52 points per possession.

You don't need any explanations other than that, which is unfortunate because you can weave other problems that are ephemeral. Their legs were shot, they had a bad shooting performance, Franz saw the wrong kind of dog that morning, etc. These are often thrown out when something inexplicable happens; what happened here was nothing of the sort. It followed from the actions Michigan could run and the shots they could get. Since those shots were largely garbage, Michigan scored 53.

In a way, this is a blessing. Illinois stuck a finger into a heretofore unknown weakness and started ripping out big chunks of wall. Minnesota did the same thing earlier in the year when their rampant doubling neutralized Dickinson and forced him into five turnovers. Michigan fixed that emphatically.

This one feels like a tougher fix, but at least the recipe to throw at Michigan is much tougher than "double the post." To replicate what Illinois did you have to be able to play Dickinson one-on-one, relentlessly stick to shooters, and overwhelm their guards athletically. A lot of teams might be able to do one or two of those things. Three is a tall order. And now Juwan Howard will go back to the lab and see what he can do.

[After THE JUMP: perimeter ball denial]

battling for most pleasant surprise [Marc-Gregor Campredon]

It's about time to catch up on all those mailbag questions I asked for last week.

There have been enough pleasant surprises this season already that I had to double-check my preseason predictions. It's time to toot my own horn: I predicted that Zavier Simpson would add a couple more aspects to his scoring repertoire and was bullish on both Eli Brooks and David DeJulius. I didn't commit as much to calling a Brandon Johns breakout and also implied that he might play more as a small forward in enormous lineups than making any more appearances at center after last year's failed experiment there.

In that context, I'll take Johns, whose emergence as a reliable rotation player at power forward would've been enough for consideration. Playing well at center against tough competition, meanwhile, is not something I saw coming. (We have a "brandon johns is not a center" site tag.) That's been especially important in conjunction with Colin Castleton getting physically overwhelmed at times; he still looks a year away from being a plus option as a backup center against top teams, while Johns hasn't looked out of place banging bodies and blocking shots against athletes from Oregon, Louisville, and UNC.

If we expanded this answer beyond players, I'd probably go with Juwan Howard. More on that later.

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the mailbag.]

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

3/9/2019 – Michigan 63, Michigan State 75 – 26-5, 15-5 Big Ten

On the one hand: it was a five point swing against the team I like to see win basketball games. On the other: it was so ludicrous that it immediately crushed all hope, and that turned out to be the right emotional state. I of course refer to the 15 seconds during which Zavier Simpson missed an uncontested layup and Cassius Winston subsequently banked in a three. These are not the events that need to happen if you're going to win on the road against a top 10 team.

There were many problems. Some with Michigan, some with the way the game was officiated, some with the ensuing lineups after the way the game was officiated. But also aaaargh, randomness.

Anyway:

I repeat: a dude. The #1 reason Michigan's offense bogged down was Michigan State's ability to switch screens. The guy who gave them that ability: Xavier Tillman. Tillman had 5 blocks in this game; his performance was reminiscent of Michigan going up against Isaiah Roby last year.

Both Roby and Tillman were able to mirror and contest Michigan shots on supposed mismatches, sending Michigan into a bog of uncertainty and recriminations as the "be aggressive on switches" option backfired. Via Orion Sang, DeAndre Haynes on Tillman's impact:

“I mean, he was really good," said assistant coach DeAndre Haynes. "He impacted a lot of our shots. Every time we drove to the basket, he was blocking one of our guards’ shots. It was tough.

"We tried to change some things up with him, but he’s really quick off his feet. He uses his body well, and he was able to get his hands on a lot of balls that usually we make in games. Our guards really work on the layups we have. He was a better player today. He was an impact today, couldn’t do nothing with him.”

Michigan was horribly inefficient when they drove that supposed mismatch.

Nick Ward going out was the best thing that could have happened for MSU in these two games.

This is the primary subject of a new Solving Basketball podcast that I haven't had the time to listen to yet but I guarantee is very good.

Dumping it down. Michigan again struggled tremendously to take advantage of the other portion of that switch. Teske got the ball once, IIRC, and was called for a dubious travel. Extremely frustrating. Understandable, maybe, as Michigan is a team that absolutely never posts and you can't go from "we never do this" to "we are very good at this" in two weeks. But holy hell, frustrating.

I wonder if this will be an offseason focus for Michigan. It probably should be. Tillman's coming back.