basketbullets

1/23/2022 – Michigan 80, Indiana 62 – 9-7, 3-3 Big Ten

Prepare for science: basketball is more fun when you are raining in all of your threes and the opposition is not. This is scientific take. In this particular game Michigan didn't actually need to be on fire from deep to win—you could have deleted five of their eleven makes and they still would have won—but for many reasons it was good to see it happen.

One is that we are all Beilein-adjusted basketball fans and it does not seem right to have a basketball team that is not burning up the nets from outside. Another is that makes imply more makes in the future. But the most important one is that the shooting in this game felt like rough justice, because:

More NBA stuff here from Juwan

DJ/HD PnR as Moussa backcuts to clear out the strong side

Houstan sets a ghost screen (basically a fake screen) that completely fools Galloway…..open 3. Splash

The Lakers run this action a ton for Carmelo

Beautiful pic.twitter.com/UlZg1dXmZK

— LAbound (@LAbound2) January 24, 2022

Michigan's average quality of look was superb, and that came against a team that entered the game with a top 15 defense.

Taken with the Maryland game, and a game against Illinois that Michigan was in late despite not having Hunter Dickinson, and you've got the beginnings of a turnaround. You might have to squint to get there, but Michigan has the tools to dig out.

[After THE JUMP: marksmen of tall varieties]

12/7/2021 – Michigan 102, Nebraska 67 – 6-3, 1-0 Big Ten

You don't want to take too much away from a game against Nebraska, because there are two kinds of games against Nebraska: one in which they hit a bunch of garbage and you have a mildly competitive game, and 35-point blowouts. After Keisei Tominaga hit two tough threes—one a relocation, the other a stepback over a Brooks contest—to give the brief semblance of the former, this one quickly settled into the blowout.

Nebraska's always been a team with huge roster turnover and this year is no different, so you have things like Michigan casually walking the ball upcourt and still getting what's more or less an open transition three for Caleb Houstan:

Jason Benetti is depressed on behalf of all basketball coaches everywhere who had to witness this. At some point even the partisan observer is asking Nebraska to show some sort of organization so that maybe this can be a better measuring stick

But! Nebraska has been reasonably competitive this year and this performance was far better than others against similar (or worse) levels of competition. At this point anything that suggests Michigan is working some things out is more than welcome. Bullets ahoy:

BULLETS

Shot quality: a thing. It's conventional wisdom in the land of the tempo-free stats that three point percentage against is largely random. This game set out to disprove that, with Michigan getting uncontested looks more or less whenever they wanted them and Nebraska throwing up piles of crap—step-backs, 30-footers, transition attempts on which the shooter never comes to a standstill, blindfolded HORSE shots. If you were to re-run this game over and over again there might be a few iterations where the teams came out with similar numbers from behind the arc, but the heart of Michigan's distribution would probably be 40% while Nebraska's was 20%.

The conventional wisdom is likely because most games against similarly matched teams have a similar quality of look from a similar quality of shooter. Over time things tend to even out. This does not mean that there are not individual shots that are good or bad. Usually the quality gap is much, much smaller.

[After THE JUMP: TEBJJ]

11/10/2021 – Michigan 88, Buffalo 76 – 1-0

No column for a quick turnaround column on a WTKA day, but here are some

BULLETS

Dickinson things. I'm not sure if this is a sane thing to say, but it felt like Hunter Dickinson had a quiet 27 points last night. For some reason I thought that he wasn't doing all that much; then you'd look at his stats and think "uhhhhhhh am I having a stroke?"

Best I can figure is that there are various Hunter Dickinson moments where my brain fast-forwards through the inevitable hoop and starts thinking about how Michigan needs to get back on defense. Supporting evidence is that when Dickinson does miss there is a record scratch in my head and I have to remember not to be offended at the cosmos. It is amazing what you can take for granted, and how quickly.

Dickinson went to his right hand a couple of times here, once spinning baseline for an and-one dunk over a befuddled Generic White Post Stiff. He also did a good job not picking up charging calls on the very frequent occurrences where he was provided a pocket pass in PNR and Buffalo was rotating over extremely well. The one call he did pick up was hot garbage, naturally.

if 29 minutes counts as a sixth man [Campredon]

Sixth man: hello. Much of the offseason chatter centered on Terrance Williams II, and how he was a different guy in year two. That bore itself out here as Williams had 15 points on 9 shot equivalents, a couple of offensive rebounds, an assist, and drew the defensive assignment on Jeenathan Williams after his outburst in the second half. Per Craig Ross, Williams already had 28 points when Michigan stuck TWII on him and finished with 32. The buckets he did get were heavily contested.

Williams has clearly slimmed down after a year of Camp Sanderson and took a step towards trashing his freshman numbers by hitting 2/3 from deep, one of them a semi-transition look that was Chaundee-esque in its authority. He also hit a late-clock Dirk fadeaway and took his man to the bucket on a drive.

That was an impressive suite of skills to display in just one game.

Williams isn't a guy who's likely to end up on NBA radars and so I am looking forward to having him around as an upperclassmen, when opposing fanbases are going to moan about how this guy is still around and isn't he 80 and why does he have to do various this well while not being an NBA caliber athlete.

[After THE JUMP: Spain!]