big ten basketball

keeping Germans, um... a 6'10 wing, for... um, ya know defensive... within the city... that ain't legal either. [Campredon]

1/3/2021 – Michigan 85, Northwestern 66 – 9-0, 4-0 Big Ten

The Book™ is one of the most durable sports clichés because it has the dual advantages of being accurate and exciting. Very good players with exploitable flaws exist. Coaches who can see just as clearly as anyone else that the regular stuff isn't working can tinker up weird stuff to go after those flaws. When it works, the very good player gets blown up. You can see why, even as a schmoe watching from home. Expectations get upset. Question marks about the future abound. The player has been Booked, and all opponents going forward will throw The Book™ at him until he finds a way around it. If he finds a way around it.

The canonical Booking also results in a paradigm-shifting upset. I probably do not have to tell you, the Michigan fan, this. The football program is currently in its throes of misery largely because they got hit with an all-time Booking in the 2018 Ohio State game. Michigan entered with the #1 defense in the country by metrics both basic and advanced. Incredibly to modern ears, they were favored to win.

Reader, they did not win. Ten million crossing routes later I was drinking whiskey in a forest while Don Brown began the three-year process of bleeding out on the table.

A less-depressing example: Ohio State stuck Aaron Craft on Nik Stauskas late in a win against the Burke team and it resulted in a crucial, dogged turnover. Tom Crean had some ideas about that, so he stuck Yogi Ferrell on Stauskas the next year. Stauskas scored 6 points in a gross 62-53 loss; Iowa then limited Stauskas to ten by putting Mike Gesell on him. Mike Gesell! There are hundreds of Mike Gesell pictures on the internet and four of them are of Mike Gesell playing defense. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush but generally speaking this guy, who is 6'1" and was coached by Fran McCaffrey, should not be shutting down the #8 pick in the NBA draft.

https___dearoldgold.com_files_2016_02_mike-gesell-ncaa-basketball-michigan-iowa

This is just my opinion.

The Book™ on Stauskas was to put your point guard on him and he'd freak out. Aaron Craft, defensive player of the century, was next up. Stauskas shot over him, going 3/6 from three, and that was the end of that, more or less. Watching Stauskas have a weakness and then overcome it was one of the more entertaining subplots of the year. And that's why people talk about books. They're real.

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

Michigan's been on the disappointing side of bookings quite a bit. This is just the nature of where Michigan programs are in the firmament: usually good enough (or boring enough) to get by without weird adaptations, rarely so good that there aren't holes to exploit. Sunday's game against Northwestern is a rare instance of Michigan dropping it on someone else.

Northwestern entered with an explosive, pretty five-out offense that relied on Pete Nance being a perimeter mismatch for opposing centers. Michigan stuck Franz Wagner on Nance. This looked like a bad idea for a couple possessions on which Robbie Beran—currently a 13% usage guy—drove past Hunter Dickinson and dropped it off to Nance after Wagner had to help. Once Howard started icing ball screens, that spigot turned off and Northwestern was forced to start taking jumpers:

Nance had Northwestern's first eight points on those two early dunks and two tough face-up jumpers. He had one bucket in the last 36 minutes. He finished with one assist and three turnovers. Northwestern's offense, which had been generating a ton of good looks fast, turned back into last year's pumpkin.

As this is happening, Robbie Hummel says that this is the new reality for Northwestern and they're going to have to adjust to it. Because Juwan Howard just gave them The Book™.

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

I was pretty positive about Juwan Howard's hire when it happened and thought that he was a good bet to succeed because he did not have a profile like the various other NBA-to-college hires. I do remember thinking that Howard was going to have to recruit at a higher level than Beilein because no one was going to match Beilein's ability to spin straw into a hellish rain of three pointers.

A year and change later Michigan is playing gorgeous offensive basketball and forcing opponents into a Yaklich level of bad, long twos. The shooting splits are so, so sustainable. Michigan is top 20 in: forcing long twos, defending long twos, preventing shots at the rim, and converting at the rim. That latter is not just Hunter Dickinson. Brooks, Wagner, and Brown are all 80%+ there. Livers is 63%; micro-mite Mike Smith is 58%. Michigan is generating great looks for everyone.

This is not a John Beilein team coasting through on the experience of the departed. This site has pushed the "Wile E Coyote year" concept for a while now, the idea being that the dropoff from coaching turnover doesn't really show up until the second year because in year one you've got a lot of the same guys running the same stuff. This should be Michigan's Wile E Coyote year, and is in fact trending to be so in the turnovers department. But Howard's overcome that because his team has a 23-point gap between its two point offense and defense. And they just wrote the book on Northwestern.

This is going pretty well.

[After THE JUMP: NET approaches WAB]

scowl if you're projected to finish below .500 in the Big Ten [Bryan Fuller]

So that was an eventful week. Some notable results from around the Big Ten since last week's post, home team listed second for each score:

  • Rutgers 74, Maryland 60
  • Minnesota 65, Illinois 92
  • Ohio State 60, Purdue 67 (EJ Liddell sat out for OSU with mono)
  • Gonzaga 99, Iowa 88 (neutral site)
  • Louisville 48, Wisconsin 85 (UL down a high-usage starter but, uh, still)
  • Butler 60, Indiana 68
  • Notre Dame 78, Purdue 88
  • UCLA 70, Ohio State 77 (Liddell back)
  • Michigan State 65, Northwestern 79 (lmao)
  • Illinois 88, Rutgers 91
  • Saint Louis 82, Minnesota 90

Before the breakdown, let's look at the standings.

The Standings

  KP/Torvik Avg   OFFENSE   DEFENSE
Team Nat Rk (change) Rec (B1G Proj) KenPom Torvik KenPom Torvik
WIS 3.0 (up 4) 6-1, 0-0 (14.5-5.5) 10th 8th 3rd 3rd
ILL 9.5 (up 5) 5-3, 1-1 (12-8) 7th 6th 35th 36th
IOWA 10.0 (down 1) 6-1, 0-0 (12-8) 1st 2nd 82nd 138th
U-M 14.5 (none) 6-0, 1-0 (12-8) 9th 10th 30th 32nd
IND 14.5 (down 1) 5-2, 0-0 (11-9) 48th 51st 8th 5th
RUT 19.5 (up 11) 6-0, 2-0 (12-8) 24th 32nd 15th 21st
OSU 22.0 (down 1) 6-1, 0-1 (10-10) 8th 9th 44th 75th
MSU 28.0 (down 7) 6-1, 0-1 (9-11) 14th 25th 51st 45th
PUR 29.0 (up 10) 6-2, 1-0 (10.5-9.5) 20th 39th 38th 30th
PSU 42.5 (up 3) 3-2, 0-1 (9-11) 37th 40th 49th 39th
NWern 53.0 (up 13) 4-1, 1-0 (8-12) 71st 54th 43rd 46th
UMD 54.0 (down 8) 4-2, 0-1 (7.5-12.5) 25th 43rd 63rd 87th
MIN 54.5 (down 4) 7-1, 0-1 (8-12) 46th 69th 52nd 51st
NEB 106.5 (down 3) 4-3, 0-0 (4-16) 143rd 135th 99th 63rd

Your biggest risers are Northwestern, Rutgers, and Purdue, which all saw double-digit bumps up the rankings. Michigan State and Maryland were the two teams to take significant plunges, falling seven and eight spots, respectively. Wisconsin has solidified their standing as the #3 team on both KenPom and Torvik and separated themselves a bit from the Illinois-Iowa-Michigan-Indiana-Rutgers-OSU-(MSU until last night) cluster of top-25 teams.

[Hit THE JUMP for MSU and Iowa defensive struggles, an impact mid-year transfer to a contender, and new tiers.]

Luka Garza's eFG% is $TEXAS [Marc-Gregor Campredon]

Yesterday's Michigan-Penn State game served as the opener to the Big Ten season as a whole. Before the rest of the conference tips off tonight, let's check in on each of the teams and stick them in tiers. If you remember, we did a preseason roundtable that included some comically large tiers as we tried to make sense of a tightly packed conference:

TITLE FREE-FOR-ALL

Wisconsin

Illinois

Iowa

Michigan State

Ohio State

Michigan

SCRABBLING FOR BID

Rutgers

Indiana

Purdue

Maryland

Minnesota

EATEN ALIVE

Penn State

Northwestern

Nebraska

There's been some movement since then despite a relative dearth of marquee games, especially outside of the ACC/B1G Challenge.

The Standings

Here's how KenPom's and Bart Torvik's rankings have the Big Ten stacking up so far, with the caveat that we're still early enough in the season that preseason projections remain a significant factor. Michigan and Penn State are the only teams to play a conference game so far (that changes tonight when Rutgers travels to Maryland) so you're not missing anything with B1G records omitted from the table. Yes, if you were checking the front page around 12:30 today, you may recognize this table.

  KP/Torvik Avg   OFFENSE   DEFENSE
Team Nat Rk Rec (Proj) KenPom Torvik KenPom Torvik
WIS 7th 4-1 (12.5-7.5) 19th 16th 8th 13th
IOWA 9th 6-0 (12.5-7.5) 1st 1st 77th 123rd
IND 13th 4-2 (11.5-8.5) 37th 43th 11th 5th
ILL 14th 4-2 (12-8) 10th 7th 32nd 34th
U-M 15th 6-0 (12-8) 7th 12th 35th 36th
MSU 21st 6-0 (11-9) 9th 22th 42nd 32nd
OSU 21st 5-0 (11-9) 12th 8th 39th 57th
RUT 30th 4-0 (10-10) 55th 56th 13th 16th
PUR 39th 4-2 (9-11) 30th 59th 38th 29th
PSU 45th 3-2 (9-11) 34th 42nd 53rd 45th
UMD 46th 4-1 (9.5-10.5) 18th 38th 57th 77th
MIN 51st 6-0 (8.5-11.5) 39th 74th 44th 44th
NWern 66th 2-1 (6.5-13.5) 86th 70th 54th 51st
NEB 104th 3-3 (4.5-15.5) 138th 132nd 100th 62nd

The conference somehow managed to group itself closer together. So much for clarity.

Onto the tiers, I guess. Please remember that, despite the size of these tiers, the order within each tier matters less than which tier a team falls into. The distinction between a lot of these teams, at least for the moment, is minimal.

[Hit THE JUMP.]