hook all the things
12/12/2020 – Michigan 62, Penn State 58 – 6-0, 1-0 Big Ten
Stanley Kubrick made a lot of movies featuring deranged men pushed to their breaking points, and he had a particular way to demonstrate that these men were no longer bound by the strictures of your normie morality, man. It's not hard. TV Tropes:
The Kubrick Stare is really quite simple to pull off. You simply do the following:
- Tilt head down
- Look up beneath eyebrows
...and voila! Instant super-creepy look!
Nothing so easily executable should be so consistently effective, and yet.
The Shining
Full Metal Jacket
Go do it in the mirror. It is the easiest piece of acting yet invented. The stare is so effective that the TV Tropes live-action film section on Kubrick Stares goes 40 deep and is no doubt incomplete. It communicates what it needs to communicate, every time.
When the Kubrick Stare happens, something is about to go down. There may be literal, if ghostly, rivers of blood, or someone might get shot or go to a weird masked sex club. But there is going to be a metal band named after whatever happens. Masked Sex Club is opening for Rivers Of Blood this weekend at the Nowhere Pub in This Analogy Works Better Without A Pandemic, NV.
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Here's a thing I like about Hunter Dickinson other than the fact he's hitting 73% of his twos. When he hits one of his twos, he runs back to get on defense looking like this.
Face down, eyes up, brows furrowed: hell yes. As long as Hunter Dickinson does not move into a haunted hotel or enroll in the military or marry Nicole Kidman or become the Joker, he's good, and Michigan is good for the duration of his tenure here.
Jon Teske did not do this. Jon Teske occasionally dunked on giant human beings and was very red afterwards. He did not seem more angry after scoring, ever. After Teske hit a three he'd take out an imaginary bow-and-arrow and shoot it; I always envisioned him as a 7-foot Cupid distributing the joy of making a three. His suction-cup-tipped arrow would ploink a small child in row eight and it would be really nice. If I was going to make a list of college basketball players who might also be serial killers, Teske would be last. Hunter Dickinson would be… not last. (#1: Brad Davison.)
This site has long-established Teske stan credentials but we also clung hard to Teske's "Big Sleep" nickname for various reasons. One was that it was appropriate. Teske was a center playing in a John Beilein offense, so he would do a lot of screening and occasionally pop up on the end of a pick and roll/pop. At no point did anyone think "we need Teske out there to make the offense function," for many reasons.
Juwan Howard inherited a Beilein team and—aside from a game-opening post-up designed to activate Teske like he was Totoro—operated it like one. Michigan's four factors last year are virtually indistinguishable from the paradigm Beilein set up:
one of these is Beilein, one Howard
It's still early days for Howard, who's just one recruiting class in, but we can already see the shift away from Michigan's blood-red back half of the four factors. Michigan's added six points to their OREB number and five to their FTA/FGA number in year two. Those climbs might be blunted by Big Ten play, but the mere fact Michigan is sending two or three big guys to the offensive boards should produce a bonafide greenish hue there by year's end.
Michigan's team history on Kenpom is quite a ride; for the purposes of this post it's enough to note that Michigan's offensive rebounding was above-average in his first year and in 2013, when he had Mitch McGary and Glenn Robinson III, and literally every other OREB/FT rate square is somewhere between pink and the deep evil red of a ranking in the 300s. Amaker turnover red.
This is not a complaint about how John Beilein did offense because your author is not insane. I'm talking about it because it's taken six games of Hunter Dickinson to completely reshape expectations for what Michigan can do, and what they should do. Post offense is inefficient? Not so far. Immobile mountain persons are unsuited for modern basketball? We'll check back after Wisconsin. Transition defense above all? Not when you've got some guys who can jump really high or occupy two persons worth of space on a daily basis. Michigan is using posts to create shots, not merely absorb them.
I admit that I was a bit worried that Howard's ability to coach up bigs, and clear desire to use them as a focal point, may have locked Michigan into a brand of basketball that felt wooden. It wasn't a major concern, just a thing in the back of your mind as you consider the contours of basketball in 2020. Right about now it feels like a thing that the opposition doesn't have a lot of good tools to combat anymore. When the 7'1" guy looks at you like Private Pyle, you might be in a spot of trouble.
[After THE JUMP: who likes some midrange defense]
2/18/19 – Michigan 65, Maryland 52 – 23-3, 12-3 Big Ten
A year ago Ace and I had a disagreement about Zavier Simpson in which I asserted he'd probably never be a 20% usage guy. A year later I'm technically, barely correct because of rounding; Ace is spiritually and functionally correct. Simpson is simultaneously a 19.4 usage guy with a meh 106 ORTG and the source of panicked consternation whenever he's not on the court.
In my defense I did not foresee Simpson bringing the skyhook back, because I am not insane.
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