laval lucas-perry

photo via Jason McMann

In isolation, Laval Lucas-Perry's exit from the basketball program is not a big deal. Last year his offensive rating and effective field goal percentages checked in lower than notable bricklayer Stu Douglass. For perspective, this is what Douglass managed in 2010:

Stu Douglass … had an eFG of 42.7 and an offensive rating of 93.9 with a 15% usage rate. If Stu Douglass was a team, he would be Southern, a 5-25 SWAC team with the same overall eFG%. And those guys have to average 20% usage.

Being less efficient on offense than a guy who is in turn less efficient than a 5-25 SWAC team is quite a trick, and not one that indicates fans are going to spend draft night two years hence punching the wall because you went in the lottery. As departures go, LLP's is more Kelvin Grady than Ekpe Udoh.

Unfortunately, that attempt to dismiss the impact of the departure overlooks one key item: this basketball team actually needed Kelvin Grady. I keep on this like a broken record, but the team's best three-point shooter in 2009 other than the departed CJ Lee was none other than Grady. Whatever deficiencies he had as a player probably wouldn't have kept him off the floor in a year when no one could dribble or find the backboard in three tries. Next year, the basketball program will need Lucas-Perry and won't have him. It would be nice if Michigan's program was the sort that could sustain the loss of a guy like LLP without blinking. It's not.

So LLP's exit does not come in isolation. It comes in the midst of this:

Last year’s off-season was the epitome of stability and optimism. I spent the summer blogging about which national reporter had Michigan in his preseason top 15 and how Michigan was hot on the heels on Casey Prather and Trey Zeigler. This summer is the polar opposite — the news continues to revolve around a mass exodus of bodies out of Ann Arbor. One early entry. Three assistant coaching departures. One dismissal. Just four returning players who have played in a collegiate game.

Add in the crippling transfer of a player already on campus that leaves one position shockingly bereft of experience and talent plus an early entry into a draft that has no interest in the entrant and the basketball program is acquiring a distinct whiff of whatever horrible thing has plagued the football team since Rich Rodriguez took the job. We went into 2009 hoping the football program would mirror the basketball program; we go into 2010 fearing the reverse. Beilein tossed Rodriguez a rope and started pulling him out of the quicksand only to find himself waist-deep in turnover, facing down an almost assuredly lost year spent trying to get a bunch of underclassmen to stop running into each other.

UMHoops calls the above an "ominous sign" and it's hard to disagree. Momentum may be a hugely overrated concept when it comes to individual games, but on a program level it's not. Michigan had an opportunity to establish itself an up-and-coming program last year only to totally blow it on and off the field. Now instead of enduring an understandable bump in the road as the last of the Amaker players give way to Beilein's recruits, the bump is the anomalous NCAA year that establishes nothing. It's a dead cat bounce. Now we've got as much kick as Penn State does over the last decade. Hoorah.

I've previously said that I think Beilein's going to get a fifth year no matter what happens in 2010 and that year six probably requires no more than an upward trajectory from whatever filthy pile of used needles the team spends next offseason in. The dismissal of one role player doesn't change that, but it does add to the pile of foreboding tidings surrounding the team and how likely it ever is to get off the mat and become consistently decent. That was Beilein's promise: consistently decent or better.

If it's hard to see that happening at the moment, it's equally hard to see how a Michigan administration is going to find anyone more likely to pull that off. They aren't going to hire a coach with the tiniest hint of skeeze. Trying to be a basketball power without skeeze when you're an hour an a half away from school with the country's best performance-to-skeeze ratio is almost impossible. And firing the head of the NCAA's basketball ethics committee a couple years after self-administering a stern talking-to for the first time in the history of your football program is going to be a bridge too far for the administration unless they have no other choice. Beilein will be handed every opportunity to get things moving in the right direction.

You can put together a scenario where Smotrycz is Pittsnogle II and Hardaway is a diamond in the rough and a roster pushing 6'6" average height is a tough nut to crack defensively and there's an NIT bid next year and an NCAA bid in 2011 and Brundidge comes in and is Rodney Stuckey and etc etc etc. You'd have to be a little daft to expect it, though. Michigan basketball looks to be stuck in this amazing limbo where there's little expectation of success for the next three years and little recourse despite that.

But have I mentioned Carl Hagelin?

 

Bork? Bork.

I guess this ends the wondering about whether Laval Lucas-Perry will be granted that 5th year of his scholarship for the 2011-2012 year. Press release:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- University of Michigan men's basketball head coach John Beilein announced today (Wednesday, June 30) that redshirt-junior guard Laval Lucas-Perry (Flint, Mich./Flint Powers Catholic HS) has been dismissed from the program.

"The University of Michigan and our men's basketball program has established expectations essential to the success of all students and athletes," said Beilein. "These university and team standards have been clearly communicated to the team and Laval on numerous occasions through meetings, conferences and mentorship.

"Unfortunately, Laval has violated our team standards. Therefore, I have decided that he will no longer be a part of our basketball program. Given the fact that Laval is near the completion of his degree, he has been extended the offer to remain on scholarship for the 2010-11 academic year and graduate in May with our 2011 class."

After transferring from the University of Arizona midway through his freshman season, Lucas-Perry has played 58 games for U-M averaging 5.6 points, 2.1 rebounds and 1.4 assist per game.

/press release.

Standard "violation of team rules" dismissal, though he'll be allowed to remain in school. Your men's basketball roster for the upcoming season now is one guard shorter, meaning more time at the 2 for the likes of Zack Novak and/or Stu Douglass, and probably an increased role for Tim Hardaway Jr.

Michigan 80 Iowa 78 (OT), MIchigan 13-12 (6-7 Big Ten)

It wasn't pretty, but at this point in the season it would be improper to take any win for granted, right? If Michigan was in position to grab an NCAA tournament bid, this would have been a scary game. However, the Wolverines are closer to missing the NIT than they are to making the Big Dance. Let's just enjoy the win.

After steady improvement throughout the month of January and the beginning of February, it's clear that Michigan's defense is not at a level that will win basketball games when the offense isn't working right. Like Wisconsin and Northwestern before them, the Hawkeyes shot the ball well, finishing with a 55 eFG%. Had Michigan not matched that number in one of their better shooting performances of the year, this game could have gotten ugly. Michigan opened up a 10-point lead late in the first half, but let Iowa claw back to tie it up by the break. Play was much more back-and-forth in the second half, but Iowa led by five with only 22 seconds to go, before Michigan managed to force overtime.

There were some bright points. On top of the newly-found shooting competence, this team actually showed some heart for the first time in quite a while, gutting out a win when it looked like all hope was lost. If they'd been able to do that a couple more times this year, maybe we'd be talking NCAA Tournament fringe instead of NIT fringe. A number of players stepped up that one probably wouldn't expect (primarily Laval Lucas-Perry), and seven whole players got double-digit minutes!

BULLETS

• Rough game for Manny Harris despite decent numbers on the scoresheet. He had six turnovers, and nearly fouled out. A couple of his fouls were borderline calls, but they were also plays he should be smart enough not to make. He shot just 7 of 17.
• DeShawn Sims, as we've come to expect, was this team's leader. He struggled making some layups through contact, otherwise he would have had a stellar outing. Very interesting for Beilein to (finally, in the eyes of some) play him with Gibson.
• Darius Morris was super-quiet. Two assists, three missed shots, and two personal fouls isn't a statline that shows off how much he's improved over the course of the year. He still needs lots of work on his shot, but this game wasn't as big a step backwards as it might seem.
• If we're criticizing LLP for being invisible most of the time, let's also give him props when he shows up to play. His 3/3 shooting from behind the arc to start the game got the offense moving, and though he didn't do a whole lot after that, he was the catalyst for Michigan's big run.
• Man, the Big Ten Network presentation was awful. We constantly got shots of the lights or the back of someone's head instead of, you know, the game. We got about 10 seconds of ridiculously loud music, presumably off someone's iPod in the production truck (I kid). The commentary was often too quiet to hear, but it doesn't matter, because the announcers had no interest in talking about the game. The Big Ten Network doesn't have a great reputation to begin with, and it's painfully clear that they have no interest in correcting that.
• [Editor's note: anyone else notice Jim Jackson's somewhat disturbing morph into Hubie Brown? I heard "blank is the best blank we have have in our league" a dozen times.
• It's nice to see Stu Douglass and Zack Novak find something of a shooting stroke. Both only shot 3-pointers, but if they can continue shooting well, Michigan might be able to surprise a team at the end of the year, and get some confidence for the future.
• Michigan still has a chance to go on a bit of a run here, with Ken Pomeroy favoring them to win three of the last five, including the next two. Dylan is hinting that Michigan is capable of sneaking into the tournament, but I wouldn't get so far ahead of ourselves quite yet.
• Getting back to the officiating for a second, I think Oops Pow Surprise said it best:

  We're not stupid enough to think that Hightower and Valentine were somehow actively conspiring against Iowa; not only is Michigan plainly unworthy of a conspiratorial effort (see: not a tournament team), but that theory would require the supposition that the two men are actually capable of calling a good game and just choose not to. That's a fantasy.

  Further, it's not the case that all the calls went against Iowa for the balance of the game. There were several calls that seemed to be a whistle just blown at random, and a good amount of them were in Iowa's favor. This is what happens in a Hightower/Valentine game.

  Bad officiating is frustrating for all, even when it's not heavily slanted in one direction or another

• [Editor's note: UMHoops pointed this out about the refereeing: DeShawn Sims says he complained to the refs about his game-tying three and the ref said he would have called a foul if he had missed, which just goes to show that every conspiracy theory you've ever had about basketball refereeing is true. Bastards.]

• Did Anthony Wright get in a bar fight or something? Beilein:
  
  “The facts are, over the last day, I believe that Anthony had done nothing wrong to what the facts that were presented to me,” Beilein said. “If the facts change, then I will make appropriate action. But the facts are the facts that we discussed.”
  
  People, don't punch Ant Wright please.

Up Next

The Nittany Lions of Penn State travel to Crisler Arena Saturday, looking to win their first game in the Big Ten this year(!). This is a good opportunity for the Wolverines to get a win against a pretty bad team, and it's also a football junior day (about which more in Wednesday Recruitin'), so let's get this team some fan support to close out the year.