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]

BULLETS

followed by celebration opposition fans found annoying [Campredon]

Dickinson: extended. We've seen enough long twos from Dickinson this year that I think his three-point shooting is likely to be sustainable even if we're looking at a very small sample size. He's just 9/23 on the season. Those number should start going up significantly, because lifting the opposition big out of the paint is likely to be a very profitable activity with Moussa Diabate camping out under the basket.

Diabate's shooting 60% on twos and is getting to the line quite a bit; his OREB rate is top 50 nationally. All of those things are going to be easier for him to accomplish if the lane is just him and some dudes who don't have his combination of size and athleticism. This pick and pop Dickinson 3 easily could have been a layup, and even if missed it's Diabate with seal-out position on Race Thompson and a high probability of a putback:

Juwan is implementing personnel based wrinkles in this PnR set

Notice Moussa cross the lane + seal off the potential help defender so Collins has a driving lane

This happens simultaneously to Hunter popping

TJD was bad on D here, as he died after showing so HD was open for 3 pic.twitter.com/wiMWfD7lBS

— LAbound (@LAbound2) January 24, 2022

Dickinson's obviously going to make most of his living on the block but the addition of pick and pop threats will make Michigan's offense hard to get a handle on. They're currently 20th in Kenpom even with all their struggles. I think there's some upside there similar to what OSU experienced when EJ Liddell suddenly started canning threes partway through his sophomore year.

[Campredon]

The luxury of tall guys. After Dickinson picked up his third foul, Michigan could just swap Diabate onto Trayce Jackson-Davis and have Dickinson check Race Thompson. Since Thompson is almost exclusively a peripheral offensive player this worked out just fine. Thompson did make an Intelligent Cut™ to get a layup but that was a minimal cost to pay for the ability to keep an on-fire Dickinson on the court.

Bubble watch. Advanced metrics still believe in Michigan even at this late date, when preseason expectations are either entirely dropped out or a very faint signal. So that win over Indiana actually sees Michigan pop up to a 10 seed(!) on Bart Torvik's T-Ranketology page. That is an estimate based on future performance, to be clear. Torvik's if-the-season-ended-today projection has Michigan the fifth team out of the field.

Here's an informative twitter thread:

More importantly, in @totally_t_bomb's Win's Above Bubble (WAB) rankings (a metric the committee does not use but one that closely correlates to seeding), Michigan is a dismal 78th, with -1.0 wins above bubble

— David Lectka (@davidlectka) January 24, 2022

How many of those games should Michigan expect to win/how many will they need to win? That's a much trickier question, but here is the range of possibilities for Big Ten final records, which has Michigan averaging 11-9 in conference, but with a lot of uncertainty: pic.twitter.com/LsB8eeILij

— David Lectka (@davidlectka) January 24, 2022

There's still a lot of work to do but Michigan is suddenly not dead in the water.

One good thing for Michigan is that there are a ton of Quad 1 opportunities left on the schedule, but none of them look insurmountable. Michigan's worst W% on Kenpom is a game at Purdue, which is still a 22% shot. The Big Ten is having a bit of a down year, which means they've got a lot of top 25 teams but only one in the top ten (Purdue).

You must be this tall to ride. Caleb Houstan is a roller coaster of a shooter. Last two games: 8/11 from three with a foot-on-the-line two. Previous five: 2/21. Previous four: 12/23. This seems highly correlated by the quality of shots he's getting up. In this game he was mostly wide open and nailing them; the one where he got a real closeout he airballed.

Hop over to Synergy and this appears to be a real thing:

• Guarded jump shots: 0.9 PPP, 42nd percentile.
• Unguarded jump shots: 1.3 PPP, 71st percentile.

You can see that in his high school numbers. When he was on the ultra-stacked Montverde team with Caleb Cunningham, et al, he shot over 50% for the season. As a senior (and in FIBA play) his numbers dropped off significantly. He is not a pull-up guy at all: he's only taken 10 shots off the dribble this year, hitting 3.

I'd say this is encouraging since the offense is functioning more smoothly as all the new parts begin to mesh together and Houstan should start getting more open looks, on which he is deadly.

astonishing [Campredon]

The softest tech. Houstan got a tech for arguing with the referee about a toe-on-the-line long two, which felt ridiculous because Indiana's Xavier Johnson had just spent several minutes barking at the refs for nonexistent fouls. On replay it looked like Houstan was peeved, not outright angry, and his incredulity at the tech was genuine. That was also his third personal early in the second half.

Of course, this became a satisfying ball don't lie moment when Johnson missed both FTs.

Oof. Boy did I hate the random bounces of the ball that turned what looked like an Indiana turnover and fast break opportunity for Michigan into a Trayce Jackson-Davis and-one that drew Dickinson's second foul. That felt like an eight-point swing what with the significant probability of Dickinson missing big chunks of minutes. Dickinson got his third foul early in the second half, but because of the aforementioned luxury of tall people and Dickinson playing smart Michigan was able to get away with it.

Actually now that I think about it that probably was a literal eight point swing since there were a couple of baskets for Indiana that Dickinson just gave up on because of his foul situation. /shakes fist at ball

This is probably just confirmation bias, but… Is it just me or is Assembly Hall the crankiest arena in America about supposedly missed travelling calls? I mean it makes sense, this is Bob Knight country and if there's any coach who would impart a maniacal anger about piddling technicalities it's that guy.

Gach watch! Around here we're still fascinated by Both Gach, the guy who transferred to Minnesota and put up an Isaiah Washington All Star season last year. He transferred back to Utah, because why not, upped his usage, and…. is shooting 53/36/79? With a high assist rate? He's got a 106 ORTG? Baffling stuff.