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.

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.

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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:

Collins had a great game plan early - pick/pop to suck Dickinson out + put Kopp/Nance on same side as shooter/dunker so that Livers couldn’t help on dumpoffs.

Juwan took all of 3mins to effectively end the game. He responds w/Eli icing the screen=no more Kopp/Nance on same side pic.twitter.com/0JptqKUSja

— LAbound (@LAbound2) January 4, 2021

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™.

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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]

BULLETS

The actual defensive number. Northwestern scored on every possession after the rotation guys exited, racking up 12 points on those 7 possessions. Drop those out and Northwestern scored 0.84 PPP. That is their worst outing by almost a tenth of a point. Their loss to Pitt is next up with 0.91.

Franz get a triple double with blocks challenge. I think Wagner turned in Michigan's first inverse trillion—fill up every column in a tempo-free box score—of the year with an incredible 14-10-5-5-2 line. Five blocks from a wing is a shock even though I wrote this after the Nebraska game:

Wagner, on the other hand, has tremendous length and enough agility to alter perimeter shots. … Perimeter contests are usually more about making the opposing player uncomfortable than actually forcing the opposition to change what he's doing. Wagner contests are occasionally something more.

He blocked three perimeter looks in this game, one of them from a 6'7" guy.

One of the more dominant defensive performances you will see from a wing last night from Franz Wagner.

He was everywhere -- providing rim protection, rotating to cut off drives, blocking jump shots, and defending at the point of attack: pic.twitter.com/kp8LigF7Rq

— Eric Shapiro (@eric_shap) January 4, 2021

His offense was almost beside the point but 14 points on 12 shot equivalents plus five assists against one turnover is a quality outing as well.

a quiet 19 [Campredon]

Pick your poison. John Beilein had offenses that finished #1 and #3 in the country in back-to-back years despite losing the Naismith winner after the first of those. That second year was the Stauskas year, except insofar as it was the everyone year. Usage for the starters:

• Nik Stauskas: 24%
• Caris Levert: 21%
• Glenn Robinson: 21%
• Derrick Walton: 18%
• Jordan Morgan: 16%

(McGary did edge ahead of Stauskas but in only 13% of Michigan's minutes.)

This year's edition:

• Hunter Dickinson: 25%
• Isaiah Livers: 19%
• Franz Wagner: 19%
• Mike Smith: 17%
• Eli Brooks: 17%

This level of balance is brutal for opposition defenses, who can never hide bad defenders and are vulnerable to having closeouts attacked by anyone on the floor.

So two of the last three opponents have hard doubled Dickinson when they could and Michigan has still eaten their lunch. Nebraska
"held" Michigan to 1.1 PPP largely because Michigan didn't hit the wide array of open three point looks at the same rate they did yesterday; Northwestern was getting nuked for almost 1.3 before walk-on time.

And Dickinson still went for 13 and 19 efficient points in those games, give or take some turnovers vs woulda-coulda assists vs Nebraska.

graaaaaaaaaaaah! [Campredon]

I CANNOT THINK OF ANY GOOD ELI BROOKS DUNK NOMENCLATURE! I cherish this "Eli Brooks thunderdunks once per game" thing. I just saw him thunderdunk, and it was amazing and unexpected. This time when he thunderdunked, it was still amazing and unexpected:

Okay. So ...

These ✌ DUNKS by Eli Brooks are just incredible. However we can’t decide which is better?

The floor is yours 〽️ nation#GoBlue pic.twitter.com/U8EYUt2Mcy

— Michigan Men's Basketball (@umichbball) January 4, 2021

This is entirely unfair but I mostly think of Eli Brooks as a mouse who was turned into a human by a wicked sorcerer and is forced to play basketball so he can go back to being a mouse. I'm pretty sure no amount of additional information will ever shake me of that opinion, which means that every Brooks thunderdunk will be a mindblowing experience. LFG.

[Campredon]

Going up. Chaundee Brown is reaching Zak Irvin levels of "yep, that's going up." If you get him a clean look from three he's going to shoot it. He's getting up 26% of Michigan's shots when he's on the floor, edging out Dickinson in that category. He's also shooting 62/40, so this is not a complaint.

In fact I think Isaiah Livers should be more like Brown. Livers had three turnovers in this game and two of them came after he turned down three-point looks that seemed like reasonable end points for a possession. Livers is a career 40% shooter from deep. If he gets an open look he should take it almost all the time. His TO rate has gone up seven points as he tries to get more aggressive and be more of a creator. It would be one thing if this team really needed that from someone; it doesn't.

A trepidation. Northwestern's backup C, Ryan Young, got 17 minutes. He's a traditional back-to-the-basket center without a lot of athleticism; he does have a fair bit of craftiness. Dickinson didn't exactly get roasted but he did give up a couple of buckets where Young's footwork and patience won out after an extended post possession.

It's not too hard to swap out Young for Luka Garza and see those buckets happening, except far more frequently. Dickinson will no doubt get his on the other end. Still, I think it's likely the senior gets the better of the freshman. One mitigating factor: the two guys faced off all summer, so this won't be new territory for Dickinson.

Please do not shoot the messenger. Maybe this shouldn't be a tech, but it's a tech:

Rather than a tech, Chaundee Brown should’ve been awarded 5pts for this possession w/the following distribution:

+1 for giving Boo Buie nightmares
+2 for the actual dunk
+1 for maintaining conditioning w/chin-up
+1 for delivering overhand right that would’ve floored Ivan Drago pic.twitter.com/2rOWUXoVWr

— LAbound (@LAbound2) January 4, 2021

You can hang on the rim, sometimes for a surprisingly long time, without getting a call. The chin-up is a tech. It's class B tech that's one free-throw and no personal and you're up 26 so go for it… but it is always going to get called.

NET out, funny. Michigan checks in sixth in the initial NET rankings, which is a few slots higher than Torvik's NET approximation had them. A reason for this that apparently slipped by everyone's radar:

The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee announced that beginning with the 2020-21 season, the NCAA Evaluation Tool will be changed to increase accuracy and simplify it by reducing a five-component metric to just two. The remaining factors include the Team Value Index (TVI), which is a result-based feature that rewards teams for beating quality opponents, particularly away from home, as well as an adjusted net efficiency rating.

The TVI has been adjusted as well. This makes it sound like it's very close to Wins Above Bubble or various strength of record measures:

In addition, the overall and non-conference strength of schedule has been modernized to reflect a truer measure for how hard it is to defeat opponents. The strength of schedule is based on rating every game on a team's schedule for how hard it would be for an NCAA tournament-caliber team to win. It considers opponent strength and site of each game, assigning each game a difficulty score. Aggregating these across all games results in an overall expected win percentage versus a team's schedule, which can be ranked to get a better measure of the strength of schedule.

We'll have to see how it works out over the course of the next few years but a few rankings pop out: #12 St Louis, #13 Boise State, and #16 Colgate(!). Colgate is a clear Too Little Data So I Make Big: their season to date consists of two games against Army, one of them a 44-point blowout, the other a two-point loss. St. Louis and Boise are more interesting.

Boise State has a four point win at BYU, a ten point loss at a top-ten Houston team, and then various wins against teams 200+. They've got some huge blowouts in there—a 52 point win against SJSU, a 47-point win against New Mexico, a 41-point win over Sam Houston State—that are the only plausible reason they'd be ranked in the top 20.

St Louis has a more credible top 20 resume with wins against LSU and NC State and a sole loss at Minnesota but again their resume has some giant blowouts against bad teams on it.

I'm not going to dump on an early-season descriptive ranking in the weirdest season in anyone's lifetime but I'll be curious to see if these teams continue to seem overrated because of giant wins over bad teams.

Oh, right, the funny part:

The first NET ranking of the season are out:

6. Michigan
119. Michigan St.

12 Big Ten teams in the top 51 of the rankings. https://t.co/T5SZLXst5P

— Brendan Quinn (@BFQuinn) January 4, 2021

BTW, MSU is still ranked in the AP poll.

BONUS: is KPI still on the teamsheets? Take KPI off the teamsheets.

KPI has to be the worst ranking system in existence.

The league: it's good. Great googly moogly:

The Big Ten is stronger, by far, than it’s ever been in the KenPom era. pic.twitter.com/t7yEP0FjMZ

— John Gasaway (@JohnGasaway) January 4, 2021

Outlier results are more likely when there's less data but—barring a historic tournament collapse—this is the third straight season the Big Ten is going to set a new efficiency margin record. It makes sense: Rutgers has gone from being one of the worst teams in the country to a top-20 outfit, Illinois is back, Iowa is at a generational peak, Minnesota's having one of its better seasons in the past couple decades, etc. There's only one hopeless team, Nebraska, and they look like they'll be interesting under Hoiberg as early as next year.