Various items about the basketball team.

BEAST. Not going to be the most incisive sentence in blog history but oh well: DeShawn Sims!!!

Not to be lost in the general !!! of Sims performance was Michigan's wide array of fantastic entry passes. Sims had 14 points off the bat and had taken one jumper, IIRC. Douglass, Novak, and Harris all had terrific post feeds—Douglass most frequently—that allowed Sims to rip Matt Gatens' arm from its socket and beat Cyrus Tate to death with it.

Perhaps annoyed by how easy things were coming, Sims proceeded to take tougher shots, hit most of them, and pull off the greatest back-to-back money performances by a Michigan basketball player since… oh, probably something the Fab Five did.

(If only Douglass could handle he would be an excellent candidate to play point guard going forward.)

Today is the greatest. Michigan takes on Illinois at 6:30 tonight, which lamely overlaps with the hockey game against Western so I won't get to see the second half. I'd tape it but it's 1000% guaranteed that six people within earshot will be reporting the score to their friends every ten seconds, so there's no point. Given the trajectory we've got going on here…

• Brian grudgingly does not liveblog the Minnesota game: Michigan wins by 3.
• Brian doesn't even think about liveblogging the Iowa game: Iowa still searching for limbs, which fat chance they're all in Deshawn Sims' belly.

…"Brian doesn't even watch second half" probably means Michigan will win by 300. Woo for that. Also helpful is the projected absence of Illinois point guard and all-around glue-type person Chester Frazier. Illinois is favored by just two.

One for the road. Is the bubble even relevant any more? Unless there's a rain of frogs and every possible autobid is filled with non-tourney dreck from here on out, probably not. Even if it was, the bubble is intent on getting Michigan in:

• Arizona lost to Arizona State and now finds itself on the precipice. Even if they get in it won't be in front of M.
• Providence died against Louisville.
• Rhode Island lost to Duquense and is out.
• Kansas State fell to Texas; they're dead.
• UNLV and New Mexico both ate it and are headed for the NIT. UNLV lost to San Diego State, which is also on the bubble, so that wasn't a major win. OTOH, New Mexico fell to Wyoming; crushing for them, good for us.
• Slightly bad: USC beat Cal and moves on to play UCLA today. They win that and 1) they threaten to take an autobid, and 2) they get in the at-large discussion. Also, Temple won.

Unless some seriously wack stuff goes down today—like Penn State over Purdue, Temple over Xavier, Maryland over Wake, and VT over North Carolina, oh, and probably Baylor winning again—Michigan's bid will go from 95% to pure snow-white lock even if Michigan can't get past Illinois.

Michigan is a 10 to Jerry Palm, an 11 to Lundardi, and a 9 to Bracketology 101. This ticket is just about punched.

A brief list of things ESPN decided to show instead of the basketball game going on, during which time they missed at least one shooting foul and definitely every terrifying attempt for a Michigan walk-on to take the ball upcourt:

• Replays of Deshawn Sims in beast mode
• John Beilein
• Todd Lickliter

Okay, annoying but par for the course.

• Tom Izzo in various hairstyles.
• Tom Izzo in various hairstyles AGAIN
• Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany

And the the kicker:

• Big Ten second-in-command SOME GUY

Argh. Argh argh argh. Aaaaaargh.

Devin Bawinkel is so immobile and white and good at shooting. How immobile and white and good at shooting is he? He is the Hylaean Theoric World version of Kyle Korver and so forth and so on.

Potentially huge news that appears to not exist. I briefly thought I was crazy yesterday when multiple message board posters pointed towards this Rosenberg column on Manny Harris and declared that within you could find an assertion from Harris that he would return for his junior year, most likely without even applying his name to the NBA draft. I can find no such quote, even though I saw the same snippet in multiple places. Any help here? Anyone know where this potentially huge assertion lives?

Update: I have no idea why I couldn't find it, but:

Harris likes it so much that he says he will come back for his junior season.
"I love college," he said. "I got a lot to develop as a player, and a lot to do at the University of Michigan."

Will he even inquire about his draft status? "No, I think I'm coming back."

Not 100%, but sounds close to it.

Sometimes I wake up naked in Prague with a dead wildebeest under me, holding only the spoon I was about to eat some TGI Friday's French onion soup with, and that's when I realize—I forgot what I was talking about again. This was mentioned during the broadcast and I feel that DeShawn Sims' quote should be replicated far and wide:

"I always walk on the court playing defense, so I walked to the other end of the court, not knowing we were playing offense," said Sims, Michigan's junior forward. "I always do that during the course of a game. I know that I just won the jump ball and it was out on them, but somehow I just wasn't focused and somehow thought we were on defense."

This happens to him all the time; it's an issue for him.

Tangent: I love how likeable this team is. I liked Graham Brown and Horton and BRJ and Petway and most of the Amaker kids were very nice, but they never got over the hump; they were so frustrating to watch. And before that… well, for every nice guy Ellerbe brought in there were two who were most definitely not. And let's not get into the waning years of the Fisher administration, when the program seemed to actively seek out loathsome characters. This team is full of guys you can't help but pull for. Sims, who had an understandably listless freshman season after his brother was murdered, is at the very top of that list, probably nationwide.