Dead Dove Do Not Get In Close Game
3/5/2023 – Michigan 73, Indiana 75 (OT) – 17-14, 11-9 Big Ten
There's a special agony in losing a close basketball game that outstrips any other close loss in other sports, because the margins in basketball are so razor thin. Close losses in other sports often aren't that close. Losing by a goal in sports like hockey or soccer is often losing by a fairly wide margin. You can lose a football game by a field goal and Bill Connelly will hop on twitter the next day and tell you that your team had a 22% win expectation.
In basketball, losing by a point—or in overtime—is losing by a point. It summons up a huge litany of coulda-shoulda moments. A 24% three point shooter draining one. Three or four buckets by the opposition that bounced around the rim for days on end before dropping. Two blatantly wrong out of bounds calls. Missed free throws—always missed free throws. A series of obvious charges that resulted in an and-one instead of an offensive foul. Remembering any one of these will set teeth on edge; remembering them all is a special form of self-waterboarding.
What this year's Michigan basketball team asks is… what if we made the whole plane out of agonizing moments?
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If you are like me or anyone on Twitter yesterday, you eventually loathed watching this team play. Not just because of the close losses but because of how Michigan got there. It's telling that in Michigan's do-or-die road games to make the tournament they got wrecked by glue guys. Even if you ignore the three Race Thompson made, he was 6/9 from the floor with three offensive rebounds and four steals. In Michigan's previous overtime loss, freshman Ty Rodgers was also 6/9 from the floor with five offensive rebounds, a block, and a steal.
Neither of these guys initiates offense, or posts up, or is a quality shooter. They live off the scraps their teammates give them. Correction: the scraps their teammates and the opposition gives them, and Michigan is excellent at ceding scraps.
Meanwhile Michigan's nominal glue guy, Terrance Williams, lost his starting job to Will Tschetter. Tschetter has not attempted a two-pointer in his last four starts. He's a massive defensive liability who offers virtually nothing on the offensive end of the floor, and Michigan played him 19 minutes in a do-or-die game for a bid. The usual reason insiders offer when asked "why is this person playing" is that he tries hard in practice. This is where the program is at: playing a guy who does not look like a high-major player in an attempt to send a message to the rest of the team that you should give a shit.
Combine that with an incredible stretch of tight games lost and you get the least watchable Michigan team since at least the Tommy Amaker era. There have been worse teams, and equally cursed teams, but watching Spike Albrecht try to figure out how to be a starting Big Ten point guard is sort of fun. Watching a team with a junior Hunter Dickinson and two guys who are candidates to go in the first round of the NBA draft fail to make the NCAA tournament is an entirely different level of Clockwork Orange basketball.
There are reasons for this: Terrance Shannon couldn't transfer enough credits. Jaelin Llewellyn tore his ACL. Frankie Collins transferred because having all of four guards on a roster spooked him. They're 310th in D-1 experience. The way this season played out, any nudge in a positive direction and Michigan is talking about seeding. If they managed anything that made them one bucket better per game this team is 22-9 and in sole possession of second place in the league. As disaster seasons go, ranking in the top 40 on Kenpom is not exactly Eddie Jordan Rutgers. This team is not good… but it's not bad. It's just there, ranking 330th in "luck" on Kenpom.
If drinking bleach and driving a thousand miles an hour into the ocean was a basketball team, this would be it. It is virtually impossible to maintain any semblance of detached smart-guy business at this point. And the worst part is that they might do this again next year, because the NBA doesn't care that Jett Howard is a stunningly one-dimensional player and has cottoned on to Kobe Bufkin being pretty good. The treadmill Michigan finds itself on where their players are mediocre in college and also of interest to the pros is one we must get off immediately, before this fanbase self-immolates.
Because they really did it. They ended the Pax Beilein:
— Michigan Wolverines Discord (@MichiganDiscord) March 30, 2021
In Soviet Michigan, basketball has once again become the donkey sport.
BULLETS
I don't want to do this. But: Torvik says Michigan's not dead yet. Beat Rutgers and Purdue to reach the semifinals of the BTT and Torvik has Michigan as the last team in the field. Torvik is an algorithm that does not account for human factors, and one human factor working against Michigan right now is that the committee tends to devalue conference tournament games that occur too close to Selection Sunday. I think a Friday quarterfinal against Purdue is probably far enough away for it to count fully. But also it will be really easy to leave Michigan out: they have no nonconference wins of note and a boat anchor loss to CMU.
About late game luck. I am in the camp where I believe that the first 38 minutes of a basketball game and the last two minutes are similar enough to believe that close game out comes are pretty close to random. There are factors that can make teams better or worse, but in general when you're dealing with an outlier as extreme as Michigan this year you're talking about luck.
Now, Michigan's problem is that they were in an absurd number of close games. 16 of Michigan's games were within six points at the end of regulation. Very good teams don't play 16 close games. But I fundamentally believe that Michigan is about as good as the teams around them in Kenpom, virtually all of which are headed to the tournament. YMMV. I dunno.
Details, details. I could drill down into the hows and whys of why Michigan lost this game but the fundamental answer to why they are less than the sum of their parts is that the only have four reasonably good basketball players. Dickinson, McDaniel, Bufkin, and Howard scored all but four of Michigan's points. They are 310th in bench minutes and probably worse than that in bench production. Having a complete zero at one spot on the floor for a full season—like, not even a stand-in-the-corner-and-shoot guy—is a large reason Dickinson's production has suffered.
Anyway, time to drink bleach and drive into the ocean. Lake. Whatever.
This is exactly right. While there is a sliver of light shining through the dark clouds, I am worried that it may just be a freight train headed at us in the form of the NBA. Losing any of the big 3 is a huge blow, and it seems more likely that we lose at least two of them. I have no idea how this program will reset with all three back, and even less of an idea if 2 or more of them go. Given the way attrition has worked against Michigan since last year, it is hard to feel very good about our prospects for next season.
How about we finish this year before obsessing over next…?
Yeah.
But Go Blue!
The fancy stats say the product out there on the floor is the second-best in the conference. That's worth bearing in mind before anyone tries to set fire to the whole shebang. It is equally true that the record says that the team is #8 in a 14-team conference. Seems like there is a lot to unpack in whatever this "Luck" factor is. (Like Does it cover the ability to draw up/execute a play of the inbounds coming out of a timeout?)
A lot of it has been bad luck, and frankly a really bad whistle. What happened at Wisconsin last year earned Howard two years of brutal ref-abuse and we are in the thick of it right now.
As for the luck factor, Michigan is being maximally penalized for every mistake this season. Some of it is inexperienced coaching and players, some of it is just really bad luck.
That might say something about the value of fancy stats.
"luck" is a catch all term for when the record doesn't agree with the model. So as you say, KenPom predicts Michigan to be #2 in the conference, their record says they are #8. How do you square these two facts? With a fudge factor called "luck". You could just call it "losses over expected". In which case, Michigan has a lot of those.
Unfortunately we were overated, not unlucky.
There is essentially no difference between #8 and #2 in the Big Ten this year.
That's not what the fancy stats say. Not even close. They do say Michigan has been the second best since the beginning of February. But even that is only marginal with MSU and Maryland effectively on par.
the close-game stuff becomes a tautology at some point. i mean, we lose close games because we don't know how to not lose close games, right?
i honestly think this team is maybe, probably, mostly the recipient of really crappy luck. i know - to listen to the yammering class, you make your own luck...and some of the most unwatchable michigan football teams of the last 30 years (hoke's last season, IIRC, and rodriguez' entire tenure) also had terrible fumble luck. but correlation is not causation.
is a late-game pass squarely into hunter dickinson's back bad coaching, or bad luck? the answer is probably somewhere between. reasonable adults may disagree.
Passing the ball into the back of a guy not looking who is surrounded by 3 opposing players is neither bad luck or bad coaching.It's an uncharacteristic panic,I don't want the ball,move made by a top notch player.
Its a half court shot as time expires. People are reading too much into it. When actually having the opportunity to draw up plays in the previous game they got a shot for Hunter he just missed and two open threes for the best three point shooter on the team he just missed.
That is just the variance of basketball. Michigan made an NCAA tournament one time because Kam Chatman hit a contested three to upset Indiana. Beilein isn't a better coach than Howard because in a down year for him a bad shooter hit a bad shot while this year a good shooter missed a good shot.
No, “Beilein isn't a better coach than Howard because….” JB is a better coach because his list of accomplishments as a coach dwarfs Howard’s. Howard can be both the best available coach for Michigan and still not be nearly as good as JB.
On a per season basis, I don't think Beilein's list of accomplishments dwarfs Howards. Even if you take out Beilein's first couple years.
Howard is 5-2 in the tourney, has a conference title, and has never not made the sweet 16.
Beilein didn't make it to the second weekend of the tourney until his sixth season.
Beilein had...two conference titles? One shared in 2012 and one outright in 2014? So 2 out of 12. Howard is 1 for 4 already.
Juwan's average Torvik rank is 21.5. Beileins is 36th. Even if you take out Beiliens first three years which were pretty bad, his Torvik average is...21.3, basically identical to Juwan's.
I know this blog is all-in on the "it's just bad luck" theory, and I lean that way too usually. But this year's basketball team has a number of key problems that may or may not be the coach's fault. For one thing, Jett is probably Michigan's most talented player, yet he disappears whenever there's 2 minutes left. Getting the ball to Hunter in the post is usually a high percentage option, but in the late game they always telegraph it and he gets doubled, with no backup option. Nobody else seems to want to put the game in their hands. The one time they generated a decent look was the airball from Baker, who was 0-4 shooting at that point. How often does a player who has made zero baskets by game's end actually make a game-tying or game-winning shot?
Interesting. It seems to me that this blog is tending more toward blame players & coaches than bad luck. E.g., swn's post below.
As Brian elaborated, YMMV.
I kinda meant Brian, Seth, and the more typical high volume posters. The unwashed masses in general tend to vastly underestimate luck. That being said I kind like agree with Swn more than Brian here. The two isos to Dickinson at the end of the game yesterday that ended in steals were clear attempts to force something because of the situation. Getting it to Dickinson obviously is something you want to do, but not when the previous 10 seconds consisted of your guard dribbling in place while staring at Hunter, as Hunter posts up. But they don’t have any other players who seem to want the ball in that situation. The rest of the team is so timid late game, which is either inexperience or bad coaching. Beilein’s teams never had that problem though. Even going back to Manny Harris there was always a guy you felt good about when he had the ball at the end of the game.
That is just a factor of who your best player is. Dickinson is Michigan's best player but a center doesn't initiate offense which makes late clock situations hard.
Beilein's best players were always point guards or wings who could handle the ball. There is a reason you really want your best player to be a guy who can create their own offense off the bounce. That is why honestly I think Kobe coming back next year is more important than Dickinson. Reed can do enough and you can re-balance the offense if you have a lead guard that can create his own shot. If you still don't have a guy who can create his own shot and Dickinson back you'll have the same problems as the last two years
Yea, this is something that Juwan really needs to adjust with his team construction efforts. The college game is dominated by guards and wings. I get that Juwan might have a soft spot for traditional bigs, given his background, but that is not at all the path to success in the NCAA and he needs to rapidly adapt.
"That is just a factor of who your best player is. Dickinson is Michigan's best player but a center doesn't initiate offense which makes late clock situations hard."
Very valid. Also the opposite of luck.
In that play's defense (the three by BakeR) Howard had fouled out, so you basically have Baker, Bufkin, and Dickinson as viable shooters in double OT and they got an open shot to a guy who is a 38% shooter. Yes he'd been cold thus far but all shooters go through hot and cold stretches and he had hit a big 3 a game earlier in OT vs. Wisconsin despite being pretty cold all game.
Their struggles all season aren't just due to bad luck by any means but even slightly better luck and we're talking about seeding and that does matter. There's a world of difference between a disappointing 10-seed and missing the tourney and it basically comes down to being 5-10 in 2-score games vs. 3-12. And at least to me that delta is due to randomness more than incompetence.
I respectfully disagree with Brian (and several posters) on the luck question. If they were something like 1-6 in games decided by 6 points or less (or OT), I'd have an easier time chalking that up to bad luck. But they're 4-12 in those games. 4-12!! And three of those wins are against Eastern Michigan, Ohio U, and Minnesota. At some point, there's a big enough sample where it goes beyond bad luck and becomes a trend with reasoning behind it. I remember feeling the same way in reverse about Jim Tressel's OSU football teams back in the day. After a while, I had to just accept that they had a knack for winning close games.
Except, ironically, he didn't against Illinois: he hit insanely clutch three pointers near the end of regulation and to start off OT.
But I don't disagree with your main point. I was stunned yesterday to see us setting up play after play with him in the corner just ... standing there. That was the play: Jett stands in the corner. I understand, of course -- he's dragging the defender out there, theoretically opening up the court (and able to hit a dagger if the defender wanders away). But ... for a theoretical NBA lottery pick neither to move nor to get the ball by design in so many plays is a bit bewildering.
For the record, when Baker airballed that, Jett had already fouled out so he had literally disappeared from the court. Pretty sure Illinois doubled / was hard denying Bufkin and to your point about telegraphing passes to Hunter late, that probably wasn't a good option.
So the play was really sound, the guy just missed the shot. That he was 0-3 at that point is pretty irrelevant compared with the fact he's a 38% shooter from three.
The biggest issue right now imo is the 4 position. It's objectively a trash fire. We have recruited 3 undersized and un-athletic power forwards who don't offer anything besides an intangible "grit" factor that hasn't shown up. It's so bad that it's thrust a true freshman center into that spot. The fact that we are essentially playing 4 v 5 plus a true freshman PG is a big reason we're in this spot
I always think a student manager snuck on the court when I see Tschetter out there. I can't believe we gave him a scholarship.
The sad thing is I was high on Tschetter as a recruit, but I also thought his lower half was a lot stronger than it seems to be
Weren't a ton of people on this site clamoring for more Tschetter in the early non-con when Michigan was struggling against Eastern and others?
Yes, but that was also when Tschetter was leading the team in +/- by a large margin in his short stints on the court, but that turned out to be fool's gold
I mean he's the guy that falls squarely into that Beilein target recruit range everyone wants to get to after dealing with losing Houstan and Diabate after last year. That is the risky part of relying on recruits in that range. There is a reason generally they are down there.
But here's the thing -- he shouldn't have to play this much. TWill going into the ravine has been a disaster. He was a reasonable recruit (in the 80-120 range), played reasonably well in spot minutes as a freshman (e.g., I was so impressed by his entry passes into the post; rare to see that from a forward, let alone a freshman), shot 38% from 3 as a sophomore and now is a junior -- it should be his time to shine as a rebounder who shoots high 30s from 3 on about 3 attempts a game.
Instead, he is shooting abysmally (25% from 3!) and doesn't rebound particularly well and still sometimes seems lost out there. It's inexplicable and very disappointing.
Rebounding is the one thing he has decent numbers with. 5.6 rebounds in 25 minutes per game isn't "not rebounding particularly well".
Exactly, he's an excellent rebounder for an undersized four (which is really not the position he should be playing).
His 18.2% DREB rate is very good for the position. It's better than Race Thompson's 17.0 who Brian is comparing him to.
Yep, there's definitely some revisionism when it comes to Tschetter. He definitely wasn't a bad recruit by any means. He was the #2 player in Minnesota behind Chet Holmgren
The guys we want in that range should be raw, and young (for their grade) but athletic guys with high upside like DJ Wilson, Jordan Poole, Caris, etc.
Tschetter has minus-minus athleticism with no upside. He's a try hard Evan Smotrycz with no offensive skills so Beilein wouldn't have recruited him. Smot was pretty much the last guy of his kind that Beilien recruited, anyway. When he had trouble defending the big ten that's when Beilein changed up the approach to go for the raw but high upside guys.
I respectfully disagree here....does he need to hit the weight room BIG TIME, yes. But once he gains more muscle and can stand his ground I think he will be a pretty good player.
He gets pushed around SOOO easily on the block, if he can focus on strength I like the potential.
What you described is what I see with him all the time. He's too weak. He's usually in pretty good position for rebounds, but I've lost count of the number of times he's had one ripped out of his arms, either after he's corralled it or as he goes up for a putback.
What do you like about his potential? He's not skilled, he doesn't have athleticism, he doesn't have length. Strength won't do much for him. Sure maybe he won't get totally killed on the boards, but there's nothing to work with. No upside.
Yeah, no, he’s just a guy
We could swap him with a manager and it would be hard to tell the difference, yes.
Four 4's on the Roster T.Will,Cheddar, Jace Glen and ironically the best one we have is the back up Center
I said this on umhoops after the Illinois game and I was only half joking - my main takeaway from that game was that every single player on Illinois' roster would start at the 4 for Michigan.
“This is where the program is at: playing a guy who does not look like a high-major player in an attempt to send a message to the rest of the team that you should give a shit.“
Such a damning and true statement. Outside of Dug, Kobe, Hunter, Reed and sadly Tschetter, it’s hard to pick out anybody else who seems to give max effort on this team.
Outside of Dug, Kobe, Hunter, Reed and sadly Tschetter, it’s hard to pick out anybody else who seems to give max effort on this team.
I mean, that's basically everyone other than Jett, Williams, Joey Baker and Jace Howard in terms of guys who've cracked 100 minutes and didn't tear and ACL. And Jace seems to give max effort, he's just limited. And I'd argue Baker tries but he's limited athletically. So what people are basically made about are 2 guys, and I'd not argue about either of them. But that isn't a searing indictment of the team overall as much as a disappointment in Williams and a rueful head shake about Jett.
The parts just don't quite fit together. An at-times dominant center with plenty of experience, but most of the time this year surrounded by one, maybe 2 average or better 3pt shooters. Late in games, they don't really have anyone who can break down a defense and get his own, it's got to be play calls, and if the other team doesn't react the way you expect or makes a play, the playcall breaks down and again, no one who can really rescue it on his own. The 4 spot has been a problem all year, and even getting Tarris more minutes only solves one issue (he can beast on the boards and play defense, but a team can absolutely ignore him outside of the paint, which Indiana did late in OT and Race Thompson got a steal doubling Hunter on the entry).
Really hope Bufkin comes back. So young (younger than Jett!) and he and Dug's development really seems like a good jumping off point for next year's team. Upshot of Dug being so small is he's extremely unlikely to be an early entry at any point.
"drinking bleach and driving a thousand miles an hour into the ocean"
I don't know what this means. Drinking bleach is a thing. Some people try to drive 1000 mph. Rarely, people drive into the ocean. The odds of someone doing all 3 are infinitesimal. Maybe that's the point, but I still don't understand.
One constant of this blog going back to peanut butter with a baseball bat is the insistence on luck = randomness and that's it.
Any sports fan has seen chokes. It's maybe most obvious is golf--Mito Pereira is the latest major example--but we've all seen it. We've seen it in the last two games with Race missing 4 fts to end the game and Joey Baker airballing a wide open in-rhythm 3 attempt.
Sports are not video games. Poor play design out of timeouts or strategies, e.g., not going for a 2-for-1 with 45 seconds or intentionally missing with 6 seconds is certainly not luck.
The end of games are also not played like the rest of games. We often see more isos, more possession by key players, different defensive tactical decisions, etc. So why should a youthful backcourt perform the same in the last 2 minutes than the first 38 minutes?
Losing to CMU is not unlucky regardless of how the game ended. You should never be in a position to lose to CMU. This team earned the non-conference they deserved and now will likely miss the tournament because of it.
(Great post otherwise btw)
I think this is a bit too hand-waving away "luck" and "randomness". Nobody is saying Michigan should be 22-5 or something and a 2-seed. But Iowa lost 92-83 at home to #345(!) Eastern Illinois. That's losing by more to a worse team than CMU. I'm fairly certain that you replay that game 100 times Iowa wins 98% of them. But sometimes you just have a bad game and you lose.
As for this idea that Michigan is the only one that plays poorly in close games, consider the last 2 games. IU misses 4 (!) straight FTs to ice the game in OT, giving UM multiple opportunities to win the game. Against Illinois the Illini had a chance to win in the first OT but Shannon missed a go-ahead FT with 24 seconds to go and then gave up a deep jump shot to Dickinson near the basket that probably should have gone in. Then in double OT they got up 5 with 3 minutes to go and then missed 4 straight 3s and fouled Dickinson for an and-1 that would have tied the game. They then missed a bad 3 pointer but Shannon and lucked into the ball bouncing back to him off basically the bottom of the rim. And then they still somehow let what has been described here as the dumbest fucking coaching staff in America to draw up a wide-open 3 for a 38% shooter to possibly tie the game. Maybe that's 8-D chess of closing games methodically but it sure looked to me like two equal teams where one couldn't catch a break while the others finally did.
Some of these issues are systemic to the team and the staff. But I looked into flipping 3 games all year - CMU, Iowa, and Illinois - and UM is a 7 seed. Those were all coin-flip games that would still leave them woefully mediocre in 1-score games. That's where I think the distinction is between fans (like me) who see a team that has flaws but is still semi-competent and the crowd that is less optimistic.
To be clear, I'm not saying randomness doesn't play a role. Any sports fan also knows that to be true. We saw it with Hunter making that shot vs Wisco. We saw it with Ben Brust. The Lions lost on a 66 yard field goal, Kordell Stewart, etc.
But the last two minutes of a basketball game are measurably different than the first 38. If the game were 42 minutes long the last 2 would be different than the first 40. Strategy, nerves, fitness, reffing, timeouts, free throws, foul trouble, etc. all change in the last 2 minutes of a game.
And if you agree the last two minutes are different then you naturally agree some teams can be relatively better or worse or the same in the last 2 as the first 38. And that is most definitely not incorporated into KenPom "luck."
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