THE ESSENTIALS

THE US

Welp. Life continues!

THE LINEUP CARD

Click for big.

Projected starters are in bold. Hover over headers for stat explanations. The "Should I Be Mad If He Hits A Three" methodology: we're mad if a guy who's not good at shooting somehow hits one. Yes, you're still allowed to be unhappy if a proven shooter is left open. It's a free country.

Pos.	#	Name	Yr.	Ht./Wt.	%Min	%Poss	ORtg	SIBMIHHAT
G	5	Glynn Watson	Sr.	6'0, 180	90	20	106	Meh
Shooting has bounced back from awful (38/29) junior year. Now at 45/37; not really a PG (17 assist rate) but doing fairly well for a guy who gets no help. Think Geo Baker.
G	12	Thomas Allen	So.	6'1, 184	84	15	109	Meh
Slippery MAAR-ish guard gets to the rack a fair bit with no help and shoots 51/36 with low TO rate.
F	0	James Palmer	Sr.	6'6, 207	88	31	104	Yes
Bar-none most disappointing player in the league. Shot 55% from two in league play last year. This year: 34%. Usage still huge!
F	15	Isaiah Roby	Jr.	6'8 230	86	22	101	Meh
Excellent switch-everything defensive 5 has had major offensive regression; 50/32 this year after 62/41 last year. Increased usage a part of that.
C	20	Tanner Borchardt	Sr.	6'8, 245	72	10	128	Yes
Generic Backup C who has to play 30 MPG; OREBs and does nothing else.
F	1	Amir Harris	Fr.	6'6 205	19	10	97	Yes
Composite #355 FR is 14/19 from two on the year. No outside shots. 30 TO rate.
F	34	THORIR THORBJARNSON!!!	So.	6'6, 206	13	17	86	Yes
***overhead clapping intensifies*** (25 shots on year, 27 TO rate)
F	25	Nana Akenten	So.	6'6, 218	9	18	99	Meh
Just A Shooter hitting 31%.
C	45	Brady Heiman	Fr.	6'11, 215	15	14	107	Yes
Composite #350 FR is 6/6 against Minnesota and has four other shots against the rest of the league.

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the preview.]

THE THEM

Nebraska's season isn't hard to decipher. There's before, and there's after. Nebraska's major-conference opponents through the lens of Isaac Copeland:

Nebraska was already one of the most bench-averse teams in the country before Copeland went out for the year midway through the Ohio State game. At that point Nebraska was 13-6 with a smattering of good wins and was tracking towards that elusive tournament bid. Since: 2-7 with road games at Michigan and Michigan State next up. Have fun storming the castle!

Without Copeland, Nebraska has been forced to start senior walk-on Tanner Borchardt and play him thirty minutes a game. Borchardt had barely played in his career before emerging into a 10-15 minute guy this year. He's in the genre of tryhard backup center, and you can see his impact on both ends of the floor in the chart above. On defense, Nebraska gives up more threes and more successful threes without Copeland because they can't switch everything; taking Isaiah Roby away from the rim also hurts Nebraska's two-point D. Sometimes because Fernando.

Bruno Fernando being made the villain here, but he’s really a hero for sparing Borchardt’s life. #DontTugOnSupermansCape pic.twitter.com/k6V4QDjgXB

— Rudy Gersten (@DCBarno) February 7, 2019

This pales in comparison to what happens on the other side of the ball, though. Borchardt is a 10% usage guy replacing a 22% one. He's got a shiny ORTG because he grabs a lot of OREBs and does little else. He has three unassisted initial buckets (ie: not a putback) all season. And the rest of the supporting cast was already stretched to their shot-creation breaking point. Without Copeland's 63/34 shooting on good volume with reasonable shot creation, things fall apart. Nebraska's two point shooting falls 13 points.

Some of this may be an artifact of when Copeland got injured, but probably not a ton. When you average the Kenpom rankings of the major-conference teams Nebraska played with Copeland you get 47. Post Copeland: 34. That's about a 3-point gap per 100 possessions. Nebraska's 11 points better with Copeland than without him. Copeland has the highest Value Over Replacement Borchardt in the country.

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

Copeland's absence has affected no one more so than James Palmer. Palmer flirted with the NBA after shooting 51/31 on high usage with a bunch of FTs and decent assist to turnover ratio. This year his regression has been nothing short of stunning: He's shooting 39% inside the arc, and has an Isaiah-Washington-esque 34%(!!!) mark in conference play. Nebraska's highest usage guy is shooting 34/28 in Big Ten play. Tough to win anything when that's your star.

this except with bricks

Palmer remains the beefy slashing wing he was a year ago and helps mitigate his appalling shooting by getting to the FT line a lot (217 attempts on the year and 79% once there) and a 19 assist rate vs a 12 TO rate. He's managed to keep his ORTG in triple digits… for the year. In the Big Ten: 96. Yikes.

[Campredon]

Isaiah Roby's efficiency has also taken a nosedive. Your author is perhaps the biggest Roby stan outside of the state of Nebraska and chooses to blame this on the dysfunction around him rather than Roby himself. But yeesh. After shooting 62/41 last year on 18% usage, Roby has plummeted to 50/32 on 22%. His free throw rate has dropped by about a third and he's shooting 64% instead of 73%, a fact that I will find some way to blame on Borchardt in a second here.

Roby remains an incredible defensive piece capable of guarding every position on the floor—please do not remind MAAR what happened when he tried to execute his patented late clock tough layups against Roby in the Big Ten Tourney last year—but his impact is muted when he's out there with Borchardt and Nebraska's switching game is hampered. I'd still put him on the Big Ten All-D Team if I was in charge of it.

Roby isn't a great shot creator and probably tops out as an efficient third banana on offense. Yes, Nebraska has no bananas today.

The two guard are pretty similar. Neither is a point guard; both have some point-guard-ish qualities. Senior Glynn Watson has inexplicably pulled the reverse Palmer: after shooting 38/29 last year he's up to 46/37 this year. He has dropped a couple of points of usage, but he's still taking a lot of tough shots—almost half his threes are unassisted—and doing better with them. Watson  barely gets to the line and his assist rate has dropped five points; while he'll still set some guys up he's a combo guard.

So is sophomore Thomas Allen, who emerged into a starter after spending most of last year on the bench. Allen's shooting 51/36 and splitting his usage equally between two and three; inside the arc the large majority of his shots are unassisted, like everyone else on this team.

Allen is slippery and probably should be more aggressive—on this team a guy with his efficiency but 15% usage is sub-optimal. He's vaguely reminiscent of MAAR what with his ability to make tough late-clock shots (his 50% eFG on 45 attempts is by far the best on the team, post-Copeland) and frustratingly low usage given the context. He is likely to be Jon Snow Gif Dot Team for Nebraska next year.

Nebraska's bench is nonexistent. Some guys come on the floor from time to time in defiance of the previous sentence:

• Nana Akenten gets about 10 minutes a game and has reasonable usage, which is about 70S% form behind the line. He's only hitting 31% out there. Missed a couple of games recently, which is why his last-five PT above is so low. But he's the bench.
• Brady Heiman is the backup 5 and attempts to stay out of the way, as one does. He's 215 and needs time he doesn't have.
• THORIR THORBJARNSON(!!!) is Icelandic, naturally.
• Amir Harris is a low-rated freshman who has no attempts away from the rim on the season.

THE TEMPO-FREE

If you're like me and watched the MSU-Nebraska game, which was a three-point affair 30 minutes in, you may have yelled something like "WHY DON'T YOU RUN OFFENSE" at the tee vee.

two issues for nebraska:
- they can’t double off goins when he’s on the bench
- they haven’t run a play since 1997

— Ace Anbender, fan of basketball, the only sport (@AceAnbender) January 18, 2019

This doesn't really come through in the stats, which are an endless field of meh-to-bad except TO rate(10th nationally). Toggle that conference-only to get the mostly post-Copeland lay of the land and you get that same TO rate and a team that's 13th from 2 and 11th from 3 in league play. But, yeah: Nebraska has a lot of possessions that don't get inside the three point line until it's time for someone to huck up an isolation shot. In context their assist rate being dead average is strange.

Meanwhile, Kenpom attempts to guess man or zone based on the statistical shape of your defense; Nebraska's profile makes me wonder if there's a way to discern how much a man-to-man defense switches. Because these guys switch everything:

• Nebraska is 13th at preventing threes and 12th at preventing assists on makes, but they give up a butt ton of OREBs (320th).
• They're top 50 at defending threes and have the #25 two point D.

This style falls apart in conference play, which is now mostly without Copeland. The deficiencies are still there—Nebraska is the worst team in the conference at cleaning their own glass—but it's just not the same when the 5 you're switching is Tanner Borchardt instead of Isaiah Roby. Nebraska is still one of the best teams in the league at forcing your buckets to come on isolation—they're third in opponent assist rate, FWIW.

THE KEYS

Isolation defense. There's going to be a lot of barreling pell-mell at the rim. Pretty confident that Matthews is going to to the thing to Palmer that he does to everyone, but Jordan Poole is coming off a much-criticized performance and probably gets Thomas Allen, a guy who I think is an up-and-comer. He'll be challenged, and if he starts off poorly Crisler might get testy about it.

Attacking switches. After one and a half games in which Michigan was ruthless about attacking guards on Teske, Michigan lost its mind in the last ten minutes against MSU. Nebraska isn't nearly as switchy without Copeland but it is their DNA on D and there will be opportunities to attack when they resort to it. For the love of Pete, find the Big Sleep.

Offensive rebounding? Can Michigan take advantage of the giant blinking weakness on Nebraska's defense? They're not inclined to usually—they're about as bad as Nebraska on that end of the floor. Some extra shot volume would be a nice buffer.

Get your defensive groove back. Wincing a bit after the last one; would be nice for Michigan to come out with the lockdown on, as they often have.

THE SECTION WHERE I PREDICT THE SAME THING KENPOM DOES

Michigan by 11.