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THE ESSENTIALS

THE OVERVIEW

Michigan came through a 1 vs 16 matchup in fairly uninspiring fashion, getting outscored in the second half after racing out to an 18-point lead. We're going to chalk a lot of that up to Weird Guys lineups and assume that the guys will be less weird in a game that figures to be competitive for the duration.

In the second round Michigan takes on LSU, the third-place SEC team. LSU got an eight seed, defeating St. Bonaventure in the first round with an unusual display of defensive prowess. That prowess was built on a 3/20 performance from three that only enhanced LSU's extremely weird three-point D juju, about which more later.

The Cliffs Notes on the Tigers are pretty much what you'd expect: they get some superior talent and roll out the ball for them. LSU is the most isolation heavy team in the nation, and a very large number of their possessions are classified as
"pick-and-roll ballhandler" by Synergy. In this case that means "isolation, but with a screen." Also their defense is 62 slots worse than Iowa's on Kenpom. Will Wade, man.

THE US

Seth's graphic [click to embiggen]:

faq for these graphics

No changes from last time out.

THE LINEUP CARD

Seth's graphic [click for big]:

Note that the brick does not necessarily mean "bricklayer". Thomas is pretty efficient. It means "man this dude shoots everything."

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

THE THEM

The headliner is freshman Cameron Thomas, a 6'4" shooting guard who was the #25 player in the most recent class and is ticketed for the mid-first round in the upcoming NBA draft. Sam Vecenie:

… high volume scorer who can get his shot basically at will. If you give him even the smallest bit of space, he can stop and pop from 3 with ease. He has a bit of a left-shot align that concerns some teams in regard to translation as it moves up levels, but his release is so quick and his range is so deep that I’m a bit less worried. The real concerns come everywhere else in Thomas’ game, as he doesn’t really impact it as a passer, defender or rebounder. This is a pure scorer, through and through.

Thomas gets little help from his teammates (20% of his twos are assisted) and almost never gets to the rim—15% is D'Mitrik Trice stuff—so there's going to be a blizzard of midrange jumpers and jacked-up shots. Thomas is very good in the midrange, hitting 41% on stuff that is almost all Some Bullshit, but he's shooting just 47/32 on the season. His efficiency comes from two things: he gets to the line a ton and hits 88% once there, and he has a rock-bottom TO rate for his usage. That latter is because he rarely passes and once cut off just pulls up to shoot.

Thomas does nothing other than score, which he does in bunches. He also provides a very high floor for LSU possessions since he's hitting 38% on off-the-dribble long twos. That won't win you games but as a last resort it's spectacular. Thomas uses those shots as first options far too often, on the other hand.

Nominal C Trendon Watford—former IU star Christian's brother—is the second banana. Watford is more of a burly four at 6'9", 240, and was described as such by all scouting services. He's been dragooned into the center position because he's the only LSU player over 6'7" after Shareef O'Neal went out for the year with a foot injury.

Watford brings a little stretch (56 3PAs on season, hitting 32%) but spends most of his time inside the line, where he lives in the Trevion Williams zone:

That's a guy who's effective anywhere inside the paint but cannot consistently get shots at the rim—about 60% of his twos are away from it. He's not an exclusively back-to-the-basket guy like Williams; he will post but he'll also drive from the outside or the high post, so a lot of his shots come off isolation or even PNR ballhandler(!) situations. This added up to 47% from two in SEC play.

On top of scoring, Watford does provide a modicum of playmaking. He is not a rim protector (his 1.7 block rate is about half of Franz Wagner's) and has pretty bad rebounding numbers for a center. An on/off check to see whether LSU drops off when he's not on the floor is not possible because he is always on the floor.

Watford's faced a total of 13 post-ups this year, so your guess is as good as anyone's about how he is about defending them. Probably not very good. It says something about something that an SEC center with a reputation as a terrible defender is graded on almost all spot-ups and isolation situations. That league just did not post at all.

Combo guard Javonte Smart—infamously the subject of a "damn strong" offer from Will Wade captured on an FBI wiretap—is the third improbably efficient high-usage chucker. Smart is hitting 42% of his threes and under half of them are assisted. Grimace dot emoji. Smart does more point guard things than anyone on the roster but still has an assist rate under 20 and a TO rate that exactly matches that assist rate. Like the other two guys he's good in the midrange.

Smart gets to the rim significantly more often than Thomas and matches his percentages both at and away from the rim, so Michigan might be better off pushing usage to the first round draft pick, who will hunt any and all shots. His teammates are more circumspect about what they'll put up.

Stretch four Darius Days is the one guy on the roster who absorbs a lot of assists. Days is 6'7", 245 and extremely athletic—see the posterization at 45 seconds in the above video. He gets to the rim a fair bit, converts 78% there while generating a fair number of his own buckets there, and is shooting 67/40 with a slight majority of his shots from outside the arc. He's a double-digit OREB guy and has a low TO rate. He's an offensive powerhouse.

Brandon Johns just about matches days for size and athleticism but has been a questionable defender at Michigan. That's largely been about knowing where to be and switching effectively. One on one he's done okay for himself. If Johns is able to limit Days usage—keep him off the offensive boards in particular—he can be a cipher on offense and still massively help Michigan's chances in this game.

The bench kind of starts here? No other Tiger has more than ~16 minutes per game and everyone past the top four is in the Wallflower Usage Zone. 6'6" wing Aundre Hyatt has started the last 10 games so he's your not-quite-bench guy. He… uh… exists. With just 48 twos and 34 threes on the year he doesn't have much sample size. FWIW, he's hitting 56/29 and chips in some OREBs.

The actual bench:

• Freshman PG Eric Gaines gets a third of LSU's minutes and has been spectacularly miserable, shooting 25/18 with a TO rate near 30. Michigan should be endeavoring to have Mike Smith out there for all of Gaines's minutes since he's little threat to shoot over him, unlike everyone else on LSU.
• Freshman wing Mwani Wilkinson is on the opposite end of things. He is super efficient because he gets up 7% of LSU's shots when he's on the floor; almost all of these are dunks or layups off of assists or putbacks. He's shooting 83% and has the #1 ORTG in the country because he barely meets the 40% minutes cutoff. Wilkinson is a bouncy athlete who's a threat on the offensive boards and will block some shots.
• Junior PF Josh "Matt" LeBlanc is pretty much the same as Wilkinson: tiny usage, everything's at the rim and most of it is off assists or putbacks.

Wade will power through foul trouble with his big three because they can't afford to have much time with any of them off the court. The general response is to make their defense even more porous and live with those consequences.

THE TEMPO-FREE

Left offense, right defense:

The left side adds up to Kenpom's #5 offense despite checking in 338th in assists per field goal made. Will Wade has found a team that matches his coaching style.

Defensively, things are a bit of a mess. There's the SWAC-level rebounding and a dearth of turnovers forced; LSU is 223rd defending twos. And the thing they do best is probably random chance. Will Wade's four years at LSU have seen them finish 286th, 231st, 290th, and 327th in the number of threes they allow opponents to get up. Opponent 3P%: 193rd, 134th, 252nd, 14th.

Since three point defense is notoriously unreliable we'd want to see some sort of mechanism that would create such a radical improvement. There doesn't appear to be one related to LSU, but there is one about their schedule: the SEC on the whole shot 33% from deep, which is 22nd amongst conferences. The Big Ten shot 38%, by comparison. Meanwhile, LSU opponents have hit 32% of three-pointers Synergy considers "unguarded". They've given up 256 of those, 9.1 per game. For comparison Michigan's given up 106, 4.2 per game. (Michigan's also been lucky on those as opponents have hit just 30%.)

I don't think the three point D is real and it's going to be less real if Dickinson is kicking the ball out for good looks.

THE KEYS

Control what you can control. LSU's going to run a ton of iso after hunting a switch or two, and a lot of the shots they're going to get up are going to be functionally un-contestable. They'll either go down or not. So what can you do? Keep them away from the basket, insofar as you can given some height and athleticism gaps. Keep them off the free throw line. And rebound. M can't do much about the first two of the Four Factors listed above, but they can do something about the OREB rate and FTA rate.

Note that a thing Michigan cannot control is the officiating, and if they get a couple of calls like Dickinson's gotten on completely innocuous screens that'll be tough to live with. A full-on Texas Southern whistle and they're boned.

wrecked Trendon Watford [Campredon]

Ruthlessly exploit the post. LSU's post-up D numbers are extremely shiny on Synergy but that's low sample size in a conference where the best opposition big is… Colin Castleton? Appears so, as Castleton was the only guy over 6'6" to make either all-SEC team. Castleton scored 21 on 13 shooting possessions in Florida's game against LSU. Watford responded with 21 on 22 because he hit a couple threes. He was 5/16 inside the line. Castleton's improved a ton this year but I don't think he would have been starting over Dickinson if he stayed.

If Michigan can consistently get the ball to Dickinson LSU is going to have to double. They've already done that on about half of their post D possessions even against mostly SEC opposition, and they'll no doubt choose that over exposing Watford to foul trouble and also having Dickinson sit on his head. That'll lead to kickouts, and that'll lead to…

Make open threes. …more of those 9+ unguarded threes per game. Michigan's hitting 38% on the season and is actually better at guarded triples (40%), but that's probably noise. Michigan still has four shooters surrounding Dickinson—Brandon Johns, you are a shooter—and will have plenty of clean-cut looks from deep for them. Ohio State first half == win. Ohio State second half == loss. Something in-between is probably good enough?

But yeah I don't see a way that this game is not heavily dependent on a three-point lottery where Michigan gets a lot of great looks and needs them to go down.

Stunt/help relentlessly. You can float off of whoever the fifth guy is, and you need to dissuade isolation drives from getting all the way to the basket. That might mean some pack line principles—in this case having secondary perimeter defenders "stunt" off their guys for a step or two to try to get drivers to pick up their dribble or force a turnover—would be of use. Anything that migrates fouls from Dickinson to anyone else would be good.

Get weird? Putting Franz Wagner on Aundre Hyatt seems like a total waste. On the other hand I'm not sure if he can stay in front of Smart or Thomas. How can Michigan best deploy the most disruptive defender in Big Ten play? What does that look like? I have no idea.

THE SECTION WHERE I PREDICT THE SAME THING KENPOM DOES

Michigan by 6.