THE ESSENTIALS

WHAT	#3 Michigan (18-2, 13-2 B1G) vs #60 Michigan State (14-10, 8-10)	yup
WHERE	Crisler Arena Ann Arbor MI
WHEN	7 PM Eastern Thursday, March 4th
THE LINE	Kenpom: M -15 Torvik: M –13
TELEVISION	ESPN PBP: Bob Wischusen Analyst: Dick Vitale

THE OVERVIEW

Michigan kicks off a season-ending home-and-home with rival Michigan State with two big items on the line. One: the Big Ten championship, which Michigan will win outright by winning either of these games (or seeing Illinois lose to Ohio State).

Two: Michigan State's 22-year tourney streak, which is currently under serious threat. MSU is in the first four out on the Bracket Matrix and is last team in the field in Bart Torvik's T-Ranketology. They are locked into the 8-9 game in the Big Ten tournament, and it looks like any win against Michigan in three tries is going to get them in (that third one assumes they win that 8-9 game, obviously no guarantee). If Michigan does sweep, we can photoshop Juwan Howard's head in here very satisfyingly:

So yeah let's do that.

THE US

Seth's graphic [click to embiggen]:

faq for these graphics

Franz loses his hat. 

THE LINEUP CARD

Seth's graphic [click for big]:

We've gone with Gabe Brown and Rocket Watts as starters, because who starts is always up in the air and they've played the most minutes recently. Also we've got two rows for the bench, because MSU.

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

THE THEM

One thing you can say for Michigan State is there sure is a lot of it. A whopping twelve players have played at least 10% of MSU's minutes; Kenpom's lineup guess shows six different bodies playing some minutes at center. Tom Izzo has been running a blender all year as he tries to find lineups that work and frequently ends up starting guys who play 10-12 minutes. Only two guys are significantly above 20 MPG. Most assertions of who will start and what role they will play are low confidence.

[Campredon]

There are two constants. Wing Aaron Henry was touted as a rising star and potential first-round draft pick entering this season. That hasn't worked out as he's been inconsistent in the absence of Cassius Winston. He's still being listed in the second round by various analysts:

The three-ball may make or break Henry as an NBA prospect, but in the second round, it's worth gambling on, given his 6'6" size, slashing ability, passing, defensive tools/anticipation and rising free-throw percentage (81.0 percent), a promising number that highlights shooting touch.

"Slashing" is maybe not the right word. Henry is big and reasonably athletic but doesn't have the lateral quickness to get by guys. He takes almost half his shots in the midrange. He is exceptionally good there (47%); since he is exceptionally bad at the rim (55%) because he's almost always finishing through someone it evens out to a guy who is hitting exactly half of his twos on the year. UMHoops points out that there is a spot on the court where Henry is legitimately efficient:

Henry shoots 64% on shots between 6 and 8 feet (on over 50 attempts). That's better than he shoots at the rim (52%), on deeper twos (42%) or from three (28%).

If Henry lands on two feet one step outside of the restricted area, it is a bucket. https://t.co/OvLxXdp8D6 pic.twitter.com/lpwqK51PLM

— Dylan Burkhardt (@umhoops) March 4, 2021

Michigan needs to prevent him from setting up just outside the paint, or maybe have Franz Wagner be able to contest those shots anyway.

Henry fills up the other bits of the box score, too, with a PG-level assist rate (26), a TO rate just under 20, and a fair number of blocks and steals. Grim numbers from 3 (28%) are an issue. He has maintained his efficiency despite a steep rise in usage; unfortunately that efficiency is barely above 100.

Shooting guard Josh Langford is the same kind of player as Henry, at his best in the questionable places to shoot on a basketball court. A one-time five star—who was infamously supposed to be on the verge of picking Michigan when Tyus Battle took his spot, temporarily—beset by years of injuries, he's settled into another jumpshooter heavy in the midrange. Only 15% of his shots are at the rim and he converts at just a 47% clip. The rest of his shots are split evenly between threes, which are reasonably efficient at 35%, and midrange twos, which are not at 40%. Langford is a questionable defender at this point in his career because of the injuries and athletic deficiencies.

Langford gets about 30 MPG in Big Ten play and that number is trending upwards as we reach the end of the season. MSU goes from a pretty bad offensive team (0.98 PPP) to a very bad one (0.88) when either Langford or Henry is on the bench, FWIW. This may be more about who comes on the court than any particular standout ability from the two heavy-minutes guys.

Figuring out who to list next is close to impossible but since wing/stretch four Gabe Brown's gotten 80% of MSU's minutes over their last five the Wheel Of Weird Guys stops on him first. Brown is MSU's best three-point shooter by a wide margin (46%) and is efficient inside the arc, albeit as a finisher on other folks' actions.

Brown had a reputation as miserable defender for the first couple years of his career but this year's numbers are favorable. His presence on the court changes nothing about the MSU defense except for much-improved defensive rebounds. That's probably a fluke since Brown isn't exactly an imposing rebounder, but if he's even defensively with the rest of the options he should be getting piles of minutes since he's easily Michigan State's most efficient offensive player. He's the one guy Michigan has to stick to no matter what.

Watts has also been a weirdly inconsistent defender [Campredon]

Point guard has been a revolving door all season. With Foster Loyer shut down for the season after shoulder surgery, sophomore Rocket Watts has started three of the last five games and is a nose ahead of freshman AJ Hoggard. Neither of these options is, uh, good. Watts is shooting 28/25 in Big Ten play with a minuscule free throw rate and just generally seems broken for much of the time he's on the court. This passage stood out to Brendan Quinn when MSU played Nebraska in January:

A minute later, Watts flipped a bad pass pulling Malik Hall out of position, then drove into a wall of bodies and delivered a pass to Sissoko in a crowd of defenders. A turnover. Izzo immediately called timeout. Then the two — Watts and Izzo — barked back and forth in the huddle. No more hugs. Watts and Hall exchanged similar pleasantries before eventually slapping hands. Everyone shook their heads. On the first possession out of the timeout, Watts attempted a 30-foot left-handed bounce pass to a guarded Sissoko.

Watts does have reasonable, PG-ish assist and TO rates. He remains quick and could give Michigan's backcourt some problems like Trent Frazier did, if he's locked in and actually doing the things Izzo wants him to do. That is always in question. Watts gives up a shocking number of straight-line drives for a guy with his athletic ability. Caveats about individual defensive Synergy numbers apply, but dude is grading out at 19th percentile overall and 8th percentile against isolation.

Hoggard, meanwhile, was barely used until January when Watts temporarily got moved to the two. He has no jumpshot, shooting 23% on other twos and 19% from three. Also he's bad at the rim. Hoggard does set up his teammates frequently but his TO rate of 27 is not quite abominable.

Your guess is as good as mine about who's going to get the start or the most minutes; no matter who it is any kind of shooting from them will be a welcome balm.

pictured: MSU's center rotation

Finally… center. This is less a platoon and more a polyphonic spree situation. Junior beanpole Marcus Bingham is credited with the most minutes at C over MSU's last five by Kenpom, because he's out there for 11 minutes a game. Bingham is the same weight as Franz Wagner, give or take five pounds, and two inches taller. If you don't batter him under the basket he's very liable to swat you—his 13.8 block rate would be second nationally if he had enough minutes to qualify—but since you can put him under the basket with a feather and some harsh words MSU's two-point D barely budges when he's on the court.

The rest of the cast of thousands should be addressed by bullet point:

• Julius Marble has a modicum of offensive skill. He's solid around the basket, creates some of his own shots, and has a short hook game. He's also responsible for a 5-point drop in MSU's two point D, which is really something considering the other options at this spot. MSU gives up buckets of FTAs when he's playing, largely because Marble commits 10 fouls per 40. Yes, 10. He fouled out of the Illinois game in 7 minutes.
• Thomas Kithier is good at grabbing offensive rebounds and does nothing else on offense except finish the occasional bucket someone else creates. He's 6'8" with no lift and provides almost no rim protection.
• Mady Sissoko is a top 50 freshman—ranked in front of Hunter Dickinson!—who's averaging about 5 MPG. Little is known about him except for his lifelong fandom of the Bad Boys Pistons. It was a Sissoko flying elbow that broke Ayo Dosunmu's nose and resulted in the Big Ten's first flagrant 2 in 13 months. Early returns are that he's big and leapy with close to no offensive skill.

Joey Hauser plays as a small-ball 5 some but is important enough to be addressed outside of the bullets above.

But wait, there's more! The nominal starters section has mentioned nine different guys. With Loyer out there are two more bench players worth talking about. The first is Marquette transfer Joey Hauser, a stretch four who was a starter for much of the year but has come off the bench for the last eight games. Hauser's shooting 56/32 in Big Ten play with a reasonable FT rate. His TO rate is too high but that doesn't explain some bizarre on/off splits:

That is baffling. I guess Hauser's ability to stretch the floor isn't that valuable because MSU doesn't have any guys who can get to the bucket when the opposition center is lifted out of the paint? Frankly, MSU not losing any defensive efficiency with Hauser out there is also weird. Joey Hauser is weird.

MSU will play Hauser as a stretch five from time to time, but probably not in this one since he's a 7th percentile post defender. Dickinson will implode him.

The 11th MSU player likely to see minutes in this game is Malik Hall, who's either a traditional (ie, not stretch) four or a massively undersized five. He does work on the boards and has a reasonable ability to finish at or relatively near the rim as long as he's able to physically outmatch his opposite number, usually by being bigger and stronger. He's a solid defender as a four.

THE TEMPO-FREE

Left offense, right defense, conference numbers:

That looks exactly as frustrating as Michigan State has been for much of the year. Their eFG is rough because they cannot get to the rim—325th nationally—and are miserable once there—278th. They punt the ball out of bounds a lot, and they're dead last in the Big Ten at allowing steals. They survive, insofar as they have survived, by knocking down longer twos at a top 50 rate.  They are highly reliant on assists because they don't have isolation players.

On defense, you can see the hack-a-thon in the glowing red box. This number understates how hacky they have been lately:

The last five games their FTA/FGA is over 50. That would be third from last nationally if maintained over the course of the season. MSU has been good at preventing threes but twos go in at a 50% clip, 9th in the conference.

THE KEYS

there will be some of these [Campredon]

Are you going to call it? MSU's recent turnaround coincides with a decision to use their infinite post-type substances as fungible bodies with five fouls each. This has lifted their post defense from 7th percentile midseason to 19th percentile—thus implying that they've been average-ish over the past month. This is despite the fact that nearly a quarter of post-ups MSU have faced this season result in free throws.

This strategy has benefited from the general ineptness of opposition centers at free throws. Nebraska Cs went 2/7 from the line; Purdue Cs went 4/9; Illinois Cs 3/11. When opposition Cs have been able to hit FTs MSU has scraped by teams like Indiana, which got nothing from the rest of their team, or OSU because they were able to bully EJ Liddell into going 4/12 from two.

Hunter Dickinson has been struggling lately but he is as very large person (unlike Liddell) who is an excellent passer (unlike Kofi Cockburn) and is hitting 76% of his free throws. Swarming him and hacking him does not seem like a winning strategy as long as the officiating does not slip into that mode where the calls must balance out.

Big if. We just had a game in which Kofi Cockburn picked up two on-ball fouls trying to defend Dickinson in the post and Dickinson immediately got his third on an irrelevant box-out.

How contested are MSU's midrange twos, and where are they from? If you can push Henry out to 12+ feet he's not super efficient, and neither is Langford. That's over long periods of time, though, and probably the standout stat from MSU's recent games is MSU's ability to live in the midrange without dying in the midrange:

• Vs Iowa: 6/22, L
• Vs Purdue: 8/24, L
• Vs Indiana: 9/17, W
• Vs OSU: 11/20, W
• Vs Illinois: 15/28, W
• Vs Maryland: 4/16, L
• Vs Indiana: 12/21, W

Against tourney level opponents, MSU shooting 50%+ in the midrange has been crucial for their ability to eke out enough offense to win. Michigan has a good chance to meaningfully contest a lot of these since Wagner, Brown, and Livers have a lot of length.

If they try drop coverage on you are you able to get something other than jumpers and floaters out of it? Michigan settled for a ton of tough intermediate stuff against Illinois, which was possible in part because enormous human Kofi Cockburn is able to dissuade passes to the roll man without giving up too much real estate near the basket. MSU doesn't have anyone like that except maybe Bingham, who probably cannot be left alone in the post with Dickinson.

But Illinois put out a book on Michigan and you know people are going to try to replicate it.

THE SECTION WHERE I PREDICT THE SAME THING KENPOM DOES

Michigan by 15.