This appears to be an effective hedge. [Fuller]

Brian directed me to an excellent Vantage Sports article detailing how NBA teams defend the on-ball screen earlier this week and suggested it would be a good idea to take a closer look at how Michigan does it. Before getting into the Wolverines specifically, a look at the three basic ways to defend this:

1. Hard Hedge — The way M's done it the most under Beilein. The defender guarding the screener (usually a big man) aggressively slides out on the ballhandler to cut off a drive to the basket and make quick passes more difficult. This temporarily commits two defenders to the ballhandler and usually requires quick rotation from the other defenders on the court.
2. Soft Show — A less aggressive approach that still briefly commits two defenders to the ballhandler, in this case the defender guarding the screener moves next to the screener, cutting off a drive directly to the hoop; he doesn't move all the way out on the ballhandler, however, and dives back to the screener after cutting off the initial drive. This still requires some weakside rotation.
3. Drop Back — The conservative tack. The defender on the screener drops back (surprise!) into the paint, discouraging the ballhandler from driving while also lessening the burden on other defenders to rotate onto the roll man. This does require the defender on the ballhandler to fight over the screen well, otherwise there's room for a pull-up three.

As best I can tell, college teams favor the more aggressive approaches. This is likely due to two things: pro point guards are really damn good, and there's less space inside the arc to cover in college, making it easier to recover after a hard or soft hedge.

I went through the last three games—Rutgers, Wisconsin, and Nebraska—to see how Michigan defended the pick-and-roll. I found nine instances in which Michigan was in man defense against a P&R*; six times they hedged hard and three times they played a soft show. The results:

A few takeaways with picture pages after THE JUMP.

[JUMP]

Michigan still hard hedges most of the time. If you've watched the Wolverines under Beilein, this isn't a surprise. One of Jordan Morgan's hidden talents was his ability to cover the requisite ground quickly to make this effective.

Max Bielfeldt is better at this than Ricky Doyle. In part due to the fact that Bielfeldt is smaller and more mobile, in part because Bielfeldt is just more experienced, the lone senior on M's roster is most adept at the hard hedge. (I realize we're working with a tiny sample size here, but this is something I've noticed earlier this season, too.)

Here's a Doyle example (0:13 mark of the video). The setup—Walter Pitchford is setting a high screen for Terran Pettaway:

Doyle jumps out on Pettaway, as he's supposed to do, but while he prevents the drive he doesn't get his body into Pettaway.

This makes it way too easy for Pettaway to pull up and swing the ball around the perimeter. With Doyle still far away from recovering, Spike Albrecht is stuck guarding Pitchford in the post to prevent an easy dunk. Aubrey Dawkins is playing one-on-two on the near side. One pass...

Two pass...

Wide open three. (He made it.)

Let's compare that to an similar play in the second half run against Bielfeldt (0:37 mark). Pitchford sets a screen for Pettaway:

Bielfeldt takes a more aggressive angle than Doyle did, forcing Pettaway to give ground to avoid barreling over him:

Bielfeldt sticks with Pettaway as he ends up on the other side of the court, positioning himself so a pass is difficult:

Equally impressive is Bielfeldt's quick recovery. Pettaway is finally able to swing the ball back to Pitchford (who popped instead of rolled), and by the time Pitchford gets it to the corner, Bielfeldt is back under the basket, allowing Zak Irvin to closely contest the corner three:

The shot is an airball, and Bielfeldt identifies the Nebraska player sneaking in from the opposite corner, boxes him out, and helps corral the rebound:

This may be one of the reasons Michigan's played more zone as the season's moved on. Their best big man against the high screen is just 6'7" and prone to getting worked in the post by larger centers—Beilein tends to go zone immediately upon inserting Bielfeldt in the game.

Meanwhile, the freshman bigs don't have the technique of pick-and-roll defense down yet, and they're not quick to recover; the first couple clips in the video feature some slow rotations after the initial screen.

Incomplete data on the soft show... but I don't think I like it. The soft show only featured three times in the video—twice against Rutgers, a team so averse to running any semblance of an offense that it's tough to glean anything from watching them play.

It works fine against the half-assed screens set by Rutgers' big man in the first two clips—RU only gets a decent shot on the first one because Derrick Walton makes the unwise decision to leave his feet on the perimeter. The final clip shows what I don't like about it. Michigan doesn't have very good perimeter defenders, and without a hard hedge from the big, it's easy for the ballhandler to work his way into the lane. Nebraska didn't score on that possession, but they got the ball to a big man in solid post position after Terran Smith managed to work his way into the paint.

Any conclusions? I'm still of the mind that this Michigan squad needs to be a majority zone team, and this exercise didn't do much to change that opinion.

*Remember, they've played a ton of zone recently.