Do the 3 point shooting teams having success give you any hope for Michigan basketball?
I know there are people that are critics of Beilein’s scheme, so does these teams having success show Michigan can do the same.
Northern Iowa
St. Mary’s
Cornell
Butler
BYU
I could be wrong, but I think most of the players on these teams were not good 3 point shooters coming out of high school, unlike the players Michigan has and with a great shooting coach with Beilein they can get even better. My hope is this year was a fluke.
Highlights of 2008-2009
Beilein doesn't plan on being undersized continually. He wants his 4 to have perimeter skills, but that does not mean that he wants said player to be Novak-sized. If that were the case, he'd never be recruiting as many big men as he has, and is. He signed two big men in his first class (Benzing and Cronin), two more in his second class (Morgan and McLimans) and should bring in two this year, counting Smotrycz.
The fundamental issue in this thread is that some seem convinced that we will play the same (mediocre) way even when we have better/more skilled players, and others are convinced we'll play differently. There is no way to definitively resolve this now. But given Beilein's track record with players worse than the ones he's currently recruiting, there is reason to believe in the latter.
I know you're a basketball expert, but I'll make it simple anyway. When you don't turn it over and force turnovers at a high rate, the relative lack of rebounding that would otherwise result in fewer possessions becomes far less problematic.
Giving up the ultimate rebounding battle =/= not caring about rebounds. Having only two big men on your roster = inability to get rebounds regardless of system.
Where was all of this last year? The complaints that a system that has worked everywhere can't work consistently? Where was it when we beat Duke, UCLA, gave OU a hell of a game? Watch WVU - Huggins carried over much of Beilein's strategy (and some of his players, mind you). A team that has been awful for 10 years has a disappointing year and suddenly M-Wolverine, Buddha, and KoB are smarter than Beilein. OK.
(I'll stop now, but: this was a terrible season and while we started over-ranked, a decent portion of this is Beilein's fault even with the personnel issues. He couldn't motivate the guys and at times probably made the wrong adjustments. But the nonsense about the system, the Cornell comparisons, it's a waste of time and clearly against the great weight of the evidence.)
But as for where was it last year...neither one of us was posting then.
And I think you all are confusing situational strategy vs. system design. And yes, he's had some big man bad luck, but it's not like Shaq blew out his knee for us. I would hope going into year four we'd not still be hoping to recruit our first legit talent big man (Psst...coaches fo the recruiting at the college level too...if we don't have enough good players...well...). But I'm sure we'll have all our talent in place just about the time Beilein hits retirement age. But we've gotten WAY off topic.
I was going to go into another long thing, but instead: if Beilein keeps recruiting this well (like getting TZ, for example), I think there is reason to believe the system will have no limit (especially since, without top talent, it has gotten to the Elite Eight).
But in fairness, you asked in another post if "pretty good" was enough. Some deep-ish tournament runs would do it for me, and unless we're going to go out and get Calipari or Huggins, that might be where we're headed barring, yeah, some 3s really falling in big games. I'm OK with that for now, because I still see this as a rebuilding period. I disagree with the idea that there is a hard ceiling for this system until we see what better players can do in its confines. But if you want to be a consistent, top-5 national program, no, I'm not saying we're not going to do that with JB.
We need better defense as well.
they need bigger (and naturally, better) players
the fact that outside of Manny we didn't have anyone who was quick enough on the drive to command help defense. This really limited the penetration and kick out possibilities that we could use. With a quicker and smaerter D-Mo and Ziegler(?) defenses will be more likely to collapse to the middle and give Douglas, Vogrich, and LLP better and more frequent looks.
Beilein will be successful when/if he consistently brings in Big Ten caliber players. For whatever reason his recruiting has been god-aweful. If he really starts bringing in kids like Zeigler, Hardaway, Brundige, Williams, and Ferrell (2 locked up already) Michigan will compete in the big ten.
Can we really say his recruiting has been "god-awful" when we've only gotten to see four of the eight players he signed in his first two years? We might be evaluating those first two classes differently if Benzing had been eligible and Cronin and Morgan had been healthy. We also haven't seen McLimans yet.
BTW, don't forget Smotrycz.
you get 3 points for a 3 point shot. layups only get you 2. beilein's offense is thus 50% better than everyone else's.