Michigan vs. Illinois SNOWFLAKES/502 Bad Gateway/POSBANG Thread
I'm not sure we played well enough for POSBANG to get it's own thread. So I've combined.
30 minutes of solid basketball. 10 minutes of s*** the bed. Glad we hung on for the W. Survive and advance.
One note..
Midway through the 2nd half, LeVert played BRILLIANT defense. Probably the best position and footwork you've seen all year. It was certainly his best series of the game.
The Illinois player pushes off, creates space and then jumps out of bounds for the dumpoff under the basket and a dunk. No call. Refs +2.
Last possession. LeVert couldn't have played it any worse. Completely out of position - horrible defense.
Illinois misses the floater.
#Sports.
are more balanced than UM is. There is not as large of a disparity between their defensive performance and offensive performance. Sure, there a plenty of teams who are unbalanced (Ohio State being an example), but that is why those teams are not considered top 10 teams.
If go by the efficiency numbers there is around a 90 spot gap between their offense and defense numbers. I don't think that is the case with the other teams in the 1-2 seed range.
One of the usual keys in the tournament is having the ability to win games in mutiple ways. This team really can't do that, they will live and die based on how they shoot the ball. The other 1-2 seed teams seem to be more equipped to be able to win games in different ways.
...I very much hope no one is expecting anything in particular in the BTT or the NCAA Tournament. The nature of a one-and-done tournament is to bite you in the ass pretty often.
M is outstanding at offense, poor at D. It allowed them to go 15-3 in the B1G this year.
If another team is #1 in offense and #1 in defense, then sure they're rock solid. But if you call a contender a team with the #15 Offense and #15 Defense, that's just balancing out the goodness. Instead of arguing that Michigan can be upset if they have a bad game on Offense, I'd just say this second contender can be upset if they have a worse game of offense and a worse game on defense. IOW, if the team in question is going to be 25 points bad, you'd apply that all to Michigan's offense and say they can lose. I'd take 12.5 to the second team's Offense and 12.5 to their Defense.
There's no reason to believe that if you're playing bad on offense you'll make it up with defense (as you seem to assume a balanced team would). If you stink that night, you're just as likely to stink all over. In that way, Michigan's offense has multiple scoring options (i.e. they can win in multiple ways, by having multiple offensive players take over for their outstanding offense), and it's very rare that all of them have an off night. If they do, they can certianly be upset early. Just like Team B can be upset if most of their players play poorly, whether on offense of defense.
And...
We will go deep in the tourney.
I've been saying it for months now.
We could easily lose in the opening round or we could go to the Elite 8, maaaybe even Final 4.
It all depends on GRIII. He's the only "unknown" we have on our team. In the first half he was aggressive and took the ball to the basket. We looked damn good. 2nd half he slowly returned to old GRIII and we looked like shit.
GRIII is going to be the reason we are a success or disappointment in the tournament because everything else is pretty much a given.
Personally, I still think we're a 2nd week loss type team (Sweet 16 or Elite 8), but if GRIII plays or doesn't play - that can easily change.
Well, Michigan loses if GRIII does not drill the three to bring them to within 1.
They won, that's all that matters at this point. Still have a chance as a #1 seed.
Thanks J-Mo.
I'd rather play Ohio than the Huskers. What has hurt Michigan this year is teams with quick guards who can penetrate and/or hit 3's. Gallegos/Petteway have that slash/splash look, not so much Ohio.
I'm extremely sorry for posting this link to that awful site, but you guys have to read some of the stuff here. This is a link to page twenty and it's when Michigan wins the game. Some of the things said are so epic. No fans melt down more when Michigan wins than Sparties and I love it.
http://michiganstate.247sports.com/Board/93/tOfficial-Big-Ten-Tournament-Thread-26408671/20
I like all the "luck" jabs. That's rich, considering the source.
But this is BY FAR my favorite:
i wish we beat Illinois by a point.
They lose two games to UM and feel slighted for some reason. They still got a first round bye...WTF? What a bunch of whiners.
Tell ya what...beat NW first, then we'll see.
I'll take it no matter how ugly the baby may be!
We don't face many of them, and there's a good reason for it. With "normal" shooting by us we're staring down a 20 point victory. We won't crap the bed like that from distance again. Count on it.
So happy to move on. That shot reminded me so much of the Darius Morris shot vs Duke that I almost feel bad for Illinois, almost.
A win's a win!!!! Go Blue!!
At least we'll be playing into the weekend and have something to look forward to tomorrow. Hopefully its a game against the Buckeyes.
I originally posted these in the "Game Over" thread, but this one might be the more appropriate forum for anyone who wanted to discuss them. Apologies for the redundancy.
Michigan eFG% - 55.32% / Illinois eFG% - 50.00%
Michigan OREB% - 20.69% / Illinois OREB% - 28.57%
Michigan FTR - 31.91% / Illinois FTR - 22.64%
Michigan TOV% - 12.99% / Illinois TOV% - 13.38%
We were 21-47, including 10-30 from three-point range. A/T ratio for this game was 1.375 and our PPP was 1.16.
Illinois was 24-53, including 5-17 from beyond the arc. They had an A/T ratio of 1.11 and a PPP of 1.07.
I don't always stop teaching to listen to the michigan game...
but when I do, we win.
jdon
Bad teams lose games they should have won. Good teams win games they should have lost.
Michigan arguably "should have" lost, but did not let it happen. Keep the faith, and Go Blue!
Oh, and can a brother get a posbang?
as i am, i came for the posbang anyway.
what the hell did i miss? must have been scary freakin' business!
That said, Beilein needs to learn to adjust to the 2-3 extending the zone and rolling up a wing on the edge. They looked uncomfortable against that look.
Michigan adjusted pretty well against Syracuse in the semi-final last year. The difference today was no McGary knocking down elbow jumpers.
I'm glad we won the game.
Now let us never speak of it again.
ESPN stopped updating with 2 min left, and the last update I got was they had the ball wil 4 sec left down one and I come here and there is a 502. I was 99.9% sure we lost.
Oh, it deserves one on relief alone. Thank freaking goodness. Heart in mouth bigtime there.
Sometimes bad teams rise to the occasion and play up to their competition. Sometimes good teams have off days and play down to their competition. Such is the way of sports.
Either way, it doesn't matter. We survived. Nobody will remember this game a week from now. Now on to the next one.
Illinois was lucky Caris missed a front end of a 1 and 1 late. I hate when people say you should have lost. If you won then you deserved to win period.
Glad to get bad shooting game out of the way now
Our defense is flat out awful against guards that like to get into the lane.
Two big problems:
(1) None of our guards are quick enough to stay in front of guards with good/great quickness.
(2) We don't have any rim-protector or shot blocker.
That is a dangerous combination for a defense. Indiana and Illinois completely gutted our defense with their quick guards. Matchups will be especially important for us this year in the tournament. A guard like Marcus Smart, Russ Smith, or Shabazz Naper would be a huge problem for us. Obviously those guys are a problem for everyone, but lesser-known guards with similar skill sets could be a problem
This team really is built for a zone with all of the length, but it's too late to change the team now. I wouldn't mind seeing more 1-3-1 but I'm not going to start questioning John Beilein. We basically have 3 of the same guys (LeVert, Stauskas, GR3) in terms or height/length. I was hoping Walton would have enough speed to stay in front of guards, but he was not match for Yogi, and I just felt bad for Spike when he was trying to chase him around. There is really no answer I guess. We just have to hope to shoot the ball well to help offset the multitude of layups other teams get while simply running their halfcourt sets.
Were we settling for too many 3s? Unfortunately I could only follow play-by-play at work but it seemed like the last ten minutes continuously read "Mich: [Player x] missed 3pt". I get that in our offense we can have good threes but for about 8 minutes i don't think we even attempted a two (excluding leading to FTs).
Inside D got even worse when Morgan went out with 4 fouls.
They secured the 2 seed with the win. Anything else is now frosting.