2-3 zone

3/4/2021 – Michigan 69, Michigan State 50 – 19-2, 14-2 Big Ten, Big Ten regular season champions

I have now watched a year of pandemic sports, and I can say that the most surreal thing to watch with nobody in the stands is college basketball. This was made plain when I turned on the Baylor-WVU game, which was about 20% full, and recoiled at the strangeness of an audio record of whether things were going well or not. People were furious at certain things. It was a sad (and unwise) echo of the Before Times, and at the same time it injected a fervor into the proceedings. It felt like a top-ten matchup, or at least the ghost of one. 

Alone amongst major sports, basketball puts fans directly adjacent to proceedings. Malices at the Palace do not transpire in other sports because there are barriers between athletes and the hoi polloi. Opportunities for portly gentlemen to confront and get absolutely wrecked by Jermaine O'Neal are limited.

This gives a basketball crowd an immediacy other sports lack. When you are close to the court the sport literally vibrates for you, each bounce of the ball resonating in your ears and feet simultaneously.

On top of that, a college basketball crowd puts several hundred dubiously sober students in prime position to mock, taunt, celebrate, wobble unsteadily, and wear varied animal costumes. The reduced number of games relative to the NBA, and the various ways in which you could succeed or fail heightens stakes. An NBA version of this MSU team is wondering whether it's worth making the playoffs just to get obliterated instead of clawing desperately to maintain a 22-year tourney streak. This turns up the volume further until a band-box arena in Vermont with maybe 3,000 people in it feels like a nuclear reactor during Championship Week.

Deleting that leaves you unsteady. The resulting season feels tangibly less real.

eight minutes to tip [Campredon]

When the confetti came down and Michigan paraded around a sign that said "2021 Big Ten Champions" I was happy, of course, but the emptiness of that building—the failure of several hundred people to appear on the court and mill around aimlessly—hit hard. A true and proper title celebration is far from the most important thing the pandemic has taken from us, but it could only be bittersweet to see Michigan be this team, to win this thing, 358 days after the 2020 Big Ten Tournament was shut down and Zavier Simpson skyhooks unceremoniously vanished into the G-League ether.

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You may have noticed that my output on this blog has dropped substantially. There have been more weekdays without a post from me in the past couple months than years-long blocks of time prior.

I have struggled. My weak connections to the people around me have been severed and the few strong ties leaned on unto their breaking point. A lack of reliance on other people has morphed from a marker of rugged individualism into a blank, gray loneliness. Existing addictions—mostly to video games, which I compulsively click at even when I am thinking about how boring this activity is—were exacerbated. Relationships strained. My personal life roiled until there was a sudden break. A look into an abyss, and a turning away from it.

I can't say the roiling has exactly stopped but at least I have a path I can see that leads forward. It is a repeated agony that it buckles and warps, cracks and shudders, rises and descends. Work gets put in and sometimes it seems like it amounts to nothing. But I suppose if Austin Davis can put Luka Garza in a blender, there is no depth that cannot be surmounted brick by brick.

This is a stupid and flimsy thing to latch onto, the actions of college players attempting to throw a ball through a hoop, but since a large part of this years-long slide was sitting on my computer staring at a football game I had no desire to comment on I'll take it and nestle it into place. Belief starts somewhere. An ability to take joy from other people starts somewhere.

Here at what feels like the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of being locked away from each other I have concluded that the only thing to do is get up in the morning and try again.

[After THE JUMP: a regular-ass bullets section! Like nothing even happened!]

2/21/2021 – Michigan 92, Ohio State 87 – 16-1, 11-1 Big Ten

At some point I realized that I had not had this particular feeling for a long time. Michigan was locked in a battle with a top five team. The game was incandescent. The importance of it left the realm of the practical—this is a Q1A game against a B10 title contender named Ohio State—and entered the realm of the madeleine.

For people who don't live with a humanities PhD and are subject to a process of involuntary weird smart stuff osmosis* that includes a vague understanding of elaborate weirdo Marcel Proust, the madeleine game is one that burns itself into your memory immediately and permanently. Anything that triggers a memory of that game brings along a flood of other memories and resets your emotional state to your state at the conclusion of that game, just as Proust wrote a FOUR THOUSAND PAGE BOOK based largely on memories triggered by encountering a traditional small cake from Commercy and Liverdun.

I'm going to do it to you now. I apologize in advance. Hey, remember that game when Jabrill Peppers got his first college interception?

…

Sorry sorry I'm trying to delete it. I chose the worst one for the strongest effect, but therse are other, nicer ones. Here's one: the game where McGary got cup-checked. The game where the point guard had a man bun. The game where Tom Izzo fouled at the end for a solid two minutes.

At some point the wider context fades out and the thing that is important is to win this game solely because you will remember Michigan winning or losing this game. From the Kentucky Elite Eight game column:

As the game went on and the temperature rose, the building knew. There is an odd shift in the dynamics of an arena once it becomes clear to everyone present that they are watching an out-and-out classic. The stakes, already astronomical, ratchet ever-higher as the imperative to not lose this game, to win this game, to have this thing in your heart forever for cold nights and funerals, reaches critical mass. I mean, what if Michigan loses in overtime to Kansas last year? It does not bear thinking about.

Michigan of course lost that game. We have just had a Slack conversation about an upcoming podcast segment that will run down the top 10 barnburners of the last 20 years; Seth brought up the Kentucky game because it was a 1.32 vs 1.26 PPP fireball in the Elite Eight, and Ace had an aneurysm expressed via text. Madeleine game. It will never leave you.

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The madeleine is asymmetrical. It has a bump in it. When they made them on the Great British Baking Show, the dimensions of said lump were important. One side of madeleine is a sine wave; the other is flat. You can flip it over and it's a different thing.

What you won't think about when you think about this game is Isaiah Livers, a 90% free-throw shooter, missing both, and Franz Wagner, an 85% shooter, immediately missing the front end of a one-and-one. Flip a couple buckets the other way and your particular memory configuration for this game would shove those right to the front of the line, ready to be triggered by someone who says "Duane" and "Washington" in close proximity to each other.

Instead you might think of Hunter Dickinson dunking a meteor through Ohio's throat.

Ohio State fans—poor, benighted Ohio State fans—will probably snap to Justice Sueing's audacious behind-the-back pass to two centers who aren't looking for the ball.

You may also remember that. I don't make the rules. Go for it.

This is the source of that odd and urgent feeling. You'll rewrite history in your head based on the outcome, so every shot missed or made ratchets up the tension until you're dropping an f-bomb in proximity to children. Until each tiny movement of the ball is scrutinized, each screen set is a potential offensive foul catastrophe, each shot causes the hairs on your head to levitate slightly further from your scalp.

When you're done it's time to lay down and think of paint and grass, and maybe Hunter Dickinson putting a basketball in the earth's core.

*[Ask me for a funhouse mirror version of something Foucault may have said one time!]

[After THE JUMP: shot quality is discussed]

12/31/2020 – Michigan 84, Maryland 73 – 8-0, 3-0 Big Ten

Hunter Dickinson got the ball on the outer edges of what could be called the left block, patiently waited out a dig-down, and put the ball on the court for a couple dribbles before spinning back to his right. Then he launched Tim Duncan's shot.

This is not an analogy. That is literally the thing Tim Duncan—one of very few NBA superstars in history to have bank shot compilations floating around Youtube—used to do, except Dickinson is left-handed. The first clip of this, yep, Tim Duncan bank shot compilation is exactly the above:

I laughed in the same way Ace and Adam did in the press box after Jourdan Lewis's interception against Wisconsin. Encapsulated therein: relief, disbelief, happiness, the feeling of reaching in your coat and pulling out a twenty-dollar bill. Michigan may have pulled Tim Duncan But Angry At Maryland out of Juwan Howard's first recruiting class. Michigan State pulled a guy who can't beat out Thomas Kithier for minutes. Cackling is authorized.

Dickinson finished 10/11 from the floor. He's shooting 77% in Big Ten play and has cracked the Kenpom Player of the Year leaderboard*. Despite reports from the Maryland side of things that Dickinson was never particularly interested in the Terps—not a surprise since they haven't gotten a DeMatha player in 18 years(!)—he managed to inflate minor perceived recruiting disrespect into a reason to Kubrick stare at Mark Turgeon every time he scored. This was found to be so intimidating that Dickinson was assessed a technical.

On one level this was an outrage. On the other hand, yeah, I kind of get it.

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Michigan just had this game against Nebraska, except Maryland is not Nebraska and the level of unconscious Maryland shooters reached was somewhere between nuclear and… uh… I had something for this… really nuclear. There is one thing to do when your opponent hits 59% of their threes: bitch about randomness and take the L.

Except when you shoot 75% from two and 90% from the line, and the opposition doesn't quite crack 42% inside the line. Only good teams can survive strategic bombing outta nowhere games. Teams that have a lot of slack against a top 50 team. Michigan gets that slack in one line on Kenpom:

Michigan is a top five team inside the line at both ends of the floor, and conference play has not yet cracked that number. Michigan's actually better in conference play so far. (Against three lower-end Big Ten teams, granted, but this is a no-days-off conference.) They have the #1 eFG defense in conference play despite opponents hitting 44% from deep.

I entered the season with modest expectations. Two transfers, defensive question marks, the #1 recruiting class coming in next year: I was prepared to take a bid as enough and anything else as a win. Every time a tall guy does something against Michigan's backcourt I feel the "ah well" re-emerge. And then Michigan wins by double digits against increasingly good teams.

I keep waiting for the bottom to drop out of something and it hasn't yet. Maybe Northwestern and their five-out offense will be a problem. Wisconsin rather looms in 11 days. At this point it feels like those two games are inflection points between a top 25 team and a top 10—maybe top 5—one. This is encouraging.

It's especially encouraging because Juwan Howard did this by leaning into his wheelhouse. He grabbed the closest analogue to himself in the most recent recruiting class and has coached him—and his teammates—up to a point where he's a top ten player in college basketball eight games into his career.

Michigan's good at the repeatable, sustainable things. Being good at them also feels repeatable and sustainable. The program itself sort of has a Tim Duncan vibe right now.

*[Notable for a couple different reasons. #1: Big Ten players (Garza, Dosunmu, Jackson-Davis) are currently 1-2-3. #2: Loyola-Chicago center Cameron Krutwig is #5. Yes, that Cameron Krutwig. He was just a freshman during their Final Four run.]

[After the JUMP: is 90% good?]