bruce madej

2/21/2019 – Michigan 69, Minnesota 60 – 24-3, 13-3 Big Ten

If you could go back in time six months and give your past self a stupefying Michigan sports update, your #2 option would be "Michigan basketball is 24-3 and it's tough to decide whether Zavier Simpson or Jon Teske is our best player." We will not discuss #1.

The needle swung to Simpson after the Maryland game, when he had 12 points on seven shot equivalents, 8 assists, one turnover, and more or less shut off Anthony Cowan for a half. The pendulum swung back to Teske in this one: 17 points on 11 shot equivalents, two assists, five blocks. Even more stunning: 36 minutes.

Teske sometimes seems to take his foot off the gas a little bit in the post, whether that's marshalling his strength or trying to avoid foul trouble. But every game he does enough to hold whoever he's directly checking to meh numbers (Oturu had 18 points on 18 shot equivalents and a TO) while hedging everyone's ball-screen game into oblivion and coming in for help defense on the regular. There's a point in every game where Teske gets a closeup and my reaction is "my goodness that person is red," but dude just keeps going. Michigan would be dead in the water if he could only play 20 MPG like a lot of guys his size. He is Camp Sanderson's magnum opus.

Anyway:

That's Minnesota for you. It took Minnesota 28 minutes to make a basket outside of the paint. The Gophers had 18 points at halftime. Eight of these were on initial attempts. They were able to claw ten more out off of putbacks, which is a little frustrating since the Gophers haven't been that good at OREBs in league play and Michigan has maintained their DREBs much better than they usually do.

The margins are are pretty thin. Given the number of rebounding opportunities Minnesota had (47!) Michigan would expect to give up 12.5 OREBs; instead they gave up 15. This places it into a category where we're mildly frustrated about bounces.

In part because of the above this was a game in which the Gopher had a huge shot volume edge. They had 7 more OREBs than TOs. Michigan was –4. To hold a team with a shot volume index over one to 0.9 PPP means you are crushing them everywhere except the offensive boards.

wall up! [Ludeman]

Verticality. Part of the trouble the Gophers had was their tendency to run pell-mell at the rim and try to chunk something up. That style is why they lead the league in free throw rate. In this one it mostly led to very tough attempts after taking contact. This was most notable on two missed dunks where Teske walled up vertically and contested.

Doink pic.twitter.com/Y7uILIYeWu

— Noah Neidlinger (@candor_for_sale) February 22, 2019

Amir Coffey's bounced spectacularly outside the three point line; Teske was called for a foul on a near-identical Jordan Murphy play. (Murphy missed both FTs, ball don't lie.)

With the exception of that foul, though, the officials allowed Michigan to contest.

When verticality is called correctly it's such an excellent rule change, rewarding defenses for being in good position without flopping and placing a priority on open shots for the offense all the way to the rim. The best example in this game was not either Teske contest but Amir Coffey getting downhill only for Simpson to show. Simpson was outside the restricted arc (I think) but instead of trying to flop he went up to contest; Coffey bumped him, missed the ensuing tough shot, and Michigan rebounded. That is infinitely superior to a guy standing on the ground and falling over in the hopes of stopping the game with a foul call.

[After THE JUMP: attacking switches, finally]