Your slightly-dated, already-posted positions: point guard, shooting guard, and center.

More Interchangeable Wing City:

ROSTER

Isaiah Livers(Jr.): Swiss-army-knife sixth man now pressed into third banana role. Great shooter; difficulty getting to the rim. Superior defender.

Franz Wagner (Fr.): See shooting guard post; elite shooter should get 10-20 MPG as the 3.

Adrien Nunez (So.): Also see shooting guard post; at 6'6" he's the most likely SG other than Wagner to see time at the 3.

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS

[pokes livers again] hey do some more stuff

attacking the bucket is the question [Campredon]

Last year's edition of the power forward post started off with an exhortation for Isaiah Livers to stop being Matt Vogrich:

[pokes Livers with a stick] hey. do something.

Isaiah Livers's 12.9% usage was the smallest number a Michigan rotation player put up since 2011, when sophomore Matt Vogrich Just-A-Shooter'd himself to 12.8%. The only scholarship player in the Kenpom era to do more than barely pip Livers in invisibility was the senior version of Gavin Groninger, who played 12 minutes a game despite shooting 10% from two and 19% from three. (Michigan basketball: more fun than it used to be.) Livers's FT rate of just above 10 is also in the same "might be the lowest in the Kenpom era" range. 90% of his shots at the rim were assisted, etc.

Excellent progress was made in this department. Livers established himself as the team's most reliable outside shooter, going from 34% to 43% from deep while more than doubling his attempts to 122. His free throw rate doubled from nonexistent to mostly nonexistent. He added about 3 points of usage and went from 13% of Michigan's shots when he was on the floor to 18%. He added that usage while slashing his TO rate (TOs count as usage). The end result: Livers went from a dubiously efficient peripheral player to a guy with a 121 ORTG with a reasonable amount of responsibility.

Livers's context has now radically changed. Last year he was an all-purpose sixth man on the floor with at least two high-usage wing-type-persons almost all the time. All three of those guys are gone. Even with the addition of Franz Wagner, Livers is going to be asked to take another quantum leap. Can he hack it?

[After the JUMP: next steps, and gratuitous Wagner embed]

On the defensive end of the floor, almost certainly. A previous post about a weird plus/minus stat ended up spending a lot of time talking about how Livers was quietly a Matthews-quality defender (or at least in the picture):

Almost a third of Livers's possessions came as a small-ball center, where he was worse than the other options. (On average.)

For Livers to make the machine gun stat list of top defenders he had to annihilate it on the other two thirds of his possessions. The vast majority of these (all but ~100) came next to Jon Teske, and yup:

Livers is enough of an upgrade on Iggy defensively to expect he'll be able to more or less replace Matthews. In fact, lineups with Teske/Iggy and one of Matthews/Livers gave up an identical 0.84 PPP. Matthews is a better defender, in all likelihood. Livers is on this list because the guy he replaced was a meh defender. Matthews is not because the guy who replaced him much of the time was Livers. But there's every reason to expect Michigan will have three elite defenders in the starting lineup again next year.

Even without any offensive progress that alone would warrant the 35 MPG he is certainly going to get.

So how feasible is that offensive progress? Reasonably so, but a quantum leap is unlikely. Livers was Just A Shooter a year ago with just 21% of his attempts at the rim, the solid majority of them assisted. It felt like Livers getting to the rim was almost always a hammer in transition:

Jordan Poole ➡️ Isaiah Livers =

Check out this pretty @umichbball alley-oop. pic.twitter.com/vaemLqwr8n

— Michigan On BTN (@MichiganOnBTN) December 30, 2018

He did attack the occasional closeout but his lack of foot speed frequently converted those into off-the-dribble pull-ups. He's good at them, and that's a saving grace, but it's a rare, rare player who can make those shots truly efficient. (I was baffled to see Texas Tech's Davide Moretti crack 50% on other twos when I previewed the Red Raiders during the tourney.) Livers is not one—he hit 43% of his other twos a year ago. He is in the range where those shots are decent in low to medium quantities.

For Livers to up his production he'll either have to be a more unabashed gunner, learn to drive and finish through contact, or hump up a lot more decent-but-not-great two point jumpers. The first is a possibility—more than once last year I moaned "shoot" after Livers passed up an open look. The second seems unlikely, but…

Isaiah Livers drives for the tough and-1 to extend Michigan's lead! #MarchMadness | @umichbball pic.twitter.com/HKYNbZib6i

— NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) March 23, 2019

…not impossible. The third is suboptimal but a decent bail-out option for a possession that's not going well.

Put it together and Livers will probably scrape 20% usage as an omnipresent three & D guy who isn't quite optimal on a team that doesn't have an obvious "I got this" go-to guy, thus forcing some bad shots on other players.

Okay but is he even going to play the three?

Maybe, maybe not. Our assumption here is that Wagner and Livers are 60-70 minutes at the two through four. If Brandon Johns and Colin Castleton are good options at the 4, Wagner will be a hilariously oversized two and this will indeed be Livers's spot. If Cole Bajema, Eli Brooks, David DeJulius, or Adrien Nunez are collectively getting a sizeable number of minutes Livers will be just fine as a 4.

This space has asserted that the PFs are more likely to be major contributors than available SG types, an opinion that today's roster release slightly reinforced by listing 6'7" Cole Bajema at 175 pounds. For the record, Caris LeVert was listed at 6'5", 170 as a freshman. It is possible that Michigan enbeefened LeVert's weight to avoid a visit from child protective services… but Bajema is probably a year away from sizeable minutes.

Isn't this Franz's best spot?

Insofar as positional distinctions outside of PG and C mean anything anymore, yeah, probably. Ideally Michigan would have a second ball-handler and pick-and-roll threat to pair with Simpson, and while Franz brings a lot of things to the table PNR proficiency is not one of them. Franz at the 2, especially with Livers and his 6.1 assist rate at the 3, puts the weight of the world on Simpson's shoulders.

This may be where you want the weight, though. Michigan is super efficient when Simpson is the shot creator; when he's off the ball his lack of gravity from behind the arc—which will only be exacerbated with the new three-point line—makes things more difficult for secondary creators. So you may as well make Simpson the be-all and end-all of Michigan's shot creation, a la Cassius Winston last year.

Maybe Franz fits better at the three on a different team that has a 40% three-point shooter at PG and a Stauskas-esque creator at the two. That is not this team. If he ends up playing more as a wing it'll be about the players around him and not an attempt to maximize his utility.

OUTLOOK

This is going to be 40 minutes of Livers/Wagner and thus projects to be a third obviously very good spot along with PG and C. No matter who it is this spot should provide near-elite or elite perimeter shooting with some ability to drive; the biggest difference between the two flavors will be on defense unless Wagner is also a Matthews-ish defender. That is unlikely to say the least. But maybe!