Shooters Get To Shoot Comment Count

Brian

2/14/2018 – Michigan 74, Iowa 59 – 21-7, 10-5 Big Ten

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[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

There are many reasons your correspondent does not coach basketball. One of them is that I would not look at Michigan's defensive issues from their first game against Iowa and solve them by putting Duncan Robinson on Tyler Cook. Cook eviscerated anyone Michigan sent at him en route to 28 points at Carver-Hawkeye; yesterday my humorous tweet about how things were going for Robinson was not quite hyperbolic enough:

Cook actually had four points at that juncture. He'd finish with ten, on 18% usage, and Iowa does not win a game where Cook ends up being a role player. Without Luka Garza going NBA Jam from 15 feet, Iowa's offense would have collapsed in a wet puddle; even with that net-burning activity the Hawkeyes were held to 0.88 points per possession, their third-worst outing of the year.

Also Robinson singlehandedly shot Iowa out of their zone, and the game, by hitting 6/8 threes—many of them from a couple feet behind the line. This naturally leads to a lot of sentences that start with "if" and end with ellipses, like "if Duncan Robinson can just do that six straight times..." or "if Duncan Robinson is possessed by the soul of Glen Rice..." or "if Duncan Robinson made a pact with the Devil..."

Then, yeah, man. Yeah. Sometimes a Mitch McGary comes from out of nowhere. It's not likely with Robinson, who's been a contributor for long enough that he's established a baseline of performance. We probably just saw Robinson's best game at Michigan.

I can accept one "if", though: if Robinson can be the 40%+ three point shooter he was his first two years, that could take Michigan's offense up to "threatening to high seed" levels. Knockdown three point shooting makes it very difficult for a Michigan opponent to not get caught in possession-based quicksand.

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I keep poking it in case it wakes up and trundles off into the sea, leaving me to wonder if it was ever real. It does not wake up. It does not even seem vaguely fluky. Michigan's defense is legitimate. Crashing the boards on this team leads to more transition opportunities the other way than second chances. Iowa is the top OREB team in the Big Ten and Michigan obliterated them. Iowa got 18% of their misses; Michigan got 28% of theirs.

That's a six shot advantage. Turnover margin provided another ten. Even if Michigan is a wonky shooting team, and they usually are this year, there's almost no way to stay in contact with a team that gets 16 more opportunities to score than you do. When only 10 of your attempts are from three, forget about it.

Michigan now combines elite turnover avoidance, elite defensive rebounding, and elite three-point shot prevention. If they were anywhere near their usual level of sharpshooting this team would be really something. They aren't, so they're just a B outfit headed for a middling seed.

But I think there's something in this new paradigm. Michigan will remain an elite turnover avoidance team as long as Beilein is here. Their worst performance in the past six years was 17th. Preventing threes also seems sustainable. They were 218th two years ago when Beilein turned his staff over and hired a defensive coordinator; under Billy Donlon they were 9th; under Luke Yaklich they are 10th. There's no reason that can't continue.

Rebounding is an open question. This is Beilein's best DREB team by almost four full percentage points, and Wagner is (somehow) now the kind of elite DREB vacuum that might move the needle. You'd think Teske would be at least in the vicinity, though.

If Michigan can go from a team that gets a lot of shots to a team that has a huge shot margin because the opposition isn't getting second chances, and that eFG D is helped out by that 3PA prevention, and they can do this with a Typical Beilein level of shooting... well, yeah, that seems like it would be good.

I eagerly anticipate marrying the era where there's a defensive coordinator with the one where Michigan assassinates archdukes with called bank shots. For now, let's hope Maverick Morgan sent Robinson a shitty DM last week.

BULLETS

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oblig mad fran [Campredon]

Damn me to hell. Yesterday in our Slack chat I wondered why Fran McCaffrey, a guy with one regular under 6'5", didn't play zone. So of course for the first time in McCaffrey's dang career he sends his team out in a 2-3 zone from the drop. Michigan spent their requisite 5-10 minutes staring uncomprehendingly at it, staking Iowa to an early lead, and limped to a 1.1 PPP performance against a defense that was previously horrible.

Michigan—Robinson—eventually shot Iowa out of it, but honestly they should have stuck with it. The zone completely neutralized the Bohannon-Simpson matchup that was a major problem for the Hawkeyes earlier this year. Simpson had one shot attempt, four assists, and three TOs. Charles Matthews also struggled mightily against it, and the Robinson threes weren't always open or anywhere near the three point line.

Michigan's going to continue facing these zones because they don't have many rise-up threats against it. Matthews and Simpson aren't; Robinson evidently can be but if he's having an off game your other options are... MAAR, I guess, and he loathes being a high usage guy. Hopefully next year's vanguard will make zone a very bad idea—DeJulius, Nunez, and Brazdeikis are all guys who can punish the half-closeouts zones generally provide outside shooters.

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[Campredon]

Every day I'm scuffling. Charles Matthews continues to implode down the stretch. We should mention that one of his misses was a Kobe assist that led directly to a Teske dunk. Still: 10 points on 17 shot attempts is grim even if he grabbed four OREBs. A couple of his makes were transition gimmes, too. It's nice that he's able to run the floor and dunk explosively; in our imaginary grading system that's less of a positive than breaking down a set defense.

Michigan just has to live with it, I think. MAAR will turn into a gremlin if he ever gets up to 24% usage in a game, Simpson's total lack of a jump shot limits him, Wagner's already carrying a heavy load, Livers is a role player at this point in his career, and Robinson is 85% Just A Shooter. And it's tough to shove minutes over to Poole when he's 0/4 in a game, as he was here.

Matthews still has a lot of upside to explore but I don't think we're going to see a 180 down the stretch here.

Expand flagrants. Iowa had two hard fouls on Michigan fast breaks that were not declared flagrants. They probably weren't under the current rules. But they should be. On both, the Iowa player had no realistic play on the ball and undercut a Michigan guy in a full sprint. Instead of cool dunk action, we got free throws, and both Michigan players hit the court hard. Those fouls are intentional and are not legitimate defensive plays; they should be two shots and the ball. If you are behind a guy on a fast break you should not be able to grab them without that outcome being worse than no foul at all.

It'll be different without Mo, but maybe not worse. I assume Mo Wagner is headed for the exit after this year even if he's not ranked particularly high on draft boards, because he's done what he can to make himself more attractive to the next level—become an excellent rebounder—and his defensive deficiencies are baked in. I'd love to have him back, but I'm not banking on it.

I am relatively sanguine about this possibility because of Jon Teske, who had 8 rebounds, three offensive, and three steals in 16 minutes. Teske doesn't quite qualify for Kenpom leaderboards—he's about 4 MPG short—but if he did he would be in the top 20 nationally as an offensive rebounder. And his OREB rate goes up as the competition gets stiffer. That's probably a sample size issue, but it does go to show that it's not an artifact of beating up on the Alabama A&Ms of the world. He's also got an absurd-for-a-big steal rate:

He is the blue dot all the way to the right, and would be top 100 in steal rate for all players if he qualified. While Teske isn't an elite shot blocker his post defense is already solid or better, and he's showing flashes of being an efficient scorer with decent usage. He's not far from being this site's Dream Beilein Post, non-Pittsnogle division: an elite possession generator and rim protector. Just has to get that block rate up some and he's going to be a major positive. McGary-esque, perhaps.

FWIW, I was poking around Beilein's history on Kenpom and the one year Michigan's OREB rate wasn't in the red was the Final Four team, which had 20 MPG of McGary, an elite OREB guy (16%), 15 MPG of Jordan Morgan, a very good one (14%), and 5 minutes of Jon Horford, an okay one (10%) along with Glenn Robinson's solid 8% OREB rate. Livers is at 8, Matthews is at 6, and Wagner is at 7. 30 MPG of Teske and his 15% OREB rate has the potential to bring Michigan's OREBs from around 250th to 130th.

That would take Michigan's possession advantage from very good to great.

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[Campredon]

Simmons lives! Jaaron Simmons has 20 minutes in the last couple games; he canned a pull-up three in front of the zone and had a clever steal to set himself up for a dunk. With four assists to one turnover he had a productive outing. He's not in Simpson's class as a defender but he is the man who got absolutely zero help from his Ohio teammates a year ago; if there's a team daring Michigan to shoot over a zone he might be a decent option. Certainly more of a threat than Simpson to do so.

BTN gives, BTN takes. On the one hand, Robbie Hummel is already very good early in his broadcast career. He offers intelligent studio analysis and his color is mostly unnoticeable—a major positive—until he says something insightful. On the other, I find it impossible to listen to Jon Crispin for two hours without thinking about the sweet release of death.

Comments

J.

February 15th, 2018 at 2:02 PM ^

Yes.  Yes you are.

By far the worst part of last night's game was listening to the drivel about how Staee should be a #1 seed because AP voters don't understand basketball, and how Nebraska should be in the tournament because... they have a gaudy Big Ten record with one signature win.  (Uh, that would be Michigan, sadly. :( ).

I mean, I know the game wasn't competitive at that point, but (a) don't insult the collective intelligence of your audience by assuming that because you don't understand something, it must be stupid, and (b) no MSU or Nebraska fans were watching that game, so it needn't be the focus of close to 10 minutes of broadcast time.

Talk about Michigan or Iowa's incoming recruiting classes.  Talk about The Wave.  Talk about Kirk Ferentz's contract, or say something asinine about Jim Harbaugh.  At least stay relevant to the fanbases of the teams who are actually playing in the event you're broadcasting.

In reply to by J.

Maize_Nation

February 15th, 2018 at 2:13 PM ^

Don't forget how he said Iowa's starting 5 was top 3 or 4 in the league.

Also, he sounds just like Dan Dakich. When I'm listening to a game that is not announced by Dakich, the last thing I want to hear is Dakich announcing.

In reply to by J.

TrueBlue2003

February 15th, 2018 at 10:56 PM ^

is how the announcers have turned the Duncan Stat (3-7 in games he scores under 6, and 18-0 in games he scores 6 or more) into the completely wrong narrative that "the team goes as Duncan goes."

In reality, Duncan does well when the team plays bad teams which are also games we are very highly likely to win (and have happened to win at a high rate).

If the team went as Duncan went, than it would follow that he did well in our wins against good teams...since he's so important to our success.  We have four Q1/Q2 wins this year.  In those wins Duncan did the following:

home UCLA: Bruuuutal 2 pts on 7 shots for an Ortg of 42. Lucky to win that one despite his performance

at Texas: nice game with 10 pts on 6 shots

at MSU: 3 points in 2 shots, only played 18 minutes due to inability to defend

home Maryland: 6 pts on 5 shots with a TO for a fairly poor 91 Ortg

6 of our 7 losses were in kenpom A tier (toughest) games and the 7th was LSU which is a B tier game.  Duncan was bad in all of them.

The correlation is near perfect between Duncan being bad in tough games (the Texas game being the only relative exception).  Our winning those tough games has not correlated with his performances.  It would be nice if he started making more shots in those games, kthanks. Definitely would help and them maybe the narrative could be that Duncan is helping us win games.

TrueBlue2003

February 16th, 2018 at 3:00 AM ^

a trope being used by sports announcers that misinterpreted data.

The facts are that Duncan has an astounding divergence in performance in tough games (98.5 Ortg) vs easy games (140+ Ortg).

Those two strong games came against bad opponents that were excellent matchups for him.  I think he's great in those types of games. If we were playing Minnesota or Alabama A&M next, I'd be all, hey, Duncan is going to have a great game.

Unfortunately, our next three games are all going to be difficult games that aren't good matchups for him.  I'm hopeful.  I would love to see him do well in those games.  I just wouldn't bet on it. And I really hope we play Livers as much as possible because again, the facts and eye test say we're a much better team with him in the game. I guess that's why I'm "down" on Duncan, but it's fact-based and well-reasoned.  I'm not an irrational Duncan hater or anything.

In reply to by J.

MGlobules

February 15th, 2018 at 8:49 PM ^

Dakich. I think he may be the worst in college basketball. Never was a less-inspired human being more self-indulgent. Banality personified. His mom or a sister humored him by adoring him through childhood. Then he had to go out into the real world. And some absolute fool indulged him!

umumum

February 16th, 2018 at 9:31 AM ^

Crispin was a shittier, one-dimensional (3 point-shooting) version of his brother at Penn State, who somehow thought he was unappreciated there, so he transferred to UCLA, where he was planted firmly on the bench for 2 years.  And yet somehow, he Peter Principle's into an announcing gig.

BostonWolverine

February 15th, 2018 at 1:57 PM ^

I appreciate what you're saying. I have already called my congressman, as well as both my senators. All I'm saying is that "Shooters get to shoot" instantly evokes thoughts about this shooting given the timing. 

By all means, talk about basketball terminology. But I'm sure you can see why this particular sentence might cause a reader's thoughts to go elsewhere? 

BostonWolverine

February 15th, 2018 at 2:26 PM ^

I believe it is for many readers, especially given the volume of responses to that effect. Again - I'm not worried about the political correctness. Shooters in basketball games do, in fact, shoot basketballs. What I'm talking about is the context. I don't think it's in poor taste. I do think it distracts from the points he's trying to make. 

Ron Burgundy

February 15th, 2018 at 3:14 PM ^

If you're going to be purporsely obtuse then what difference is there in replying? 



You don't think that the large, bold headline, the first thing your eyes see when the page loads that sets the tone for the entire article (without any context in the healine relating to basketball), is different from the word "shoot" being used in the article talking about shooting basketballs? 



And for the record, I'm not of the belief that the headline needs to be changed. I'm of the belief that people like you shouldn't purposely misconstrue what someone says.

Ron Burgundy

February 15th, 2018 at 3:25 PM ^

annnnnnddddd in the comment above, where I talk about not misconstruing what people say, and explicitly say I don't think the headline should be changed, you completely misconstrue what I say immediately in reply? How do you even manage to make it to this website with them there comprehension skills?

carolina blue

February 15th, 2018 at 5:05 PM ^

I provided one example.

To sum up:
Only five of the supposed 18 occurred during school hours and resulted in any type of injury. Three more happened during school hours but no one was injured (so, 8 now). Two more were firearms shot by the on duty officer. Surely that last variety can’t be counted as a school shooting. One of the others was a group of college kids that thought they were firing practice rounds by accident. Hardly a school shooting. At least 7 of them took place outside school hours.
That’s not quite all of them but you get the point.

So, while 5 or 8 is still too many, it’s nowhere near 18 and it’s not pedantic.

Shop Smart Sho…

February 15th, 2018 at 5:39 PM ^

Go tell the kids who were on campus when the police fired a gun that it doesn't count. I'm sure they'll just magically recover from any PTSD they're suffering from.



School hours don't cover all of the time kids are on campus. The last place I coached, kids got to to school up to 2.5 hours before school, and the latest I ever saw kids at school was 8 hours after school let out. And kids are generally on campus off and on all day on Saturdays as well.



So stop being a god damn pedant.

carolina blue

February 15th, 2018 at 2:00 PM ^

Ridiculous. The fact that this post is about basketball doesn’t matter. Even though you disagree, surely you can understand one’s sensitivity. Take the heat and move forward, but criticizing the point of view is counterproductive. Also...no congressman can make any law that would have prevented what happened yesterday. Laws don’t prevent crime, they establish what is and is not a crime.

N. Campus Tech

February 15th, 2018 at 2:49 PM ^

Per a USA Today article, he leagaly purchased it from a gun shop and passed a background check.

What reason would he have been prevented from purchasing the rifle?

FTA:

"Cruz legally bought the semiautomatic at a Broward County gun shop last February, law enforcement officials who weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly told the Associated Press.

Federal law allows people 18 and older to legally purchase long guns, including this kind of assault weapon. With no criminal record, Cruz cleared an instant background check via the FBI criminal database."

BrewCityBlue

February 15th, 2018 at 6:29 PM ^

could include restrictions for types of weapons based on age, mental testing/evaluation, more extensive checks with area medical/mental facilities, gun buyback program for Assault type weapons, etc. It frustrates me nothing ever gets done because people argue extremes when a possible solution or certain step in the right direction is often in the middle.

Jonesy

February 15th, 2018 at 9:33 PM ^

considering all the other countries that have no legal private gun ownership I'd say it's a realistic option, and a good one. Sorry not sorry to people who have nostalgic memories of shooting bambi with Pa. Go hunt with a bow and arrow if it's so important to you, your hobby isn't worth all the people killed by guns (yes people would still die, but a lot less).

carolina blue

February 15th, 2018 at 2:52 PM ^

You can’t just deny someone gun rights because you think they’re a bad person. You Have to have committed a crime or been diagnosed with some mental illness or some other disqualification. I don’t know whether not he had a disqualifying condition. Maybe he did. In that case, yes obviously he should not have been allowed to own a gun. That said, he still probably would’ve found a way to get one regardless, as we have found that people in the past that commit these kinds of crimes illegally obtained guns. My point is that laws themselves do not prevent crime. They just don’t. All they do is establish what is and is not a crime. He committed a crime by being on the school premises with a gun anyway. Obviously, he also commit a crime by killing people. It was a crime to kill those people, but that didn’t prevent him from doing it. In general, the issue is that we don’t really care about the individual anymore. It’s something I have noticed occur over the last, I don’t know, 20 years or so. When we stop showing love and respect for one another, bad things can happen.To me, it’s an attitude change, not a policy change.