Vegas says Michigan -3 over Houston, but...
Kenpom says Michigan +2, at least according to the simulator I use. I watched Houston last night, and that Gray kid is legit. I know nothing about SDSU, but unless their defense is really bad, someone is going to need a great job on D on him for us to win this game. I think we pull it out late in a close one, something like 72-69...
EDIT: Someone correctly pointed out below that we are actually 2 point faves on KenPom. I was looking at his simulator as an away game, not a neutral site game. My bad, homies. Regardless, it's gonna be close either way...
March 16th, 2018 at 11:47 AM ^
I mean, the first game of the BTT we went to OT with Iowa, who is in all honesty probably worse than the Montana team we did end up beating by double digits last night. We came out of the Northwestern loss laying the torch to 9 straight opponents to finish the regular season.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:47 AM ^
I'm glad it happened (now that we won). I think its next to impossible for a team to string 10+ good games together.
The exact same thing happened against Iowa. We finished the last 4-5 games of the regular season strong, couldn't make a shot against Iowa but managed to pull the game out, and then went on to dominate the B10 tournament.
I think this team needed to get a bad game out of their system, and now that they have, I think they could put potentially 5 good ones together in a row...
March 16th, 2018 at 11:33 AM ^
I don't know -- just have a feeling it's going to be one of those games where we hit 16 threes and win by 28.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:35 AM ^
it could be a long night. I'm expecting a terrifying Oklahoma St. type game.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:39 AM ^
Houston's defense is too good for an oklahoma state game. Gray is going to get his points. He has scored big points on cincy, the #2 defense on kenpom. People who think Z is going to completely shut him down are being too optimistic in my mind.
I really think this game is going to come down to our free throw shooting. Houston fouls a ton and SDSU lost last night because they shot 21-35 on free throws and left 14 points on the board. If we don't hit our free throws we are going to have a lot of empty possessions. I'm honestly terrified about it and last night didn't make me feel any better.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:52 AM ^
He will get his, he definitely won't be completely shut down. However, holding him to 12-15 points, which is under his 19.2 ppg would be adequate. Honestly, even holding him to roughly his average would be fine. When people say they think Z will shut him down I think this is what they mean, that he will hold him check. What we don't want is for him to absolutely go off and dictate the flow of the game with a 25-30+ point game. That is where Z, MAAR, and Matthews all will need to be on their game to hold him down a bit. That is also where I am very confident. I'm not confident that he will be completely shut out, but instead will just have a bad game relative to him. I think he'll end with around 15 points but will also have quite a few turnovers forced by our defense.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:53 AM ^
See my posts above. He did not do well against UC. His biggest point total in 3 games was 17, and he needed 22 shots to put up that many.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:53 AM ^
That's like 7 points on the board max. It doesn't really make sense to think that teams should just always shoot 1.00 from the stripe. A great free throw shooting day is the team going ~0.8
March 16th, 2018 at 12:09 PM ^
I have always been annoyed when people say that assuming we should just hit them all. With this team even shooting 80% overall from the stripe is not realistic.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:01 PM ^
Trae Young has that many turnovers in one half.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:12 PM ^
So basically youve watched Houston once this year. Last night. Gray had 9, 13 and 17 against Cinci on 13/50 FGs. Not what Id call 'scored big points on cincy'. He is a hyper inefficient guard who had his best game of the year last night.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:41 PM ^
I only watched the cincy houston aac championship game but saw houston had also beaten cincy earlier in the year but you are right didn't look at the box score for shooting numbers.
And yes I understand nobody shoots 100% from the stripe but you can still say every missed free throw is a point left on the board. Houston is going to create empty possessions with their defense when they foul z and Matthews
March 16th, 2018 at 12:22 PM ^
as he was very inefficient in all three games.
He did not score "big points" on Cincy.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:24 PM ^
Have to prepare for the quick calls. I'll probably get reamed for this, but my impression was the refs did okay last night after a really bad start. I think they realized that if they called Montana the same way they started out calling Michigan, Montana wouldn't have any players left by the end of the game.
They let Montana play that defense and they let Michigan cope with it. I was actually quite pleased. That was a good team playing badly (how far above their season average in turnovers were they?) against a team that is used to winning, but still in control.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:37 PM ^
I had the sound off (people sleeping, and something about the broadcast team at the start of the game made me hit mute), so I didn't hear the commentary on it, but was the butt-foul hilarious or what? MAAR did a nice job reacting to that.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:57 PM ^
March 16th, 2018 at 11:37 AM ^
He only shot 35% from three this year. He may return to Earth on Saturday. Hopefully Z can help make that happen. We have reason to have confidence that he will.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:39 AM ^
Houston only scored 67 points last night. That's not exactly an inspiring overall offensive performance and SDSU doesn't have a world beating defense.
I'm more worried about our offense stalling than the bun kid.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:48 AM ^
And only 5 points from non-manbun hairdo type folks in the second half. A repeat of that and I think we win fairly easily.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:28 PM ^
Sure Houston looked good but they only scored 6 more points then we did and we did not look so good.
I trust Belien will have them ready and we will see a much better game than last night, kind of like the difference from Iowa to Nebraska in the Big10 tourney.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:39 AM ^
March 16th, 2018 at 11:44 AM ^
25 shots and 0 assists.
He would be the most annoying guy to play pickup with.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:06 PM ^
March 16th, 2018 at 11:59 AM ^
I thought Trae Young would be an annoying teammate, but this guy takes it to a new level.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:22 PM ^
To be fair, for as much as Oklahoma leans on Young to do well because they really aren't all that good without his production (or markedly worse than they already are, if you prefer), I think he's earned the right to be an annoying team in that respect anyway.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:37 PM ^
I think I heard that Young had more assists than the rest of his team combined this year. He's high usage, but he's not a ball hog.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:46 PM ^
Trae Young led the nation in assists.
Im not a Trae Young fan at all, but i am objective. He is a pretty damn good teammate. He dishes out some nice passes. As a matter of fact, i probably like him more as a passer than a shooter.
Young shot 42% from the floor and 36% from 3. And most people on here want to lick his balls. That is probably not even average stats from a guard, let alone one that is supposed to be the best player in college basketball.
However, the kid averaged almsot 9 assists a game. THAT is the part of his game i like.
BTW, you know what Trae Young is now infamous for? Ladies and Gentlment, meet Trae Young, the NCAA single season record holder for Turnovers in a season - with 167.
Like, HOLY SHIT! 3rd place is 149. this kid CRUSHES it!
March 16th, 2018 at 11:40 AM ^
March 16th, 2018 at 12:05 PM ^
March 16th, 2018 at 11:43 AM ^
Have we played a good team this year that has one player with such high usage? I can't think of any examples (down year for good PGs in the Big 10). Will be interesting to see the defensive approach.
Keys will obviously be keeping Z out of foul trouble and the help D. Just from watching last night, Grey has kind of an idiosyncratic hesitation/step through game when he penetrates that's going to really test Z's ability to not overcommit. When he does try to step through, the help has to be ready to come because he sure didn't seem to dish the ball at all. He had like 30 shot equivalents with 0 assists, which is crazy.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:57 AM ^
March 16th, 2018 at 11:48 AM ^
I didn't see either Houston or SDSU play anything that resembled defense yesterday. I think Manbun will get some points by default, what with being Houston's offense, and all. But the other four will get obliterated. And they aren't as quick as Montana was, or at least didn't appear to be against SDSU. I don't foresee any issues with this game, unless Michigan is still flat from the layoff.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:49 AM ^
I'm pretty sure that if we can contain him like we did the Montana PGs in the second half, we'll be fine. Dude had to go NBA Jam to beat an okay SDSU. If he wants to play hero ball, that's fine.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:00 PM ^
also felt last night he spent too much time with the ball and took too many shots, to the point where SDSU started getting easy shots inside in their comeback second half and could have easily won the game. Hard for your whole team to stay involved on both ends when you have the ball most of the time on offense imho.
March 16th, 2018 at 11:57 AM ^
Dialogue with my 9 year old daughter after having a waiter with a man-bun deliver us our food at the local Mongolian BBQ:
HER: Is he a samurai?
ME: No.
HER: Aww. This place would be a lot cooler if he was.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:36 PM ^
"No."
"It would be a lot cooler if you did."
March 16th, 2018 at 11:59 AM ^
We had a similar freak out about Nate Wolters a few years back.
We beat (the other) SDSU by double digits that year.
I would not be surprised by a double digit win against Houston on Saturday.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:00 PM ^
Man bun has a punchable face.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:01 PM ^
SDSU doesn't have a bad defense - they're 31st on kenpom. But Michigan's defense is a different order of magnitude - 5th on kenpom.
I think Michigan will be fine, especially after getting the rust off from the long layoff.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:18 PM ^
After last night up to 3rd on kenpom.
March 16th, 2018 at 12:01 PM ^
He is becoming more and more important to the teams potentail results. He picks up 2 cheap BS calls within the first 5 minutes and then Montana's guards look all NBA driving past us at will.....
Simpson comes back in the 2nd half....... Yeah that is more like what I expected......
I believe tomorrow's game will be predicated heavily upon the Simpson v ManBun match up. Honestly, even if Simpson doesn't score he can significantly impact the game by hounding ManBun to a 40% (or lower) shooting night.
Shut Gray down and UH goes down.
Oh yeah, it would be really nice if Wagner gets his nervous nellies out of his system early. Someone else noted earlier this year that we can definately tell early on how Wagner will play. If he hits his first shot......Look Out.....NBA Lottery type player....
If he misses or does a couple of WTF plays...... 6pts - 4 Reb night....
Can not afford the latter...... Not anymore for this tournement......
March 16th, 2018 at 12:11 PM ^
I don't know...Simmons entered when we were down a bunch and brought us back by halftime. Z continued that in the 2nd half and his defense helped us go on that 10 minute streak of not giving up a bucket, but Simmons got us back on trck.