2018-19 rutgers

1 hour and 22 minutes

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1. Wisconsin with a W

starts at 1:00

Happ can’t get a foul called on him. Brad Davison has changed block/charge calls in the Big Ten. Happ got worn down after 60 percent usage—beat up Teske then couldn’t even push X around late. Michigan’s defense was amazing. First reason Michigan won was Teske, second was Matthews making shots late. Iggy has an allergy to Wisconsin. Haven’t talked about the Teske re-screen in a while.

2. Rutgers with an S

starts at 31:20

They’re not bad: we’d take Baker and Omoruyi, and maybe three or four backup centers. Michigan made their free throws. Rutgers offense is terrible. The pick and pop is great but needs to stop ending with Iggy misses. Brian’s cheezed off that Gonzaga is a 1 seed. Someone would like to destroy your sweater.

3. Football: The New Coaches, New Offense

starts at 46:50

Second straight year Michigan oversigned their coaches and had to slow-motion process a guy. Aside about Drevno. How much of a problem was Pep? How much is Harbaugh going to hand over the offense to Gattis? Buggy Rugs. Throw the ball, and throw it off our run action please.

4. Hockey and USA Soccer

starts at 1:08:05

The icers finally swept a series. If they can sweep Ohio State and Notre Dame to finish the season they might earn a playoff seed? Gotta win the BTT too. Yeah, it’s a longshot. USA soccer did something other than make Americans miserable for the first time in two years. What’s next, and can they build a 4-3 under defense (?!?) out of players who could play in Europe?

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MUSIC

• "Say It Ain’t So"—Weezer
• "I Don’t Mind Your Cussing"—Hoots & Hellmouth
• "Pretty Fly for a White Guy"—Offspring
• “Across 110th Street”

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I could tell from your tweet about this that you were pretty upset about it.

In Michigan's win over Rutgers the other night, Ignas Brazdeikis had one of his best games as a Wolverine. Even though he had to defend the physical (and much bigger) Eugene Omoruyi all game, Iggy scored efficiently, putting up 23 points against Omorouyi, Rutgers's top defender. He knocked down five threes, a season-high. Rutgers clearly wanted to isolate Iggy in the post and did so frequently. Over a quarter of Rutgers's possessions ended with an Omoruyi shot, free throw, or turnover, and many of those were post-ups on Iggy.

Michigan was a little more creative in trying to attack the matchup at the four. Iggy, more of a miscast wing, and Omoruyi, a traditional power forward, each had strengths and weaknesses relative to each other. Iggy got a variety of looks: spotting up and either shooting or driving against the closeout, a couple of ball screens with him as the ball-handler, and the 1-4 pick-and-pop. Michigan likes to have Isaiah Livers set a screen and then pop to the wing when he's playing the 4 or the 5, and they got Iggy some similar looks in this game against Omoruyi.

On this play, Michigan looks like they're going to run a Zavier Simpson - Jon Teske pick-and-roll.

Iggy comes to set another screen — a good one — after Teske settles towards the baseline.

Omoruyi has to contain Simpson and try to recover, but Iggy is open for three.

...and he airballs it.

[After THE JUMP: Iggy gets wide open threes, makes them.]

2/5/2019 – Michigan 77, Rutgers 65 – 21-2, 10-2 Big Ten

There are worse things than being unable to pull away from a stubborn lower-tier Big Ten team. There's a bullet below all about that. Some other ones first:

Rutgers doesn't suck. This leapt off the screen. They're not good, obviously. But previous games against Rutgers were either comical blowouts or really frustrating games where the opponent makes a bunch of garbage to stay in contact. Rutgers made very little garbage—only Doorson's early line-drive bank shot stands out as an eye-roller—and was nonetheless nipping at Michigan's heels for much of the game. Michigan shut off Geo Baker, who was 1/9 from the floor, and Rutgers did not fall into a hole and die.

Omoruyi can play; Baker can play even if he got a dual-barreled blast from Matthews and Simpson; they're put together defensively in a way that prevented Michigan's pick and roll game from really getting going. If they had two guys who could be Just Shooters they'd be a tournament team. But they cannot shoot, at all. The end.

FWIW, it felt like the main reason this didn't push out to a 20 point game was non-Baker players going 4/6 on threes. Only a couple of those looks were wide open (the Omoruyi ones) and their shooting is such that you'd expect maybe two of those to fall.

A flash. Charles Matthews had a swooping layup early on which the big got pulled out of the lane; Baker tried to fill for the charge and Matthews just leapt around him and went up for a layup. I immediately regretted my assertion in the previous basketbullets that Matthews's surrounding cast didn't have an impact on his reduced efficiency. The pure 5-out offense Michigan fielded last year provided Matthews many more opportunities to make such plays.

Matthews then hit a bad idea fadeaway jumper after nearly losing his pivot foot.

Even though this shot was plainly a bad idea on the replay it seemed like everyone on the team knew it was going up. Simpson was not even giving Matthews the option to kick it back out.

In related news…

Letting it come to them. Both Matthews and Poole were much more reserved on the offensive end. One turnover each, and I think Matthews's might have been the steal he nearly brought in but stepped out of bounds on. Other than the aforementioned bad-idea jumper from Matthews neither guy pressed like they had been for big chunks of the year. Their shots were good ideas in the context of the offense.

Simpson is now in the driver's seat, with 12, 7, and 7 assists over the last three games and an offense that works best when Simpson's doing something on the pick and roll. Michigan put up 1.2 PPP against a top 50 defense on the road, and the usage was Stauskas-era balanced: nobody had more than 22%, all of the starters had at least 16%.

[After the JUMP: a pick and roll variant and good vibes from Champaign]