2020-21 northwestern #1

1 hour and 37 minutes

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1. Northwestern Recap

starts at 1:00

Michigan is so hard to strategize for. Hunter Dickinson demands a double, and you can't double him. Running horns with a high-low—incredible that they're already on the back end of the playbook at this point in the program. Rules say you can't do a pullup on the rim but Seth is still mad they T'd up Chaundee. Announcers versus added probabilities.

The rest of the writeup and the player after The Jump]

1/3/2021 – Michigan 85, Northwestern 66 – 9-0, 4-0 Big Ten

The Book™ is one of the most durable sports clichés because it has the dual advantages of being accurate and exciting. Very good players with exploitable flaws exist. Coaches who can see just as clearly as anyone else that the regular stuff isn't working can tinker up weird stuff to go after those flaws. When it works, the very good player gets blown up. You can see why, even as a schmoe watching from home. Expectations get upset. Question marks about the future abound. The player has been Booked, and all opponents going forward will throw The Book™ at him until he finds a way around it. If he finds a way around it.

The canonical Booking also results in a paradigm-shifting upset. I probably do not have to tell you, the Michigan fan, this. The football program is currently in its throes of misery largely because they got hit with an all-time Booking in the 2018 Ohio State game. Michigan entered with the #1 defense in the country by metrics both basic and advanced. Incredibly to modern ears, they were favored to win.

Reader, they did not win. Ten million crossing routes later I was drinking whiskey in a forest while Don Brown began the three-year process of bleeding out on the table.

A less-depressing example: Ohio State stuck Aaron Craft on Nik Stauskas late in a win against the Burke team and it resulted in a crucial, dogged turnover. Tom Crean had some ideas about that, so he stuck Yogi Ferrell on Stauskas the next year. Stauskas scored 6 points in a gross 62-53 loss; Iowa then limited Stauskas to ten by putting Mike Gesell on him. Mike Gesell! There are hundreds of Mike Gesell pictures on the internet and four of them are of Mike Gesell playing defense. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush but generally speaking this guy, who is 6'1" and was coached by Fran McCaffrey, should not be shutting down the #8 pick in the NBA draft.

This is just my opinion.

The Book™ on Stauskas was to put your point guard on him and he'd freak out. Aaron Craft, defensive player of the century, was next up. Stauskas shot over him, going 3/6 from three, and that was the end of that, more or less. Watching Stauskas have a weakness and then overcome it was one of the more entertaining subplots of the year. And that's why people talk about books. They're real.

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Michigan's been on the disappointing side of bookings quite a bit. This is just the nature of where Michigan programs are in the firmament: usually good enough (or boring enough) to get by without weird adaptations, rarely so good that there aren't holes to exploit. Sunday's game against Northwestern is a rare instance of Michigan dropping it on someone else.

Northwestern entered with an explosive, pretty five-out offense that relied on Pete Nance being a perimeter mismatch for opposing centers. Michigan stuck Franz Wagner on Nance. This looked like a bad idea for a couple possessions on which Robbie Beran—currently a 13% usage guy—drove past Hunter Dickinson and dropped it off to Nance after Wagner had to help. Once Howard started icing ball screens, that spigot turned off and Northwestern was forced to start taking jumpers:

Collins had a great game plan early - pick/pop to suck Dickinson out + put Kopp/Nance on same side as shooter/dunker so that Livers couldn’t help on dumpoffs.

Juwan took all of 3mins to effectively end the game. He responds w/Eli icing the screen=no more Kopp/Nance on same side pic.twitter.com/0JptqKUSja

— LAbound (@LAbound2) January 4, 2021

Nance had Northwestern's first eight points on those two early dunks and two tough face-up jumpers. He had one bucket in the last 36 minutes. He finished with one assist and three turnovers. Northwestern's offense, which had been generating a ton of good looks fast, turned back into last year's pumpkin.

As this is happening, Robbie Hummel says that this is the new reality for Northwestern and they're going to have to adjust to it. Because Juwan Howard just gave them The Book™.

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I was pretty positive about Juwan Howard's hire when it happened and thought that he was a good bet to succeed because he did not have a profile like the various other NBA-to-college hires. I do remember thinking that Howard was going to have to recruit at a higher level than Beilein because no one was going to match Beilein's ability to spin straw into a hellish rain of three pointers.

A year and change later Michigan is playing gorgeous offensive basketball and forcing opponents into a Yaklich level of bad, long twos. The shooting splits are so, so sustainable. Michigan is top 20 in: forcing long twos, defending long twos, preventing shots at the rim, and converting at the rim. That latter is not just Hunter Dickinson. Brooks, Wagner, and Brown are all 80%+ there. Livers is 63%; micro-mite Mike Smith is 58%. Michigan is generating great looks for everyone.

This is not a John Beilein team coasting through on the experience of the departed. This site has pushed the "Wile E Coyote year" concept for a while now, the idea being that the dropoff from coaching turnover doesn't really show up until the second year because in year one you've got a lot of the same guys running the same stuff. This should be Michigan's Wile E Coyote year, and is in fact trending to be so in the turnovers department. But Howard's overcome that because his team has a 23-point gap between its two point offense and defense. And they just wrote the book on Northwestern.

This is going pretty well.

[After THE JUMP: NET approaches WAB]

14-10-5-2-5.

That's not a software key code or the combination to my bike lock. It's tonight's stat line for Franz Wagner: 14 points (on 12 shooting possessions), ten rebounds, five assists, two steals, and five blocks. He did all that in only 29 minutes, not because of foul trouble, but because Michigan (9-0, 4-0 Big Ten) beat the hell out of a Northwestern (6-3, 3-2) team that posed some seemingly difficult strategic problems for the Wolverines to solve.

The 85-66 final score doesn't reflect the beating. Michigan was up 14 at halftime and spent most of the second half with their lead in the mid-to-high 20s; the margin was 28 when they emptied the bench at the under-4 media timeout.

The game looked competitive for about five minutes. Juwan Howard solved the puzzle of how to defend stretch five Pete Nance with the bigger, slower Hunter Dickinson by not guarding Nance with Dickinson at all, instead using Wagner and Isaiah Livers to guard the central hub of Northwestern's five-out offense while sticking Dickinson on more limited power forward Robbie Beran. Nance scored eight quick points and Beran added another bucket after blowing by Dickinson off the dribble. Michigan, meanwhile, couldn't stop passing the ball out of bounds.

survey and destroy [Campredon]

It all clicked in a hurry. The WIldcats sent a hard double-team at Dickinson, whose signature pinpoint skip pass began a lovely passing sequence capped by a Wagner three-pointer. Michigan ripped off a 10-2 run over the next 2:40. After missing their first three attempts from beyond the arc, the Wolverines rained in nine of their next 14 to finish the half as Dickinson bent the defense out of shape with his behemoth presence and skillful passing.

Eli Brooks drilled three of four from downtown in the first half; Wagner and Chaundee Brown each added a pair on their way to ten first-half points. Brown was coming off a scoreless 21-minute outing at Maryland. Dickinson only had four points and (somehow) zero assists at the break but the ball always found the open man created by the extra attention directed the center's way; M tallied 12 assists on 17 first-half field goals.

Nance, meanwhile, scored two points after his initial outburst—not just in the half, but for the rest of the game. Howard stuck to the plan to great effect as Michigan's combination of length and athleticism shut seemingly every option down. NU's leading scorer, Miller Kopp, needed 14 shots to score 13 points—four of them after M was up 29 late—as he was hounded by Wagner and Livers. Wagner even blocked one of Kopp's pull-up jumpers. Boo Buie, one of four Wildcats to average double figures, did not score all night.

THUNDER ELI [Campredon]

The onslaught continued in the second half with Dickinson looking for his own shot more often. He finished with 19 points on 14 shooting possessions in 27 minutes; he went 6/8 for 15 points in only ten second-half minutes. The rest of the team could mostly focus on entry passes and off-ball cuts; Brooks finished off one of the latter with a massive dunk for the second straight game, sending the bench into hysterics. The starters would return the bench mob favor later when Jace Howard scored his first career basket on a tough and-one finish.

Northwestern's night can be summed up in two sequences. Beran, who fouled out with a team-high 14 points, had stared down a pursuing Livers after a fast break dunk early in the second half; when Livers got isolated on Beran later on, he cleared out his side of the court, gave Beran a few hard backdown dribbles, and then faded away for a shot that hit nothing but net. Not long thereafter, Buie drove to the rim and attempted to finish over a walled-up Brandon Johns, yelling "and-one" on the release; the ball missed everything, no foul call came, and Johns hit a three on the other end.

Even if NU is a paper wildcat, Michigan played like a powerhouse tonight. Their standing as one of four remaining unbeaten teams in the country looks more impressive with passing day as the rest of the Big Ten tears each other to pieces. Dickinson looks like an All-American; Wagner is starting to play on at least an all-conference level. This is a top-ten team until further notice.

[Hit THE JUMP for more pictures and the box score.]