block charge
1/12/2021 – Michigan 77, Wisconsin 54 – 11-0, 6-0 Big Ten
It doesn't seem real.
This isn't the usual mopey woe-is-we Michigan fan garbage. Set aside backslides from previous teams in various sports. Set aside emotional states entirely. Just focus on what usually happens when relatively equal, good basketball teams butt heads. The results are not this, literally ever in the history of college basketball:
Michigan is the 1st team in college basketball history to beat three ranked opponents in a row by at least 19 points. https://t.co/f7MqH09SjM
— Larry Lage (@LarryLage) January 13, 2021
This doesn't even cover it, really, since all of these games saw Michigan leap out to even more absurd leads than they finished with.
It doesn't seem real because Wisconsin has gone 18 years without getting clobbered by 30, and the only reason they didn't in this game was a stirring comeback after they were down 40. Wisconsin has lost a total of four games by 20+ in a decade. Michigan hadn't beaten a top-ten opponent this badly since 1987. If you're watching Michigan basketball games these days and you don't wonder about your sanity, you have far too much experience with psychedelic mushrooms. Nate Reuvers's face is melting. Literally? Metaphorically? Who can tell anymore?
Michigan has this effect not only on observers but also on their opponents. Early in the second half Tyler Wahl went Full Carlton:
What
— Due# (@JDue51) January 13, 2021
The hell
Was that pic.twitter.com/vf6CFeBRna
This was one of the more stupefying plays I've seen in the last decade of college basketball; at the same time it also fit right in there. Wisconsin entered the game on pace for the best turnover rate in the history of Kenpom; late in the first half Greg Gard called timeout because Franz Wagner's ghostly appendages had emerged from Badger sternums far too often for his taste.
An initial flurry of ferociously blocked post-ups led to a flurry of—uh—wide open three-pointers I was certain would go down. Once those didn't fall, the ancien regime of Wisconsin basketball devolved into a chaotic mess of contested two-pointers, turnovers, and guillotines. Wisconsin is a team of thousand-year-old vampires executing gloriously regimented plays; fifteen minutes in they looked like a Busby Berkeley movie after it got hit by a nuclear bomb.
You have to focus. You have to focus on it and assure yourself it's real. Michigan's third-most-common lineup over a five-game stretch including three ranked opponents and a feisty, weird Maryland team is the Kenpom Kids.
That ain't real! Nobody can tell me that's real! This is one of those prestige television episodes where the protagonist is unjustly confined in a mental institution, except it's completely awesome! No I will not take your drugs, Doctor Butthole, this is rad!
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The Matthew Loves Ball highlight reel we use for clips, like most other highlight reels, is almost exclusively focused on buckets. Blocks will show up, as will critical end of game possessions that end up empty. Misses are excised in the name of time. This game's highlight reel includes all of the last 49 seconds of the first half, in which no buckets are scored:
First Chaundee Brown forces Trice to give it up, then denies him on a dribble handoff. When Wisconsin gets it back to their tough-shot maker with ten seconds on the clock, Trice… gives it up to Tyler Wahl. Cheap foul on Wagner, fine.
The second sequence features Brad Davison trying to drive past Mike Smith; Davis slides over and Davison has to try to fit between a couple of closing doors. Smith gets his chest back to the front of Davison, and Davison humps up a shot through Smith that doesn't get over the rim. The wild rebound bounces off Brown.
The third sequence: Livers and Brown switch off, then switch off again on Trice. Livers cuts off a rim cut from Ford, and with the clock ticking down Brown comes over to double. Ford fumbles the ball into his feet, and Wisconsin doesn't get a shot up.
The bench erupts onto the court when the horn sounds. The announcers are flabbergasted. The halftime crew stares blankly into the camera for 15 straight minutes, unsure of the implications of such a display. It must be befriended lest it destroy us all. By the numbers, Michigan's offense is better than its defense.
[After THE JUMP: GUMBZILLAAAAAA]
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2/9/2019 – Michigan 61, Wisconsin 52 – 22-2, 11-2 Big Ten
I'm a person who looks a at lot of box scores. I look at a lot of tempo-free box scores, and a lot of bonus stats derived from play-by-play data, and then I watch the basketball. The thing that continually surprises me is just how neatly most basketball players can be defined by a deep enough dive into box score stats.
Just Shooters are just shooters. D'Mitrik Trice is a great example: he has about 10% of his shots at the rim, shoots a fair number of unassisted threes, and that is enough to paint a picture of Trice's offense exact enough to define him. In the last game the sheer loneliness of Geo Baker was neatly captured by his teammate's assist rate on his twos: under 5%. Ethan Happ, surely one of the most bizarre players in the last 20 years of college basketball, is a butterfly pinned to a board once tempo-free stats are applied.
Most of it is in there. Stats don't capture Simpson's sky hook or Charles Matthews's colossal leaping fadeaways, but they'll tell you the what and a lot of the how.
Charles Matthews's "what" has been wut:
I probably don't need to remind anyone reading this column of the above, specifically the bit that says 27%. It was 24% before this game.
The dissolution of Matthews's despair came gradually—he had two points in the first half—and then all at once. A second-half Matthews post-up got him to the rim, and hooray. The next possession, Matthews post up, Matthews elects to take a contested fadeaway baseline jumper. I did not think that was going in. It did. I didn't think the next one was going in, either. It did. So did the next one, and by the end of the game there was only one person who was going to take the bad-idea shot after Michigan ran the shot clock down. That, too, was a long fadeaway jumper. Swish.
Sure, what the hell. There's no reason Matthews's jumper fell apart this year so there's no reason it can't come back.
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If combined with offensive contributions from anyone else, a consistent offensive output from Matthews gets Michigan back to what they were earlier in the season, when they were able to run away and hide from good teams. At Villanova: 19 points on 16 shot equivalents, run away and hide. Vs UNC: 21 points on 16 shot equivalents, run away and hide. There have been blips and bloops since but nothing resembling his finishing stretch last year.
It's hard to square the version of Matthews Michigan has had much of the season with the guy who was banging out a string of efficient tourney performances. Last year's post-season ORTGs: 120, 108, 130, 97, 90, 97, 138, 103, 120, and then a dud in the final: 47. Matthews seemed to be rounding into the final collegiate version of himself, a guy who wasn't ever going to rack up MVP numbers but would be a consistent source of moderately efficient points that Michigan could count on and build off of.
Instead a mid-season drought Atcaman in its intensity.
Matthews has cut his turnovers down and become a functional free throw shooter at the same time so his overall efficiency has been more or less what it was a year ago. But you do want more, because when he hits one of those fadeaways where he jumps so high his head's level with the rim he's a marvel. Matthews alternates between being "Bambi on ice," as Beilein famously described him, and looking like a robot hawk designed to kill God and play basketball. Sometimes when you're on, as the man said.
If Michigan could just bottle that Matthews and mass produce it for 12 or 13 or 16 games down the stretch… but no. Probably not. Matthews is riding back-to-back reasonably efficient games against major competition for the first time all year. There will be oscillations, like there are with Poole and Brazdeikis, and Michigan will hope to ride the waves such that they're able to navigate to post-season destinations.
[After THE JUMP: Happ comes back to the pack]
Them? [Marc-Grégor Campredon]
Something's been missing to take the edge off before Michigan games since the free programs ceased being economically viable: scientific gameday predictions that are not at all preordained by the strictures of a column in which one writer takes a positive tack and the other a negative one. Something like… Punt-Counterpunt, except for basketball.
BLOCK
By Bryan MacKenzie
We all know the bad news: Villanova. They are good. This need not be discussed at length. The good news: Michigan’s offense has struggled mightily throughout the NCAA tournament.
Yes, yes, this is not the good news you were hoping for. You were hoping that I had climbed high atop the thing and consulted the wise oracle, and the runes foretold of a great firebombing from deep. But this is actually better. Because already know what happens when Michigan comes out firing – and hitting – from three. You get a game like Texas A&M, or late-season Maryland, or the Texas Shruggie game, or the Florida Elite Eight Stauskasfest. There is much rejoicing and Twitter screaming and maniacal laughter. A good time is had by all.
According to Science, two of these = a National Championship [Brian Fuller]
Team shooting streaks are as fleeting as Nick Ward’s and Jaren Jackson’s minutes; you never know when they will appear, or how long they will last. Michigan could come out tonight and hit 60% from deep, and no one would be that surprised. But Michigan could also come out flat again, in which case they will lose (as would any team Beilein has ever fielded, and as would 99% of basketball teams assembled in the modern era against this Villanova team). Based on the last two and a half weeks, this would surprise no one either.
Coming into this season, Michigan under John Beilein was a combined 11-80 when its offense put up a Dead Body game (i.e. where their offensive efficiency dipped below 98.6). That just over one win per year. This year, they are 7-2 in those games. They’ve won as many such games this year as they won in the previous eight seasons combined. And this includes three tournament wins this year (Montana, Houston, and FSU) and barely excludes Loyola-Chicago.
[Fuller]
It’s hard to imagine that any other Beilein team would even be standing at this point with the kind of offensive production they’ve gotten. Yet here they are, still playing in April. And sure, they still have those Walter In The Crawlspace games in them. We’ve seen three of them in the current 14-game winning streak. But now, for the first time, they have a defense. A real defense. A salty defense. The kind of defense that can get some stops when the offense stalls, as even the most firebreathingest offenses are wont to do. Michigan doesn’t have to be perfect. They have the luxury of being almost perfect. And that might, might just be enough.
One other thing. I feel pretty comfortable with the notion that karma doesn’t really control basketball games. Neither the Universe, nor any omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent entities residing therein, care significantly about the outcome on Monday night. But I feel equally comfortable with the notion that if he/she/it/they ever DID want to put a finger on the scale, it would be in favor of John Beilein winning a title. Winning “The Right Way” may not be fair, as one can only be so upset about players getting paid during the cash bonanza that is the NCAA Tournament. But he has sure as hell won The Hard Way, and the next person I meet with a cross word to say about him will be the first.
[Fuller]
Still, as we said before the Loyola game, this is ultimately a battle of basketball teams, and Villanova is statistically better. Michigan probably needs to have one of their Death From Above performances to win this game, and this may be the one opponent against which such a performance might not be enough. That’s a tough ask, even for a wizard.
Villanova 77, Michigan 73
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CHARGE
By Smoothitron
I feel conflicted regarding Villanova being Michigan’s title game opponent. This is exactly the sort of matchup I would want if I were an unaffiliated fan. It has two schools big enough and good enough to produce a quality game with two coaches dragging college basketball ever further out of the 2-points-and-a-cloud-of-dust era, but none of the annoyance of seeing a blueblood like North Carolina for the zillionth time.
In other ways, Villanova is exactly the kind of opponent I didn’t want to see. This almost goes without saying, but Villanova is extremely good. Their Kenpom page is a boon for the antacid industry and it’s hard to imagine Beilein coaching circles around someone like Jay Wright who emphasizes so many of the same concepts but has reached an indisputably greater level of success. On a more personal note, while I’m happy to see Villanova be successful in general, I had always imagined and hoped Beilein’s pinnacle victory would be against one of the villains of College Basketball.
yeah like that guy
I’ve decided not to let any of it bother me, though. I’ve gotten to see this team make a 10-0 deficit look like a well-intentioned but woefully insufficient rec-league handicap against Montana. For Throwback Thursday: an old-fashioned Michigan shruggie game vs. Texas A&M, followed by a win against Florida State where the concept that Michigan lives and dies by the 3 was emphatically destroyed. The Houston game was a simple reminder that sometimes good things just happen to good people.
I didn’t cry, YOU cried
Against Loyola and for the 4th time this tournament, Michigan treated us to the experience of watching a team not playing its best but still winning important games. It’s harrowing and frustrating, but it’s a feeling I never had the privilege to endure growing up in the Amaker era. Coach Beilein and the players have rescued a moribund program and its fanbase from another generation of mediocrity and apathy, and they deserve their damn coronation.
So I’m done doubting; it’s no fun and the team has earned better. Villanova is a tremendous offense; they haven’t seen a defense like this. They hit a ton of 3s; they can’t make any if they can’t get them off. Jalen Brunson could be the best guard in America; X will be in his shirt and in his head for 40 minutes. Michigan’s offense goes into lulls; ask the Aggies about those lulls. Michigan can’t hit free throws; it won’t be close enough to matter.
Just a few more hours before an ass whoopin’. They ain’t know.
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