isaiah livers really ties the room together

As we expected/reported, respectively, Isaiah Livers will be moving on to the NBA draft, and Eli Brooks will be returning to Michigan next year. Zay’s message was laconic:

thank you michigan

— Isaiah (@isaiah__02) April 15, 2021

While the even more understated Brooks let the school announce it:

SPECIAL ROSTER NEWS

Simply put ...
A CAPTAIN IS BACK!

Taking advantage of the NCAA's one-time rule in response COVID-19, Eli Brooks met with Coach Howard & accepted the additional year to return for the 2021-22 season!#GoBlue 〽️#ForCompetitorsOnly pic.twitter.com/GMDLq9wquL

— Michigan Men's Basketball (@umichbball) April 14, 2021

Brooks returning goes a long way to settling the biggest question on Michigan’s team next year, giving a very young backcourt a super-senior who specializes in getting others organized. Brooks’s impact on the court last year was as visual as our podcast, but it was certainly measurable (using Faulds to excise backup time):

Note some extreme three-point luck on defense.

Or you might have watched the Minnesota game and 90% of the MSU game he missed last year and come to the same conclusion. As Ace wrote last week, Brooks gives Michigan positional versatility at the 1 and 2 spots, and was a major factor in Michigan’s defensive ability to dissuade good shots and run complicated rotations. He’s also a solid 40% shooter, excellent at the line, and underrated distributor. His presence should give Juwan Howard the flexibility to bring along the freshmen at their own pace. Barring a surprise from the transfer portal, Brooks should see his minutes at the point increase while they ease Frankie Collins into the role. Michigan would of course love for Collins, Kobe Bufkin, Isaiah Barnes or Zeb Jackson to really pop next year. Odds of one of those guys being a major contributor are pretty high; two would have been an ask.

As for Livers, we already got our extra year when he decided to forego the NBA to captain the 2020-‘21 team. It remains one of the greater tragedies in Michigan history that his final team had to play their postseason without him. Their best outside shooter, best free throw shooter, most switchable defender, and team leader, the nights Livers was on Michigan was absolutely unbeatable, and he was on a LOT. Most games we would end up talking about another guy, or some halftime adjustment, and then come back to Livers canning four threes in the second frame while shutting down the other team’s best wing. Ho hum. May his NBA team have a similar sensation of how boringly good this guy is, minus the moments when he comes down gingerly from a thunderdunk attempt and you have to contemplate life without him.

Michigan is about as prepared for that as one can be. Brandon Johns used Livers’s final absence to emerge as the no-doubt starting four of the future, showing the same kind of size/athleticism combo that made Livers so frustrating to play against on defense. While Johns doesn’t have anything like Livers’s quick trigger outside the arc, he can certainly shoot, and brings a lot more as a foul magnet and dunker in the lane. Additions Moussa Diabate and Caleb Houston, plus sophomore Terrance Williams, seem more than capable of fulfilling the roles relinquished by departures at the wings.

Speaking of departures, Michigan’s roster seems mostly set at this point, as they await official word on Franz Wagner, who’s expected to be a lottery pick, and Hunter Dickinson, who’s expected to return. Brooks is the only super senior who chose to take the free COVID year.

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Replacing the Irreplaceable

Livers' defense may prove as hard to replace as his offense [Campredon]

Michigan isn't going to make a couple minor tweaks to the rotation and come up with a way to replicate what the injured Isaiah Livers brought to this team. That doesn't mean the Wolverines are doomed for an early exit—far from it—but it does cut the team's margin for error. Today, I'm going to look at what Michigan loses with Livers on the bench. Tomorrow, I'll take a deeper dive into the ways they can best replace his production.

I went into the Hoop Lens on/off data and did my best to excise the bench mob from the numbers, and I'm only drawing from the Big Ten games and Toledo for opponent strength purposes. While the Wolverines, rather surprisingly, have been of near-equal quality on offense when Livers is on the bench by points per possession, the defense takes enough of a hit to move this from a dominant team to merely a very good one:

As usual, there's some noise to filter out. The lineups without Livers have shot worse on two-pointers and better on three-pointers; the former is more sustainable while the latter is concerning—it's hard to believe this is a better outside shooting team without its best shooter. This team isn't as powerful on offense without Livers available; they could still be very good, though, even if the ceiling isn't quite as high.

In more encouraging news, that three-point percentage gap also applies to the team's defense in much more extreme fashion, while two-point defense, turnovers, and rebounding stay level. After looking at who's played when Livers isn't on the floor, there isn't a personnel-specific reason to believe the team should be significantly worse at defending the arc without him—certainly not nearly ten percentage points worse. Again, it's hard to imagine the team being better at defense without Livers available; again, the dropoff may not be severe.

This is probably more of a two- or three-seed caliber team without Livers available. While that's disappointing in a certain context given the late-season visions of competing with Gonzaga for the top overall seed, it far from eliminates Michigan as a title contender, especially since they still get the advantage of a one-seed's path to the Final Four.

[Hit THE JUMP for the parts of Livers' game that will be hard to replace.]

2/18/2021 – Michigan 71, Rutgers 64 – 15-1, 10-1 Big Ten

Here's a famous tweet.

I...worked on this story for a year...and...he just...he tweeted it out.

— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) July 11, 2017

This is how your author felt when last night's broadcast began with the announcers relaying Steve Pikiell's take on the game, which was "we're going to jack up a bunch of heavily contested off-the-dribble twos and see how it goes." The announcers said it a little differently, leaving out the heavily contested jacks so they could euphemistically refer to this behavior as "shooting in the midrange."

There's midrange and then there's midrange. There's Franz Wagner midrange where he's using his crazy gumby arms to get up layups from outside the paint, and there's Rutgers midrange that comes from just inside the three-point line with several angry gnomes climbing all over the shooter. When those latter go down at the rate they did in the first ten minutes of the game there's a lot of heavy sighing and maybe the occasional "cumong!" uttered.

To be fair to Rutgers, they did repeatedly attack the basket. Since Michigan is the king of drop coverage and Rutgers is Rutgers these attacks often felt like assaults designed to destroy the rim for unspeakable crimes rather than genuine attempts to score. When the dust cleared, Rutgers had identical marks both at and away from the rim: 11/25.  One of those numbers is really good, considering the circumstances. The other is not really good.

Throw in a near-total lack of threes and the result: 0.98 points per possession despite turning the ball over just three times. That was the best-case scenario for Rutgers, give or take a transition miss, and they did not quite hit a point per possession. This is life in the midrange salt mines.

Hearing one of the better coaches in the Big Ten resign himself to those mines was a bit of a jarring experience. But if you're signing up for the Rutgers job and succeed there you have to have a pretty clear-eyed view of things. That's what Rutgers had to do, and but for a couple meaningless threes in the last minute it got them what it's gotten nearly everyone except Minnesota (and, uh, Penn State): a double-digit loss.

[After THE JUMP: Franz rises, Dickinson recedes]