shot volume

Martelli on the Purdue game. The real one:

"We've done a much better job of tracing the ball and not leaving the big guy on an island," Martelli said. "When we put clips together for this game from the last game (against Purdue), we were like, 'Wow. How did we get to where we are?'" …

"We could have stayed out there another 20 minutes, they just were not going to score enough," Martelli said after Purdue.

Still kind of felt like the big was on an island for much of that game, but the results were excellent.

Shot volume. This John Gasaway piece on shot volume is a little old but feels even more relevant after Michigan scraped out a win against Purdue in which they turned the ball over just three times. Michigan is amongst the national leaders in getting shots up:

Gluttonous               TO%     OR%     SVI
1.  LSU                 16.5    36.2    100.5
2.  Auburn              16.7    35.3     99.8
3.  Illinois            16.3    33.3     99.3
4.  Michigan            14.0    27.0     99.0
5.  Purdue              16.3    32.4     98.9
6.  Arizona             16.0    31.2     98.7
7.  Minnesota           15.7    30.4     98.7
8.  St. John's          14.0    25.8     98.5
9.  Baylor              18.4    36.5     98.3
10. Rutgers             16.2    30.9     98.3

Michigan may have inched up past Illinois after the Purdue game knocked their conference TO rate down to 13.6. (If it sticks there this will be uncanny consistency in the Age of X. Last year Michigan's conference TO rate was 13.5; the year before it was 13.6.)

[After THE JUMP: Kenpom is yelled at for stuff he didn't do]

2/19/2020 – Michigan 60, Rutgers 52 – 17-9, 8-7 Big Ten

It was weird seeing Jalen Rose directly behind the Michigan bench last night. It was weirder when Eli Brooks hit a cold-blooded three after getting stuck with a late clock possession against a 6'7" guy. The camera cut to the bench, where Zavier Simpson and Rose were doing the same thing:

This is a synthesis of two different Michigan pasts, its present, and its future.

One of the two pasts is offscreen: it's Brooks canning the three. Brooks is the most Beilein kid on Michigan's current roster. He's utterly devoid of swag. He remembers things after you tell him. He plays relentless positional defense in the manner of a guy determined to overcome limitations. He shoots from distance; the rim is a rumor unless the opposition has gotten beaten by one of Michigan's sets.

He feels like a mid-major player who got bumped up by circumstance. Eli Brooks is Zack Novak and Stu Douglass and the progression of guys who are just making it work against all athletic odds. Maybe not the most common Beilein architype, but the most Beilein archetype.

The other past is obvious, with apologies to Chris Hunter: Jalen freakin' Rose. Fab Five guy. Decade-long NBA career. Now paid to be interesting in public. The Fab Five was larger than life and Rose was always the guy with the mic. Your author had some problems with Rose in the Beilein era because he didn't seem to care about the program at all until it made the Final Four, and then that was just an opportunity to talk about how rad the Fab Five was.

To be clear, Rose has every reason to be bitter about how Michigan treated him and his classmates for close to 20 years. hat bitterness could only increase as the idea that paying basketball players was immoral was repudiated by ever more important components of the college basketball ecosystem. First bloggers, then sportswriters, then coaches, and finally the NCAA itself. For Michigan's banners to stay down while Will Wade and Bill Self keep their jobs after being definitively proven as violators by the FBI (the FBI!)… well, if that was me I'd probably be pretty distant too.

But he's back, and he's hanging on Eli Brooks. Hanging.

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The present is Zavier Simpson, who's only on the bench in the shot above because he's got four fouls and Michigan's buying him a couple minutes. Aside from this brief period he barely comes off the floor, leads Michigan in scoring, and is robbed of a double-digit assist game by Michigan's erratic three-point shooting.

Simpson is the exact opposite of a Beilein archetype, brought in as a no-shoot all-D point guard. He's beaten himself into a progressively better player over the course of four years. He's not a Beilein creation or a Juwan Howard creation. He is always becoming himself with no outside intervention except from maybe dad. He scores his 1,000th point in this game on a hook shot he and only he uses.

It didn't matter whether Beilein stayed or not. There was never going to be another Zavier Simpson. Juwan Howard won't recruit anyone like him; John Beilein wouldn't have. That's because there are no other players like Zavier Simpson. He is sui generis.

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To get to the future you gotta put it all together. Brooks is 0/5 in this game at the suddenly impregnable RAC. This space repeatedly wondered whether he had a mental block against high level teams, and thought David DeJulius should start eating to his minutes. Juwan Howard didn't, and Juwan Howard was right, and Eli Brooks just hit the iciest shot of his career.

Jalen Rose is there, a couple games after Dikembe Mutumbo and Worldwide Wes were at Welsh-Ryan, of all places. Juwan Howard knows everyone and everyone likes him. Michigan's tendency towards factionalism could easily rise up in the aftermath of losing the best coach in program history, but it won't because everyone wants Juwan Howard to succeed from Lebron James on down.

Zavier Simpson is there. Juwan Howard has gotten out of Simpson's way and let him have his team.

It's really hard to get everyone pulling in one direction. Everyone reading this knows that in their bones. In Juwan Howard it seems like Michigan's found a guy who can pull up the guys who need it, leave the guys who don't alone, and gather everyone to him, past, present, and future.

[After THE JUMP: the new disaster artist]

1/12/2020 – Michigan 67, Minnesota 75 – 11-5, 2-3 Big Ten

I would appreciate it if the basketball games would start being different so that I had different things to say about them. Also then the opposing center wouldn't have a career high in points.

The last edition of this post worried about Michigan's post defense, which had reached Disturbing Trend levels. After Daniel Oturu put up 30 points while going 12/16 from two we've moved on from Disturbing Trend. We're at after Michigan's defense and Jon Teske in particular got posterized for the fourth time this year.

This one was unambiguous. Maybe Trevion Williams hit more than his share of circus shots; maybe the issue against Luka Garza was Michigan failing to get back in transition. There's nowhere to hide after the latest debacle. Oturu hit 75% of his twos because he should have hit 75% of his twos. Aside from a couple threes and one face-up jumper the average Oturu shot came from here:

13 of Oturu's 16 twos were at the rim. He had one turnover. Teske got worked. Late in the first half Oturu took the ball all the way in from the perimeter and bumped Teske on the block;  Teske looked at the ref for no apparent reason and Oturu got an uncontested layup.

I don't know if there's a way back here. As detailed in the Purdue version of this post, Teske was left by himself last year too. Michigan's post defense wasn't 114th in points per possession (with passes included), per Synergy. Since post ups tend to be one of the less efficient scoring methods that was a solid platform to base an elite defense on. This year:

synergy ranks out of 353 teams of michigan's defense against post-up possessions (passes included):
- 349th in points per possession
- 348th in turnover %
- 350th in % of possessions ending in a score

— Ace Anbender (@AceAnbender) January 13, 2020

Michigan's close to dead last in everything. I can't see any transition costs between "we're never going to double the post" and "we're never going to double the post." This is the starting center on last year's #2 defense going from an A- defender to a walking opponent career high. It is one of the more stupefying things I've seen since Michigan basketball ceased being holistically stupefying 12 years ago.

Matt D thinks that Teske has some limitations and opponents have adjusted, which is probably part of it:

Michigan Film Review: Teske Post D v Oturu in 2019/20

2019-Oturu backs Teske down w/2 dribbles but doesn’t get near a full revolution w/his nonpivot foot on the dropstep, isn’t able to seal Teske to mitigate his contest

2020-Oturu gets near full revolution, seals Teske, easy 2 pic.twitter.com/tBTFYiiEdd

— LAbound (@LAbound2) January 13, 2020

Oturu has a higher ceiling than Teske and is improving faster. Okay, that's a part of it. Luka Garza is #4 in the KPOY rankings this year. A lot of guys are having trouble with the Peacock.

That can't be all of it. Last year Teske battled Ethan Happ and Bruno Fernando to a standstill; at that point he was a junior coming off extensive playing time the year before. In return games against both those opponents Teske's shortcomings, whatever they may be, didn't help Happ or Fernando perform anywhere near the level of efficiency Michigan's opponents are this year.

The good news, such as it is, is that nobody is consistently this bad at defending the post and doing a whole lot of butt-nothing should see improvement. The bad news is that improvement might not get Michigan anywhere near acceptable.

[After THE JUMP: defense Festivus continues]