tom izzo eats his liver
3/2/2022 – Michigan 87, Michigan State 70 – 16-12, 10-8 Big Ten
Say what you want about Tom Izzo—please do so loudly and publicly—but you have to give him one thing: he offers satisfaction. You can beat guys like Chris Holtmann and Matt Painter and yeah it's nice to win a basketball game against a good team. They'll talk about what happened and it'll be nice. But at no point will you feel that cosmic justice has been done. You can woof at them and they'll say "he's a good player." They'll probably even mean it.
Not Tom Izzo.
https://t.co/19TJPrlt05 pic.twitter.com/nxsmy3siqq
— Patrick Barron (@BlueBarronPhoto) March 2, 2022
When Hunter Dickinson is dropping 33 and four blocks and woofing like he's going for 70, Tom Izzo will not sit on the sideline in stony silence and then graciously tip his hat in the post-game press conference.
Instead, he will wander onto the court to berate an official because the tall man is being mean. He won't get a technical for this, for reasons, but he will sputter and mewl and yell at his players for betraying him; only then will he descend into the stony silence. When it's clearly time to pout. He will give Dickinson the blow-by in the handshake line he just valorized in the aftermath of the Trohl Center incident. Then in the press conference he will say things like "give them credit, I guess."
Tom Izzo is a delight to beat, because he's a thin-skinned maniac. One time Izzo was getting hammered by Michigan and spent two full minutes of game time pointlessly fouling because he would not give up on the 0.01% chance Michigan would hurl all their free throws into the stands along with their clothes and get called for indecency technicals. This is what I am saying.
To beat Tom Izzo is to watch him rend his clothes and go bug-eyed and threaten to kill an official who will pat him on the head because he's a lovable wee scamp if you're the kind of lunatic who referees college basketball. One day someone will beat him so badly he will lie down and die on a basketball court, out of spite.
BULLETS
Mmm drop coverage. AJ Hoggard only played 11 minutes with leprosy or whatever, but even though MSU's most drop-coverage vulnerable PG wasn't a major factor Michigan still spent the whole game in it and MSU did little against it. Tyson Walker was hesitant to pull up despite having significant off-the-dribble game. In particular, I think he attempted one pull-up three despite Michigan constantly going under screens against him. He is capable:
He just doesn't want to do it much. This was fairly typical:
He has all the room in the world to pull up; he's hitting 55% from three on the year (and was 35% last year on 113 attempts); half of his threes this year are unassisted. It is flat out weird that he's averaging just over 2 3PA per game.
Also:
Instead of an aggressive ball screen coverage "showing" above the level of the screen, tonight Michigan went under almost every ball screen & had Dickinson drop near the paint.
— Eric Shapiro (@eric_shap) March 2, 2022
MSU's PGs were reluctant to shoot off the dribble & the coverage was significantly more effective: pic.twitter.com/9qiFqLywv8
This performance makes the blitzing from game one all the more baffling, but at least that mistake wasn't repeated.
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]
2/8/2020 – Michigan 77, Michigan State 68 – 14-9, 5-7 Big Ten
Afterwards, Tom Izzo sat down for a classic Tom Izzo press conference. The Izzo standard is to complain about how his backup point guard has bunions immediately after saying he's not saying the things he's saying. Sometimes immediately before. You can see the U-turn in an em dash:
"Simpson goes 4-for-7 from the three. He hasn’t done that in weeks. That’s — give him credit. He’s a competitive kid."
I'm not sure how we are defining "that" but Simpson is literally coming off a 3/7 performance from three in the game before this one. He's shooting 36% on the season, and that number was above 40% early when teams were giving him the full Tum-Tum treatment. Simpson still has trouble when teams give him a modicum of respect. He can hit practice jumpers now. MSU gave him practice jumpers.
https://t.co/VQH3fWb60m pic.twitter.com/AnCNZ36DPC
— Scott Bell (@sbell021) February 9, 2020
And they kept doing it after Simpson hit his first two.
On the other end of the court Michigan had a similar gamble: they left Xavier Tillman alone behind the line. This worked out better. Tillman was 0/3; he entered the game a 31% three point shooter on extremely thin volume and left it a 29% shooter.
Leaving Tillman allowed Michigan to bottle up Cassius Winston by constantly blitzing ballscreens. Floaters were gone. Winston's two makes inside the arc were an off-the-dribble stepback from just inside the three point line and a layup Michigan gave him because they were up nine with 20 seconds left. He got one open corner three operating off the ball; every other one of his three point attempts was off the dribble and challenged except for a shot from the logo in Izzo Eats His Liver time.
Michigan won on the boards and gave up close to no transition. Against Michigan State.
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[Campredon]
The recent history of this series has been unusually dependent on giant flashing red THIS IS COACHING signs. Moe Wagner against Nick Ward followed by Zavier Simpson against Xavier Tillman moved the series from "bust they ass on three" to a three-game season sweep for MSU last year.
The opening game this year was the first real one without Livers and the dawn of Michigan's month of horrendous three-point luck so it didn't feel like quite as coach-driven as recent events. It still featured a lot of MSU running off makes and another Winston/Simpson head-to-head matchup that Simpson lost, his fourth straight.
On Saturday, Juwan Howard gave it to Tom Izzo. MSU could not run; Winston had Eli Brooks shadowing him most of the day. Simpson was largely sitting in a corner, marshalling his strength, instead of running around four ball screens on every defensive possession. It's not a coincidence that his massively wide open shots went down. He was fresh. He outperformed Winston in the meeting right after the game in which I threw up my hands and said "he's Trey Burke, oh well."
Beating Michigan State is important for a lot of reasons, not least today's Mega Spartanfreude Monday. This early in Howard's coaching career, though, taking a bad situation against a hall of fame coach and flipping the script in a month noses ahead of the pack.
Tom Izzo's reduced to kicking a can and sputtering about how his players are "fatigued" a few months into Howard's Zack and Stu phase. Beilein's Zack and Stu phase lasted four years; Howard is one Josh Christopher away from having his phase last one year. Combine the fact that Howard has met every basketball player in America at some point with his player management and his clear coaching chops and you've got a hell of a stew cooking.
[After THE JUMP: stop asking Izzo to stab you]
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