11/27/2019 – Michigan 83, Iowa State 76 – 5-0
11/28/2019 – Michigan 73, North Carolina 64 – 6-0
11/29/2019 – Michigan 82, Gonzaga 64 – 7-0, possessors of a magical trident

Hey! That went well. Michigan won three games. Juwan Howard cleaned up the court.

Coach Howard just got my vote for Coach of the Year! I don’t care who you root for, but for the head coach to walk on the floor and wipe up the sweat? Incredible! pic.twitter.com/RkWZ8abn6b

— Steve Finamore (@CoachFinamore) November 27, 2019

Then he gave the Erik Bakich interview after the trident was secured.

The best coaches know that it is about serving others. Juwan Howard has been around some great coaches and he is off to a really good start!#ServantLeadership pic.twitter.com/zS4GIytfAI

— Doug Brotherton (@CoachBrotherton) November 29, 2019

I was watching another basketball game later that day and they replayed Howard's entire post-game interview at halftime, which seemed unusual. Recruits: hello. Also: protected seed. Hello?

[After THE JUMP: isooooooooooooo]

Uh probably shouldn't play in that tourney again though? The whole tournament featured guys crashing and burning on the floor because they couldn't keep the floor dry. Thus the first embed above. It would have been very frustrating to lose a player for an extended period of time because of that, and from time to time Michigan guys limped around and grabbed portions of their anatomy ominously.

This tourney gets an incredible field every year, probably because the program gets to go to the Bahamas. I'd rather Michigan play somewhere else. Unless they give people a giant trident for winning. Then I'm back in.

[Campredon]

Brooks! Bigs excepted, I'm not sure if we've ever seen the kind of mid-career turnaround Eli Brooks appears to be executing. We've seen guys go from pretty good to great; we've seen long arcs of incremental improvement. I don't know if we've seen anyone flip a switch like Brooks. Last year: 32% of Michigan's minutes, 46/29 from the floor, 13% usage. This year: 81% of Michigan's minutes, 42/50(!) from the floor, 20% usage. That gap is even larger if you file Brooks's relatively encouraging finish to last season with the good stuff.

Brooks is still pretty bad inside the line and has suffered a bit of a TO spike but he's added seven points of usage and ten points of ORTG, which absolutely never happens for people with any sample size. Combine that with his excellent defense and you've got a good Big Ten starter. As of about 15 games ago everyone wanted to process the guy and now he's indispensable.

I'm not waiting for the other shoe to drop, either. This feels like the new normal for him, hopefully minus a few points of TO rate down the road.

X is a cathedral that's never finished. Every year Zavier Simpson adds something. This year he's changed his three point shot with good early returns (8 of 18 in the early going) and developed the ability to go left. These culminated in an event against Gonzaga when Simpson pumped-faked from three, blew by his man, and got a lefty hook to go.

Early returns for Simpson are very encouraging. Per Synergy he's got 17 points on 10 isolation possessions this year; last year he had 39 points on 52 iso possessions. This was 44th percentile, and it made him Michigan's best iso player. Early days yet but Michigan isos have jumped from 24th percentile to 99th.

Introducing Franz Wagner. Wagner's first playing time at Michigan was getting thrown in the deep end against good opponents. The rust was apparent; Wagner suffered a few blow-bys on defense, fumbled some balls out of bounds, and fouled out in 23 minutes against Iowa State. It's going to take some time for him to settle in and find his role.

On the other hand, he displayed tremendous upside.

As Ace noted on the podcast, Hoopvision referred to Michigan playing "two or three bigs," referencing Livers and Wagner along with the center, and ye gods Wagner seems like he's got four arms. He picked up two steals in both the UNC and Gonzaga games and forced another few turnovers with deflections and just generally being huge.

Against Gonzaga Michigan made a concerted effort to get Wagner the ball curling off screens where he could put the ball on the floor and go to the basket. He converted an easy OOB play, dribbled into traffic for a turnover, and then had two takes to the bucket that looked like a whole world of possibilities if he can just cut down on the errors.

Also introducing the E-LINE. The worst moment of Juwan Howard's head coaching career to date came with 6:41 left in the first half against Elon. Elon was a semi-frequent topic on this blog last year because the introduction of dunk stats on Bart Torvik Dot Com midseason last year revealed that the Phoenix were the only team in the country without a dunk. It took them until mid-February to successfully dunk, in an OT loss to Northeastern.

Welp:

Elon dunked. Reader, I admit that this had me shook for days. Winning POSEIDON'S TRIDENT(!!!) has only now restored my faith in the present and future of Michigan basketball. Elon dunked. Elon dunked.

But, like the Fightin' Musks actual mascot, we are reborn in the fire.

Computer, enhance.

Gonzaga failed to meet the Elon line. The E-Line. In fact, we are setting the E-Line at two dunks since I think you should probably be able to surpass the feats of a CAA team ranked #325 in Kenpom. Other teams to fail to meet the Elon line include North Carolina, Iowa State, Creighton, and Houston Baptist.

Congratulations to Appalachian State: in the biggest upset in school history, the Mountaineers are the only team who've successfully crested the E-Line in Michigan's first seven games. Truly a moment to remember for an athletic department devoid of other accomplishments against Michigan.

This has a semi-serious application! The tactical story of the season is Howard implementing drop pick and roll coverage, where the big drops into the paint and the guard chases over the screen. Kenpom used to have a "defensive fingerprint" field that attempted to guess whether a team was man or zone. It got dropped for not doing its job very well, but maaaan Michigan's drop coverage has a hell of a fingerprint:

• Michigan is 302nd in forcing turnovers.
• They're 22nd at avoiding fouls.
• They're 7th in the country at preventing threes.
• They're 8th in the country at preventing assists on made buckets.
• They're 44th in 2-point D.

That's what a bunch of barely contested two point jumpers off the bounce looks like. Michigan's sixth in forcing long twos, nationally.

Teske constantly dropping into the paint prevents teams from clearing the E-Line by giving guys wide open midrange jumpers. This has been frustrating at times, particularly early against Iowa State and Gonzaga. It also wrecks offenses that don't have a stretch 5. Hoopvision's breakdown of the Gonzaga game dealt with drop coverage at about the 4:00 mark (though you're going to want to watch the whole video anyway):

This naturally leads into a discussion about what a "good shot" is. Michigan is betting that very few college players will make 15-18 footers consistently enough to beat them, especially since the pick and roll ballhandler is getting a contest from the guard coming over the top of the screen. When Cole Anthony was taking long twos he was pulling up off the dribble with a defender coming back to him from behind. It's only opposing bigs who are getting truly free reign for uncontested catch-and-shoot long twos.

Michigan must have a backup plan for stretch 5s but even guys like Cassius Winston have a hard time being truly efficient in the midrange. Winston was 45% on long twos last year. It's possible that Michigan is worse than average at defending these shots but that hasn't shown up yet—opponents are hitting 36%. And even when a team does have a reasonable amount of midrange success, the tradeoff is probably still worth it. Witness the UNC game:

• 17/30 in the midrange! Yeah! 1.13 points per possession! LFG!
• 7/18 at rim
• 2/13 from three
• fail to clear E-Line
• you lose

Phil Martelli told Sam Webb they have other coverages if the situation demands it so I assume we'll start seeing those mix in as the opposition dictates. That'll be pretty soon. Luka Garza qualifies as a stretch five and Michigan plays Iowa after Louisville.

Same as it ever was. One thing we thought Howard might change but has not: Michigan's predilection to go for offensive rebounds. Michigan is just above 300th in OREBs and is getting virtually nothing from anyone except the two centers and Brandon Johns. This is particularly notable on a lot of Michigan's threes, which feature either a center or nobody under the basket.

This has kept Michigan's transition defense in about the same shape, too. A game against Houston Baptist, which took 44% of its shots in the first ten seconds of the clock, is distorting. Drop that out and Michigan's facing 24% of its shots in the first third of the clock, up slightly from last year's 20%. I'd wager that almost all of that is Michigan's open-court turnover rate going up 3.4 points. Synergy's tracked a big drop in transition D that is almost certainly because of TOs.

This makes a lot of sense given Michigan's personnel. Livers isn't a pogo-stick OREB type at the 4. They're getting great looks at the basket by spreading the court and going 4/5 out. Their half-court D is excellent. It wasn't something that had to change, or evidently should have changed, and it has not.

going left [Campredon]

On the sustainability of Michigan's shooting. Michigan is currently the #2 eFG offense in the country, which is propping up Michigan's offense in the face of mediocre-to-bad performances in the other three factors. Whenever you're riding so high a regression is likely, but the shape of what Michigan's doing makes it likely they stick towards the top of that metric for the season.

Driven largely by Zavier Simpson, Michigan has been killing it at the rim this year. Michigan's close two (ie, restricted circle and in) percentages are off the charts. They're third in the country at 75%, and that barely changes when you restrict the competition to top 100 opponents (ie: Creighton + Atlantis); Michigan is at 74% in those four games. It's a sea of green from everyone who's taken a shot except Brooks, who's 3/5, and Wagner, who's 3/8.

None of those defenses are elite but UNC and Gonzaga are top 30 in Torvik, which appears to drop preseason out a lot faster than Kenpom, despite having a Michigan torch job as one of their main data points so far. I'd imagine Michigan shooting at the rim is quite sustainable. They were pretty good last year (66%, 22nd nationally) and got their point guard and center back; that point guard is now driving left fairly consistently for the first time in his career.

In a way, Michigan's extremely low free throw rate is another indicator that their shooting at the rim will be sustainable—on most of these looks there's little or no contest. 

Michigan is probably due for a regression at the other two levels. When your center is 11/20 in the midrange and his backup is 6/12 you're going to regress. But they've got a good shot at improving a lot even so. Michigan's shooting on long twos was abominable last year. That problem is now someone else's:

• Poole, Brazdeikis, Matthews 2018-19 long twos: 63/223, 28%.
• Pre-radioactive-spider Eli Brooks: 4/17, 24%.
• Simpson, Teske, Livers: 47/124, 38%.

(Simpson's inclusion on that list with a significant number of attempts should give you an idea of what counts as a "long" two since pretty much all his hooks are in that bin.) Nobody who watched last year's offense will be surprised at the profusion of bad midrange shots from folks who are emphatically not three-level scorers. It's bonkers that Charles Matthews took 98 longer twos and Isaiah Livers took 21.

Michigan should be much better in the midrange this year just because the guys taking those shots are going to be actual shooters. Seven games in, Livers is just two attempts short of his season total on farther twos, and he's hitting 42%. Moving 223 shots from the three departures to Livers, Brooks, DDJ, and Wagner should portend a big bounce up from last year, when Michigan was 309th(!) at converting long twos.

always should have been a C&S dude but until you see it you don't know [Campredon]

Michigan will regress from 42% shooting from three as well but improvements from Livers, DDJ, and Brooks seem like they're here for the long haul. Michigan is replacing 2 ~40% shooters and 1 30% shooter; it looks like they're going to upgrade. Once Wagner's up and running Michigan won't be playing anyone from the 2 to the 4 who isn't a plus outside shooter, and they've got a shot at having one or two elite guys.

The other factors. Only one of the three other factors is particularly concerning. Free throw rate is whatever. Michigan doesn't get to the line much because many of their shots get inadequate contests. A quick look at the FT rate leaderboard does not suggest there's a ton of correlation with FT rate and being good at offense. There are zero top 20 offenses in the top 20 FT rate teams. The offensive rebounding is discussed above and doesn't get into the teens where you get seriously worried.

Turnovers, though: turnovers. Michigan's dipped to 161st. Michigan's worst ranking in that department over the last seven years: 17th. They were 5th last year. Getting back to the top 100, or even top 50, would go a long way towards sustaining success in the face of shooting droughts.

There are two main reasons to think this is feasible. One is that a big chunk of Michigan's regression in this department has been X going from a TO rate of 19 to 26, and that's down from 29 after his explodes in every direction ISU game. He's taken on extra burden this year but a large number of his TOs felt uncharacteristic, and after that ISU game he had three TOs against Gonzaga and UNC, two of which were transition poke-aways from behind when teammates didn't communicate that he had a trailer. If Simpson can get back down to last year's levels that'll be a big help.

The second reason is that Michigan is clearly still going through a number of transition issues. There was a possession against Gonzaga where three guys looked back at Howard mid-play, then nobody ran anything until an ugly jacked-up late clock shot. There's a lot of Simpson waving guys to or from certain places. Michigan's retained a lot of Beilein's sets because they're not crazy, but they've also added a bunch of stuff that Michigan is still getting to grips with.

I'd say 7 of the 8 factors on offense and defense are almost certain to look about how they do now at season's end. Michigan's TO rate is the swing factor in the season.

Poll items. Polls don't matter in college basketball except for hype purposes, but tomorrow's game against Louisville is going to get hyped to the moon since it's now #1 vs #4. Going from unranked to #4 is the biggest jump in the history of the poll, matching Kansas's surge in 1989.