Bracket Watch: The Other Bracket Looms

it us. [Marc-Gregor Campredon]

The outlook is grim. After everyone but Derrick Walton sleepwalked their way to a loss against a mediocre Ohio State team, Michigan is 14-9 (4-6 B1G) and out of the projected NCAA tournament field. The Wolverines have to climb out of an increasingly big hole and they may have already missed their chance; KenPom says they've played the easiest conference schedule of any Big Ten team so far, and that's about to change in a major way:

Michigan only has three home games left; of those, a more confident and rested Michigan State squad is by far the most beatable. The Wolverines have yet to win a road game this season; they'll need to take at least two, and quite possibly as many as all five left on the docket, to have a realistic shot at an at-large bid. They're 79th in RPI. I had to edit the second sentence of this post multiple times before it was family-friendly.

If they lose tomorrow night, NIT bracket-watching begins in earnest.

[After THE JUMP: Some good news! Really! Also some bad news.]

At Long Last, Derrick Walton

The bright spot. [Campredon]

If you listened to the Signing Day podcast, you heard that I was already compiling the rather astonishing Derrick Walton stats since Maverick Morgan's (unfortunately accurate) "white collar" comment. Based on both his recent comments and play, it's clear Walton took particularly strong exception to that statement. This was after the Illinois rematch:

“Honestly, because I’m an inner-city kid, I’ve never been called soft ever. That’s never been a question in my mind. Nobody ever questioned my toughness before. I had to do some self-evaluating to see if I was actually soft—nah, I’m joking. (laughs) As a group, we’ve got a lot of inner-city guys. We’ve played a lot of basketball. People play ’21’ games where you’ve gotta be tough. It was kinda confusing.”

Since the first Illinois game, Walton has played like the player he was supposed to become out of high school. His averages in the six games since are all-conference—if not All-American—quality: 34.2 minutes, 19.7 points, 6.8 rebounds, 3.2 assists, 1.5 turnovers. His shooting in that span is remarkable: 55% on twos, 50% on threes, 86% on free throws (on an astonishing 72% FT rate). He's taken greater control of the offense and still playing the most efficient ball of his career.

It may be too late, but it's not too little. It's bitterly disappointing that Walton's breakthrough comes in conjunction with what can only be described as a collapse by Zak Irvin, who has five points on 2-for-18 shooting from the field with zero free throw attempts, five assists, and six turnovers over the last two games. If Michigan gets much of anything out of Irvin over the last week, they're in position to make the tournament with a half-decent close to the conference schedule. They got practically nothing.

Rebounding: Blergh

Speaking of practically nothing, here's a stat: Moe Wagner and Mark Donnal played 39 minutes against Ohio State and combined for one defensive rebound. OSU, the eighth-best offensive rebounding team in the conference, pulled down 48.5% of their misses.

As Jim Calhoun, who I thought did an excellent job breaking down the technical aspect of Saturday's game, pointed out multiple times, Michigan's big men were simply outmuscled. Wagner's issues usually stemmed from positioning; Trevor Thompson was able to box him out and seal him off, which shouldn't be happening on the defensive end of the floor. Donnal couldn't keep Thompson behind him even if he had good positioning initially; there was a rebound with five minutes left that I'm too ennui-stricken to clip in which Donnal had the initial boxout and let Thompson go right around him. Walton couldn't hide his frustration heading into the ensuing timeout.

Wagner doesn't have more than five defensive rebounds in any Big Ten game this year, and he's failed to surpass three in seven of those ten games. Donnal, meanwhile, has recorded multiple defensive rebounds in precisely one B1G game this season (3, vs. Maryland); Walton, the goddang point guard, is literally doubling his defensive rebound rate in conference play. (#FreeTeske.) DJ Wilson's defensive rebounding has also taken a sharp dive in B1G games.

As John Beilein pointed out after the game, this doesn't entirely fall on the bigs, either:

Some of the rebounds, as I watch it, will not be about effort. It will be about the ball bounced to them or they had really good positioning, or it was just about mix-ups on defense—where a guy either got blown by or we missed something somewhere along the line. When a guy steps off to give help and his man slides in and wedges you and gets a rebound—there’s no boxing out; he’s boxed you out before you could ever get there.

Here's an example with multiple breakdowns:

OSU gets Michigan rotating with a high screen, and that rotation is the first problem: as OSU swings the ball into the corner, Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman gets caught ball-watching instead of getting back to a man, a bad habit of his that also led to at least one wide-open Marc Loving three in this game. Either MAAR or Donnal needs to be hauling ass for the paint, where Zak Irvin is tasked with guarding two players by his lonesome, which brings up another issue: M's defensive communication breaks down far too often.

Then there are the actual boxout attempts. MAAR is lost in space; Donnal is beaten to the paint and sealed off by Micah Potter; Irvin falls over after Loving slips around him and boxes him out; Walton never sees Andre Wesson, who ultimately grabs the rebound, sneak in from the corner. Donnal then allows an embarrassingly easy and-one to a guy three inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter than him.

If I had to pick one play to sum up Michigan's defense this year, that one's very much in the running.