THE ESSENTIALS

WHAT	#20 Michigan (15-9) vs #39 Indiana (16-8)	"booooooooo" –these guys [JD Scott]
WHERE	Crisler Arena Ann Arbor MI
WHEN	1PM Sunday
THE LINE	Michigan –6,  Michigan W 72% (KenPom) Michigan –6.9, Michigan W 76% (Torvik)
TELEVISION	CBS

THE US

Seth's graphic:

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I think we can say Michigan is rolling? Four of the last five are wins, the sole loss came after a game-changing flagrant that I bet DJ Carstensen got chewed out for, the defense is tightening up, and Livers is throwing down one-handed tomahawks. Hordes of people are feverishly slicing out sections of the season on Bart Torvik Dot Com. It all feels somehow familiar.

Is this… a trademark Beilein surge?

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the preview.]

THE THEM

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Michigan's about to face the third-worst team in the Big Ten. Because it's this year's Big Ten that means a top 40 opponent currently on the right side of the cut line on 3/4ths of BracketMatrix submissions.

In the nonconference Indiana took out Florida State, UConn, and Notre Dame plus top-100 mid-major Louisiana Tech. They did lose to Arkansas, and it should be noted that Indiana somehow managed to play a nonconference schedule with zero road games. UConn was in NYC, ND was in Indianapolis, everything else was at Assembly Hall. Indiana's lost every road game they've played except the freebie at Nebraska.

In conference Indiana is 6-7 like Michigan; they're coming off an 89-77 win against an increasingly crippled Iowa team* in which Devonte Green went nuts behind the line (7/11) .

*[With Cordell Pemsl suspended and CJ Frederick injured after about ten minutes Iowa was down to six scholarship players. Fran McCaffrey seemed to think Frederick would be out a while, which would suuuuck for Iowa fans. Imagine this Iowa team with Bohannon, Frederick, Pat McCaffrey, and Jack Nunge available.]

PERSONNEL

IU guards don't do this much [JD Scott]

Indiana's roster is a muddle with only two guys playing more than 70% of available minutes and 11 different players getting ~20% or more. It looks like sophomore Damezi Anderson has dropped out of the rotation, probably because he's shooting 23% from three and takes most of his shots from there. Some of this is due to injuries from earlier in the season but here are their last five games, per Kenpom:

Guh? Guh. I guess we'll start with point guard Rob Phinisee, who started most of last year and then lost his job over the offseason. He reclaimed it a month ago… for reasons. Phinisee is a slight guy with mediocre handles who's taken one step back for every one forward in year two. He's a decent assist guy (eighth in ARate in league play) but has a TO rate higher than his assist rate. He is also horrendous inside the line, shooting 37%. He's bad at the rim; he's worse (22%) away from it.

Phinisee's main positive is that he's hitting 40% from three, up from 31% last season. That's not on much volume—he averages 3 attempts per game in league play, which is the stat split in which he gets the most minutes. Almost all of Phinisee's threes are catch and shoot; he's not a pull-up threat.

In short, drop coverage is perfect against Phinisee.

Junior Al Durham is the starting two. His role has expanded a bit without Romeo Langford around; the main difference with Durham this year is that he's getting to the line a ton. He's #1 in the conference in free throw rate and converts those at an 80% clip.

In previous years Durham had DJ Wilson vibes where he'd do about three things a game that made you say "wow" and then disappeared into the background. That remains the case, and if you keep Durham off the line you'll be fine. In Tier A+B games he's shooting 35% from two. He's not quite as miserable as Phinisee in the midrange but he's not much better.

The aforementioned Devonte Green sucks up almost all the minutes at the 1 and 2 that don't go to Phinisee and Durham. He is Not Just A Shooter with an assist rate of 20, a TO rate nearly that high, and a similarly miserable time from two. He has a D'Mitrik-Trice-ish ratio of shots at the rim (16%) to everything else. He will take some threes off the bounce, unlike his compatriots, and after the Iowa outburst he's up to 39% on the season.

I guess we'll call Justin Smith the starting 3. Smith is every Michigan fan's favorite current Indiana player because of his inexplicable 24-point outburst against MSU last year in which he hit three of the seven threes he hit on the season.

When not doing that Smith is a traditional back-to-the-basket four with Brent Petway hops and a little bit more skill. Joey Brunk's ability to step out and hit jumpers mitigates the awkwardness of having Smith at the 3 for a big chunk of time. Smith, Brunk, and Jackson-Davis have been on the floor together for about a third of Indiana's possessions and that lineup is surviving offensively largely because of three point luck. On the other hand, Indiana's defensive FTA rate more than halves and may be suffering bad three point luck themselves on that end of the floor:

A classic O-vs-D conundrum obscured by the fact that threes go down all willy nilly.

Freshman Trayce Jackson-Davis was the composite #30 recruit and arrived at Indiana a burly 245 pounds; he hit the ground running. Jackson-Davis is notionally a four but functionally the five whenever he's on the court. He's the only Hoosier with a meaningful block rate—his hovers just outside the top 50 nationally. He's a double-digit OREB guy, a 20% DREB guy, and gets the vast bulk of his work on offense at the rim.

A whopping 75% of Jackson-Davis's shots are at the rim, where he converts at 66%. That's not bad since only half of those are assisted. He's solid on the kind of post-ups that get filed as other twos, and while there's been a bit of a drop off in league play he still maintains an ORTG near 120 because he has a superb TO rate for a big who's generating a lot of his own shots. He also gets to the line a ton and converts at a 72% rate once there.

This would be a really nice game for Jon Teske to return to last year's form and D-up a legitimate post threat. Failing that this is a team with guys you can double off of.

The final nominal starter is grad transfer Joey Brunk, who had an incredible season for Butler a year ago:

Ace: No games removed!

That is Joey Brunk’s performance at Butler, which some may note is in a worse conference than Indiana.

Seth: Maybe putting Joey Brunk on the court and then removing him magically makes one better at defense?

Brian: The truly incredible part is that the other two guys getting minutes at C were a 6'10" guy with a 1.4% block rate and a freshman.

Indiana has made this work by chaining Brunk to Jackson-Davis. Only a sixth of IU possessions feature Brunk and no TJD. This is wise. The only thing separating Indiana from utter disaster when Brunk is playing C is astounding luck:

When they're on the court together, it's completely fine.

On offense Brunk is a finesse big who can face up, shoot from the elbow, and generate a fair number of opportunities on post ups. He's a big dude at 6'11, 245, and his near-total lack of lift is less of a problem on offense because he's a crafty son of a gun. Think of him as power mushroom Austin Davis.

Brunk takes advantage of the fact that he's a 6'11" four-man with a double-digit OREB rate of his own; free throw shooting (52%) is a problem.

Other than Greene, the Indiana bench is broad and shallow. There's one ORTG above 100, that an artifact of a 6'8" guy dunking on some low majors. The folks in question:

• Star-crossed C De'Ron Davis is still around. He can't jump any more and his hitting 40% from two and 43% from the free throw line. He only gets lengthy rollouts when there's foul trouble.
• PF Race Thompson is the guy who dunked on some low-majors. He's coming off 24 minutes against Iowa in which he had 10 points, two blocks, and four steals; he is a pesky guy on defense.
• Freshman SG Armaan Franklin is shooting 48/24 and has a hefty TO rate.
• Redshirt freshman Jerome Hunter, who recruitniks may remember as a guy who got away, is shooting 49/29 with most of his shots from three.

Anyone who's not a starter can be sagged off of.

THE RELEVANT NUMBERS

Indiana factors in conference play:

left: offense, right: defense

A combination of few attempts and poor shooting sees Indiana land 12th in percent of points behind the arc.

This game will be a movable object versus a resistible force when it comes to turnovers. IU's the worst in the league at taking care of the ball; Michigan is 11th at forcing TOs.

THE KEYS

Drop away. Indiana is horrendous at converting the kind of shots drop coverage gives up to guards. Green has a few off the dribble threes but not many; everyone else has none; all three IU guards are miserable in the midrange. Meanwhile IU gets work done at the bucket.

Johns might be important against a big IU team [Scott]

Can anyone handle the second IU big? Or the first one? IU's got a weird configuration but it's working okay for them because they pose some questions with two 245-pound dudes in the same frontcourt. Both Brunk and Jackson-Davis get a ton of shots at the rim and are very good at getting there themselves. Is Michigan comfortable with Isaiah Livers on a guy like Jackson-Davis? Can a guy like Brunk chase Livers around screens? Can Michigan force Indiana to drop their three-big lineup and put in a scuffling backup?

Who adjusts to who might depend on how a couple of early threes go. Livers is going to have looks. If he hits them Indiana might be forced to go away from what looks like their most offensively productive lineups.

Rebound, rebound, rebound. Michigan should win this game if shot volume is equal. Big if.

THE SECTION WHERE I PREDICT THE SAME THING KENPOM DOES

Michigan by 6.

This is the bit where I note that Kenpom and the like are now underrating Michigan a bit because of the Livers injury.