Previously: center.

ROSTER

Brandon Johns (Sr.): Athletic enigma has been on cusp of breakout for entire career. Performed well in extended Livers absences as sophomore and junior. Quality three-point stroke (35%) but low volume; contests at rim; gets after offensive rebounds.

Moussa Diabate (Fr.): Is getting more than 15 MPG so chunk of those will come at the 4. Offensive viability may depend on one of Dickinson/Diabate getting three point range; defensive viability looks, uh, good.

Terrance Williams (So.): Undersized junkyard dog type needs to fix his shot but had his moments, particularly while feeding former AAU teammate Dickinson down low. Probably in line for scattered minutes in preparation for bigger role as upperclassman.

Caleb Houstan (Fr.): Primarily addressed as a 3 but has the size to play the 4 if necessary.

Will Tschetter (Fr.): Assumption around these parts is that Tschetter will redshirt, or get very limited minutes, since he's coming out of small-school Minnesota basketball. But he is a 6'8", 245 pound shooter so he could break through even if he's limited defensively. 

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS

[Campredon]

What does a season of Big Minutes Brandon Johns look like?

I think this post makes it official: Big Minutes Brandon Johns is an MGoBlog hobbyhorse. Johns's production as a 10 MPG backup has been sporadic, but when forced into larger roles by Isaiah Livers injuries over the past couple years he's been effective. This was most succinctly summarized in the aftermath of the Penn State game:

Johns oscillates wildly. Brandon Johns had a rough game to the point where Michigan inserted Terrance Williams late when they wanted to switch everything, but even in there he had a number of defensive possessions where he was excellent against pick and roll and able to contest without fouling. If he can just get his feet under him and not, you know, commit four turnovers in 14 minutes Michigan might have something there.

This situation feels a lot like early Eli Brooks. This Brooks is unrecognizable compared to the sophomore and even junior version. That version went through long stretches where he felt almost unplayable because the ball would get to his hands and possessions would die there due to his uncertainty and lack of confidence. This version of Brooks is attacking the basket when appropriate and has a hair trigger from three when he gets a look.

So it does happen. Johns himself had a stretch in the middle of conference play last year that felt like a breakout, and then he turned back into a very athletic pumpkin.

This continued for much of the Big Ten season, and then Isaiah Livers got hurt. That also happened last year, and in there we have a fairly large sample size of significant minutes for Johns. He had at least 18 in all but four games and started 10. His numbers over that span:

• 15% usage
• 6.6 OREB rate
• 11 TO rate
• 30/47 shooting from two (64%)
• 19/50 from three (38%)
• 40 FT rate, 35/39 from the line (64%).

That added up to a 119 ORTG. Not bad for a guy labeled a perpetual enigma. Last year's closing stretch was also without Livers; Johns didn't shoot that well but got to the line a ton and put up a 111 ORTG on significantly higher usage. You can work with this:

You can especially work with it if Johns gets a little more aggressive about his perimeter shot. He's hit 35% of his threes over the course of his career but he went from a 60-40 split between twos and threes last year to 75-25. More willingness to shoot should help his TO rate, which spiked last year, without hurting his eFG much.

[After THE JUMP: moon man and junkyard dog]

Johns projects as a solid third banana, taking advantage of advantageous spots to get his own offense and creating a few shots for himself and others. Finding someone in the guard spots to be #2 to Dickinson's #1 is important to keep Johns from being relied on too heavily, which may lead to stretches where confidence is lacking and turnovers frequent.

Evaluating Johns on defense is a trickier proposition, because you can punch in some on/off splits that look pretty good and some that look pretty bad. He got jerked from PF to C quite a bit over his first few years in Ann Arbor, which resulted in a lot of mental breakdowns since Johns didn't have a good grasp of either spot. Unfortunately, this is a spot where Hoop Lens doesn't quite have the granularity to give you a great answer with our traditional "screenshot all the things" approach, but a glimpse at his sophomore year:

• 2019-20 PPP with Teske and Johns on the court: 0.95
• 2019-20 PPP with Teske on, Johns off: 0.92
• 2019-20 PPP with Johns on, Teske/Davis/Castleton off: 1.06

That latter is just 70 possessions but it does feature an eight point 2P% gap (54% with Johns at C, 46% with Johns otherwise). Johns emphatically erased that last year:

Johns isn't likely to play much center but those numbers are indicative of a guy who figured out where he was supposed to be. And when Johns was in the right spot under the basket, his ability to contest was impressive.

Johns presence next to the starting center did not occasion a meaningful drop in PPP allowed or two point %, unlike last year. It seems like he's figured it out—mostly, there were occasional mix-ups even last year—and that his athleticism makes him break even, more or less, with Livers and/or Wagner.

Uh, repetitive question about Diabate?

Diabate is likely to play some four, probably for half or more of his minutes. The general outline of those minutes was already discussed in the post about center, where it was theorized that Johns projecting to start at the four means that all three candidates for major minutes at the spot are going to have post game and that we'd be seeing an awful lot of high-low action. It is suggested it'll be fine:

When Brandon Johns took over the starting job at the 4, things were suddenly reminiscent of the Jordan Murphy/Daniel Oturu Minnesota teams. (Minus Richard Pitino looking pained at the general higgeldy-piggeldy unfolding in front of his face.) Michigan ran a ton of high-low post sets that were generally effective.

That was an on-the-fly adjustment to an injury. Now Michigan has an entire offseason planning around the fact that they're going to have two effective post scorers on the floor at all times. The high-low install and repetition is going to be relentless, and that's going to give those twin towers lineups more viability.

There isn't a whole lot to expand on here since we're dealing with an incoming freshman who hasn't established a baseline of college performance—and also Diabate's game has expanded rapidly over the past year and doesn't seem set to stop. Matt D's latest video of him catches him with a smooth face-up 15-footer early in this clip:

It's not likely that he's a good option from three in year one—and there's probably not going to be a year two—but it's not out of the realm of possibility that he's a decent one. Dickinson also might be able to develop his game to add a little stretch. He definitely has an elbow jumper, and there was that tantalizing practice video embedded in the previous post.

Meanwhile there are no questions about whether Diabate can check college 4s. He can probably check college anything. If the offense functions while Diabate and Dickinson are on the court together, forget about it.

What can Terrance Williams offer?

[Campredon]

Largely depends on his shooting. Last year teams sagged off him and the offense tended to bog down. Ace grabbed a representative screenshot:

Going 1/14 from three will do that. Folks started saying things like "he's open for a reason" as this happened, but coming in it was expected that Williams would be at least a decent shooter. Matt D:

Known for his ability to overpower defenders to the rim, Terrance did not disappoint. On several occasions, Williams bullied defenders to the rim with one hard dribble before finishing with good body control or stopping on a dime and hitting defenders with the up-and-under to get a clean look. We were really impressed with the DMV-area natives perimeter shotmaking. Terrance looked extremely comfortable knocking down shots from distance off the catch and midrange pull-ups off the bounce.

It is notoriously difficult to get anything but counting stats from high school games, and I can't find anything for Williams except some EYBL numbers. FWIW, he went 12/25 from three and 29/35 from the line in 149 minutes. This sample is small, but about twice as big as his freshman year sample.

Don't write him off as a perimeter option just yet. It's common for sparingly-used freshmen to put up ugly shooting numbers. Freshman Brooks from 3: 25%. David DeJulius was 1/15 as a freshman and hit 36% on 83 attempts the next year. (He fell back to the Bad Place on a horrible, horrible Cincinnati team this year.) Moe Wagner was 2/11 as a freshman. Guys who don't get their feet under them and often play in weird or end-of-bench lineups don't have shooting numbers that we should put a ton of stock in.

Williams was limited to just over two games worth of possessions in our typical Big Ten + tourney + Toledo slice of last year, so statistical conclusions are hard to draw. FWIW:

Michigan migrated more of its shots to beyond the three point line at the same time they experienced a dive in efficiency out there, which is part Williams actually shooting and part a reduction in the quality of shots Michigan was getting off—also note a significant dip in FT rate.

The defensive numbers are an anomaly since no one person has that much impact on defensive rebounding, which is much more team-driven than offensive rebounding. Williams's DREB rate was giant (26), FWIW, but implausibly so. Still, it's not a bad thing for Williams to be a break-even defender in every other category on the nation's #4 team in defensive efficiency.

If Williams can get to decent from the outside, his rebounding, defensive competency, and chemistry with Dickinson may allow him to carve out a 5-10 minute role. Or he could have a role similar to last year's—sporadic—due to the other possibilities at the four.