The poster above is pretty reliable on basketball; however, I gotta say, you nailed this one right on the head.

Walton's leadership was critical.  He willed that team to improvement in Feb and March, and DEMANDED they all play defense like they meant it. That plus the talent of Wilson carried us.  

Somebody on this team needs to step up and be the leader.  Point guards are presently a weakness.  We'll see.

almost every game, sometimes multiple times, from the perspective of a coach.  So here's the story of how last season went from that perspective:

Dan Dakich predicted before the season that we'd go to Final Four and it wasn't as much attention-seeking-players-dad lunacy as it was an informed prediction coming from a guy with inside information.  That inside information told him that DJ had made the leap, and that Walton was finally healthy and playing the way we thought he'd play after his very promising freshman year.

Then we watched them crush a solid Marquette team and a very good SMU team (#11 in final kenpom) in the PNIT and that's when anyone paying attention saw that we indeed had a team that could get to the Final Four.  We talked about it here.  National pundits talked about it.  We were ranked #15 in kenpom and that belied the actual dominance because it factors in preseason expectation that weighed down the ranking.

My guess is, like most of the Michigan fan-base, you didn't pay attention to the beginning of the season because football was still going on.

It was clear we had a really good, talented, healthy experienced backcourt for the first time ever under Beilien and we had two potential NBA bigs in DJ and Wagner. If you had told me after NYC that we'd finish the season tied for 5th in the conference, would rally to win the BTT and then lose in the sweet 16, I would have shrugged and been mildly disappointed, given what I knew to be true as stated in my previous sentence.

After the great start, the middle of the season was up and down, and on average pretty mediocre thanks to four main things: A) Zak Irvin going on an extended somewhat fluky run of poor play B) Lazy, unfocused defense C) Poor luck on opponent three point shooting and D) poor luck in close games.

A) C) and D) were bound to come back to the mean and they did. B) was turned around by two things: 1) the leadership of Walton to turn his own effort around and hold others accountable and 2) The coaches putting DJ at center and playing Wagner fewer minutes.

So we had a really good team with really good players, we let ourselves get complacent and then turned it around.  If you started watching at the end of the OOC schedule or beginning of B1G schedule, that would look like a super impressive turnaround. And from the mid-point to the end, it was a great turnaround.

But it was more like a person being fit, letting themselves go and gaining a bunch of weight, then committing to getting fit again.  Credit the team for doing that, and huge props to Walton for pulling the team together.  It was great they did that.  But they were mostly turning around some poor habits that sunk in and getting back to where they should/could have been all along. I'm not going to give as much credit for a turnaround when the bad place you're in is a place you shouldn't be in.

As for Walton flipping a switch, it wasn't as dramatic as the story goes (other than him fixing his own defensive complacency and bringing the team with him in the middle of the season).  He scored 28 in a great game against SMU. His non-conf and conference stats are almost identical. He did play incredibly well down the stretch and that's the reason we did see modest improvement from sleeper final four team to team that maybe should have been there but needed some back luck to not make the final four, but I contend that he was very good early on as well.