3/22/2021 – Michigan 86, LSU 78 – 22-4, 14-3 Big Ten, Sweet 16

With apologies to Chaundee Brown and Eli Brooks, all hail the real MVP: regression to the mean.

Cam Thomas came out in full-on NBA Jam mode, and folks I gotta tell you it felt bad. After Thomas hit a one-footed fadeaway 18-footer around the midway point of the first half it felt like he would never miss anything. It felt like by the second half he would scorpion kick a ball into the basket for his billionth point and then fade into the background like the avatar of a fallen god. "Peace," Thomas would utter mysteriously, "basketball has been solved."

Meanwhile Michigan came out and hit one of six clean looks from three. Visions of Will Wade hunched over a cauldron full of booster cash and other nefarious reagents flooded my vision. This is how LSU gives up three after three and survives. This is occult, man. Why would LSU stop at strong offers or rampant, repeated institutional Title IX dysfunction? Satan! Satan is involved. I feel his presence.

These are the things you think in the first eight minutes of a basketball game when you're happy with almost all the shots both teams take and furious at the results.

None of these feelings show up in the box score. LSU shot 44% from two; Michigan shot 67%. LSU shot 24% from three; Michigan shot 40%. This game was only a single digit affair because LSU turned the ball over all of three times. This sounds weirdly disciplined for a team that frequently didn't bother to even raise a hand in the direction of three-point shooters, but then again only one guy on the team bothers to pass inside the arc. Water finds its level.

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With apologies to regression to the mean, all hail the real MVPs: Eli Brooks and Chaundee Brown.

Both are four-year college players, but other than that they could not be more different. Brooks has been at Michigan almost as long as D'Mitrik Trice has been an undead warlock. Brown is new. Brooks spent much of his career in a state of emotional precarity, one turnover or missed shot from a funk that would last games and games. Brown showed up determined to shoot every last plausible three he could get his hands on, no matter recent results. Brooks is listed at a willowy 6'1" and when he dunks a basketball everyone says "I didn't know he could do that!" even though he just did it a couple games ago. Brown is 6'5" and built like a linebacker. When he dunks I wince in case he does a chin up that destroys the basket.

But here they did the same things, more or less. They checked Cam Thomas, in their varied ways. They buried open threes. They ventured inside the line successfully. They did not stand around with question marks over their head when offensive actions were attempted. They led Michigan to a Sweet 16.

Remarkably, that's their sixth in the last eight tournaments. The two exceptions were years when Caris Levert got injured*. The only team that can match that claim is Gonzaga, which has morphed from a curious team into a dominant program over the last few years. Michigan will seek to match Gonzaga in that, too.

Brooks and Brown feel like the past and future of Michigan basketball. Brooks is a heady overachiever maximizing his talent. Brown is a physical marvel unleashed by newfound structure. This is not to say they are separate. The Venn diagram has some overlap here. As mentioned, Brooks has thrown down some rad dunks, and Brown is the kind of culture guy who might blow up on the sideline at Breslin. Together they spearheaded a second-round tourney win, and point the direction forward. Less a transition than an adaptation.

Right now Michigan needs both of them as they stare down the only chalk left in this bizarre tournament.

*[As is required by law, let us reiterate that LeVert was shooting 53/45 with a big free throw rate, a 33 assist rate, a 13 TO rate, on 26% usage when he was lost for the season. He had one bad game against a high major in there (SMU) but was more or less at that level of production in the other four A-tier games before he was lost.]

[After THE JUMP: heeeeeeeere's Willy!]

BULLETS

Closeouts affect things on the margins. Thomas's early hot streak was primarily against Brooks—Smith got matched on him for another hand-in-the-face long jumper—and consisted almost exclusively of shots like the above. I don't think there's much more to do on those. If those are the shots you're getting up against anyone you're not going to have a good time.

Thomas in particular is almost contest-immune. He has an eFG of 55% on unguarded catch and shoot opportunities. On guarded ones that drops to… 52%. He fell off later in this game because that was always going to happen, and also he played 40 minutes. Chaundee Brown did get some minutes on him late in the first half, but down the stretch Michigan matched Brown on Javonte Smart because Smart was getting into the lane and hitting those floaters. Eli stuck on Thomas and Thomas didn't do much. Heck, Thomas took Smith to the rim a couple times and got a charge and a massively contested miss for his troubles.

Anyway: yes, closeouts matter. Length matters. What matters more is the kind of shot you've induced from the offense.

The King of Floaters. Speaking of: Javonte Smart's floater gave me horrible flashbacks to Cassius Winston. Usually you induce a floater and chalk up an EV win. Smart makes that dodgier since he's at nearly a PPP on runners over the course of the season. Here is the spot where it really felt like Michigan's height was an issue for them. A closeout on a jumper is a relatively minor effect relative to Smart being able to get two feet in the paint and go up, even through some contact.

A contrast in styles. Michigan had 22 assists, 79% of their buckets. LSU had 8, 30%. All of those came from Smart or Aundre Hyatt. It seemed like a turning point in Michigan's ability to defend LSU was when they realized that no one other than Smart was going to pass the ball and they started collapsing on drives like Michigan State against Kofi Cockburn.

Meanwhile LSU had a massive shot volume advantage because they turned the ball over just three times to Michigan's 12 and had four more OREBs. Michigan combatted that by almost exclusively finding good looks.

No secret sauce. The mystery of LSU's three-point defense is solved: it's blind luck. Michigan got up 25 threes and it could have been 35 if guys didn't turn down a bunch of okay-to-great looks. Maybe a handful of them were meaningfully contested. A corner three where Javonte Smart closed out, sort of, and didn't even bother to lift his hand rather stuck out as a meaningful non-contest, if you get my drift.

Michigan hit 10 of those 25 looks, a 40% clip. That 40% versus the 30% LSU has given up on the season is the whole margin. On the one hand, rough justice. On the other hand basketball games get dizzying if you contemplate a couple misses here and there. Brooks banked one in. Delete that and the finish to this game is a blazer.

eeeeeeeeeeeee [Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos via Getty Images]

Chaundee's first shot == Moe Wagner's first shot. Brown got a kickout for a mid-range catch and shoot two. That went down, and things took off from there. This is entirely irrational feelingsball but man Brown's first shot seems like a hinge point in a lot of games, just like Moe Wagner's first one.

From there he was off. Brown was Michigan's best player when it came to exploiting LSU's matador defense, repeatedly driving baseline past guys with no inclination to stay in front of him.

I'd say he roasted Cam Thomas here but that implies the opponent isn't stuffing himself in an oven with a smile on his face, seasoning himself the whole time.

This was brought into light by the opposition: Brown himself is fairly contest-immune. The confidence with which he goes up even in the face of closeouts is notable. Other guys on the team will turn down open threes to drive far more often—there was a particularly frustrating Wagner drive when nobody was even going to close him out that turned into a turnover and a fast break bucket the other way. Brown has those freshman Zak Irvin vibes where if his feet are set and he's got a little bit of space you know it's going up. And he's hitting 40% so nobody's going to complain. (Except when he misses shots and they do.)

This is a foul

They were never going to keep calling it. LSU started the game by having Days put his face in Dickinson's chest. (The above is it happening to Davis several minutes later.) This resulted in a turnover when Dickinson tried to hit Johns on a back cut after Days snapped his head back when Dickinson tried to rotate and do basketball things. That's supposed to be one of those "cylinder" fouls, but expecting an NCAA tourney crew to remember the cylinder after a year where nobody's bothered with it seems… uh… optimistic.

I could insert various other officiating notes here, but I think people will boo at me and throw trash when I say that I was less perturbed about the various calls in the second half than Twitter seemed to be during the game. Sometimes you get something that looks like a ref show and then on the replay it's just that a lot of fouls are being committed. There were some weird ones or missed calls (the loose ball foul on Davis, Brown stepping OOB immediately before an LSU foul, Brown getting a very ticky-tack call while closing out a Thomas three) but this felt more like the players uglying up a game instead of the refs.

There. Throw your rotten vegetables.

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

Terrance Williams: functional? Williams got nine terrifying minutes but mostly held his own. Smart hit a pull-up three over him and he had a couple other moments on defense where he was unable to stay in front of LSU's athletes; he also had a bad turnover when he was trapped against the LSU press. I hardly blame him for that; that is not a situation a freshman power forward should be put in.

On the other hand he cut to the basket so Dickinson could finally get something other than a hockey assist and had a putback off a missed Brown three. His defense occasionally cropped up as an issue but he wasn't a glaring deficiency.

Williams was a reasonably good shooter in high school and needs to recapture that before my "senior Kenny Goins" comparisons can bear fruit.

Also to be hailed: front ends. Michigan had five different one-and-one opportunities and went 5/5 on front ends. Dickinson missed the back half of one opportunity late in the first half.

Not the Ivy League. Mike Smith struggled with LSU's athleticism. Things got off to a rocky start when he attempted a pull-up jumper that Thomas could have blocked if Smith was another foot off the floor. Later he had a couple of sloppy turnovers on which he underestimated LSU's ability to accelerate. The travel in the last couple minutes was probably just one of those things.

This is a concern going into Florida State, which is very large everywhere but particularly in the backcourt.

JUST ONE SMALL PROBLEM, WILL. Okay so you've got four badass offensive players who barely pass and barely need to pass and just aggressively wander towards the basket and put in impossible shots. You don't turn the ball over because you don't pass. Your offense is so rudimentary Sean Astin keeps popping up asking if he can star in it. And it's top 5 nationally.

Just one question: [axes through wall] WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR PRACTICE TIME, WILL? DRAWING AQUAMAN? You have the number one hundred twenty three defense in America despite being the beneficiaries of what feels like a historic amount of three-point luck. Maybe try drills like "get your hands up occasionally" and "don't bend over for no reason on a baseline out of bounds" and "for God's sake I am begging you to just close out ONE GODDAMN TIME."

The funniest thing in the world will be if LSU gets its program nuked to the Stone Age because they were hell-bent on keeping Will Wade.

The shirt. I'm surprised they keep putting this on television:

I was really not feeling SEC twitter mocking Michigan for having one fan on a message board who thinks it's RICO when 1) the above and 2) the only thing that guy wrong was the statute they should bury LSU athletic department under.

The best of post-game twitter. Buzzfeed article lightning round time:

This guy said I’m not done playing jazz flute for you yet pic.twitter.com/cq0VRWvDhW

— Noah Neidlinger (@candor_for_sale) March 23, 2021

Also.

pic.twitter.com/hWLoQnAkfy

— Mark Markney. (@MarktheNomad) March 23, 2021

Also.

Helluva win there by Michigan without Isaiah Livers. Advancing to its sixth Sweet 16 in eight years and fourth in a row.

— Brendan Quinn (@BFQuinn) March 23, 2021

Also.

Among other things, people who believe that hating Michigan is a personality felt really invested in this game, which makes this better.

— zach (@zamartin) March 23, 2021

Etc.: Michigan-FSU is at 5 Sunday. Nantz/Hill/Raftery on the call. Only two teams left in the tourney have won titles in the last 25 years: Villanova and Syracuse. Rodger Sherman on the second round winners and losers. The biggest loser: floor slaps. Welcome to the resistance, Rodger. This is the wackiest Sweet 16 ever. M-FSU is the only chalk matchup.