Hoop Vision on Luka Garza. Iowa's just down the road for the basketball program:

Would they even have helped? In year one Juwan Howard had a couple of high profile recruiting reversals that stung: losing Josh Christopher to Arizona State and Isaiah Todd to the G-League. This was depressing at the time; for obvious reasons it no longer is. We've talked about Christopher some. Todd's been on the shelf as the NBA figures out what the hell to do with the G-League, but his Ignite team recently started taking the floor. Early returns via Sam Vecenie:

Teams remain unenthused by Isaiah Todd

Todd didn’t bring much to the table in the opener. He had a couple of nice defensive possessions but overall didn’t look like he was at the same level of play as most of the other guys out there. He played 17 minutes but had two points and three rebounds on 1-for-4 from the field. The 6-foot-9 forward was considered one of the top-five players in his class when he was an underclassman in high school but steadily dropped down the composite rankings through his prep career as he started to float out on the perimeter while not particularly improving as a shooter or decision-maker.

“There’s no way I’d draft him right now,” one scout said. “I wish him the best, but he didn’t look ready for pro basketball.”

The G League is a tough, highly competitive league. There’s no shame in a teenager not being ready to play in such an atmosphere. But it also goes to show just how far off Todd is from contributing to an NBA situation if he can’t even contribute positively to this one. I have Todd outside the top 80 on my board.

There's obviously a big gap between G-League teams and college. I wonder about the counterfactual where he's on this year's roster. Whose minutes is he taking? Terrance Williams, probably. Brandon Johns, maybe. Livers, Wagner, Brown: no.

If you're looking at one-and-done types the portal is likely to cough up just as many quality options as high school recruiting.

Also! This got slipped into an eval of Todd on Prospective Insight:

Much more effective when he plays inside-out, but doesn’t embrace contact; Subpar free-throw shooter; Was viewed as having one of the highest upsides entering high school, but has largely failed to improve substantially and became enamored with demonstrating his improving perimeter skill-set; Weak and often unwilling passer to date; Plus shot-blocker (more from the weak-side); Solid student; His mother is substantially more vocal than he is; Needs to add upper-body strength, tighten his handle, refine his perimeter shot, and embrace contact.

Grimace dot emoji.

[After THE JUMP: the spot you want to be in]

The spot you want to be. Brendan Quinn on the Wisconsin game:

Isaiah Livers, the team’s senior captain, remembers the moment like this: “Our leader, the boss — he was talking about, ‘This is where we want to be!'”

Really? This was where Michigan wanted to be? Facing its largest halftime deficit of the year? Trying to maneuver through the malaise of a three-week layoff? At Kohl Center, of all places, a building where No. 21 Wisconsin had won 19 of its last 21 games and was 72-17 under coach Greg Gard?

Howard reassured his team that everything was fine.

“Nobody was pointing fingers,” Livers recalled. “No one was upset. We just knew we were down 12.”

I don't agree with your police work. Alex Kirschner looks at home court advantage in Slate, and I am confused about the question in the sub-headline ("Home-field advantage is real. Why?") given the data cited in the article. I'm excluding various bubble situations cited since they are not relevant. These are the items noted:

• "In the early weeks of the NBA’s new season, which is being played in empty or mostly empty home arenas, home teams are trending toward their worst win percentage ever—just a shade over 50 percent."
• "In the English Premier League, there was no bubble. Home sides, playing in their own stadiums, won 41.6 percent and drew 20.5 percent of matches during the stretch of 2020 when no fans were allowed into stadiums, a drop from winning 44.8 percent and drawing 25 percent with fans in the stands in the prior season."
• "In the NFL, a league that would never dream of playing in a bubble, home teams (some playing in front of a limited number of fans) went 127–128–1 in the regular season and 6–6 in the playoffs"
• "In MLB, where the home team gets the benefit of batting last, home-field advantage appeared even stronger than usual, as the Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh outlined. Home teams won 55.7 percent of their games, higher than the historical average of 54 percent and the highest mark in a single season since 2010."
• "And in equally bubble-averse college football, home teams (some, again, playing in front of smaller-than-usual crowds) went 318–216, a roughly 60 percent win rate that falls roughly in line with the sport’s history."

Most of those numbers the equivalent of a coinflip. The lone exceptions are baseball, which is incredibly random and has a major built-in advantage for home teams, and college football, which still played a bunch of non-conference games designed to be lopsided. In the Big Ten, which did not play nonconference games, home teams went 22-27.

This seems to be a pretty clear conclusion: fan yelling works and is the source of most home-field advantage. This is not the conclusion provided, though:

The pandemic has given strong backing to the idea that there’s something at play in home-field advantage that goes beyond the noise generated by boisterous fans. But as to what that something is, the pandemic has provided data points for and against every explanation.

I don't know how you get there from the data above, which clearly suggests that a lack of fans has severely dented—mostly erased—home field advantage in most sports.

Exit walk-on linebacker. I don't think anyone expected Adam Shibley to play much next year but now your expectations can decline further:

Michigan linebacker Adam Shibley is in the NCAA Transfer Portal today...four days after BenVanSumeren entered his name

— angelique (@chengelis) February 16, 2021

Shibley has some tape to show now and might be able to land at a starting job in the group of 5.

Scared off by Thomas Kithier. Enoch Boakye decommitted from MSU, which is a blow for their 2022 recruiting but one that they've got plenty of time to repair. I'm mostly interested in Boakye delivering what has to be one of the least realistic reasons for departing in the history of decommits:

“Just doing a lot of research with my people and watching a lot of games, it looks like they will have a lot of guys staying,” Boakye said. “I want to go to a place where I have the opportunity to make an impact right away. That’s the No. 1 goal of mine.”

Boakye might be reclassifying, which means that MSU's frontcourt would return intact for what would have been his freshman year. I don't know, if I was a five-star center and someone told me Thomas Kithier, Marcus Bingham, and Julius Marble were all returning my response would be "so?"

Make the nets bigger. Ken Dryden has an article in the Atlantic about the plague of ever-bigger goaltenders in hockey. This is the key problem it creates:

The most basic instruction every coach offers their forwards has always been, “Go to the net”—for rebounds, to deflect shots, to screen the goalie. Now they say the same but slightly differently. “Take away the goalie’s eyes. If he can see it, he’ll stop it.” If a goalie, even in his near-perfect position, can’t see the puck, he can’t move the few necessary inches to fill the unguarded spot, and if the puck happens to be shot exactly there, it will go in. Or, alternatively, if the goalie doesn’t see the puck but it hits him, he won’t have known ahead of time whether or when to shrug his upper body to create the cushion that swallows up any rebound. Instead, the puck will hit him and rebound somewhere in front of him and his instincts, his own worst enemy as it turns out, will take over. He will move toward it, opening himself up just enough. Or if the puck is deflected and goes in a new direction he couldn’t anticipate, the result is the same.

So for shooters and coaches, that is the strategy. Rush the net with multiple offensive players, multiple defensive players will go with them, multiple arms, legs, and bodies will jostle in front of the goalie, and the remaining shooters, distant from the net, will fire away hoping to thread the needle, hoping the goalie doesn’t see the needle being threaded, because if he does, he’ll stop it. The situation for the shooter is much like that of a golfer whose ball has landed deep in the woods. He’s been told many times that a tree is more air than leaves and branches, but with several layers of trees in front of him, somehow his ball will hit a leaf or branch before it gets to the green. Somehow, the shooter’s shot will not make it to the net. So he will try again. Because what else can he do?

The result: This game, one that allows for such speed and grace, one that has so much open ice, is now utterly congested.

You see this in the Big Ten whenever MSU or Notre Dame rolls into town. Tight checking, no lanes to the net, everyone in the slot. Dryden proposes various solutions, and the one that seems to work the best to me is to increase the size of the net. That would make more of the ice useful for shooting from and would punish the everyone-lay-down-in-the-slot approach to play, because those shots that got through would be much more dangerous.

Also:

• leaving your feet to block a shot should be a penalty
• offsides shouldn't exist (the two line pass still exists to prevent severe cherry-picking)
• batting pucks with a high stick should be legal (there is already a penalty for high-sticking and the rule does not dissuade players from trying to deflect pucks above their shoulders, because they do not know if it's above their shoulder and they might as well try)

The 2021 NHL draft takes are getting out of control. Corey Pronman's latest NHL mock draft:

1. Luke Hughes
2. Matt Beniers
3. Owen Power
4. Dylan Guenther
5. Kent Johnson

Going to assert that Michigan's 2021-22 team featuring four of the five top picks in the previous draft—knock on wood—would be unprecedented. (Also F Mackie Samoskevich makes Pronman's HMs.)

Meanwhile, SI's Ryan Kennedy still has Owen Power at the top of his list. Hughes is #1, Power #3, Beniers #7, Johnson #8 to FC Hockey.

Etc.: Cameron Krutwig driving that Rambler train again. More on Brown getting that game ball. The scout team, profiled. Todd McShay's latest mock draft has Kwity Paye at 21 and Jalen Mayfield at 28. There's going to be an NIT. Why? I don't know.