M draft picks-two opposing views on Juwan
Jett 11. Kobe 15. Two observations re: Juwan.
1. This should forever put to rest the misguided trope on this board that Juwan can’t develop players. The Athletic had their top 100 NBA prospects back in November. Jett was 23. Kobe wasn’t even on the list. And, only one school had multiple picks among the top 15. Not Duke. Or Kentucky, UNC, Kansas, etc. Yes, the only school in the country with two picks in the top 15 was Michigan!
2. However, this begs the question: how did a team with two top 15 NBA picks and Hunter Dickinson end up with a mediocre season and not make the tourney? Obviously, the talent was there and it was developed by Juwan. But, it never came together as a team. Fluke or a true reflection of Juwan’s lack of coaching acumen? And given that Juwan isn’t going anywhere soon, how is this remedied?
Discuss.
As an English major, I’m sticking with “beg the question.” Let’s see what the Oxford Dictionary says:
beg the question
phrase of beg
-
1.
(of a fact or action) raise a question or point that has not been dealt with; invite an obvious question.
Exactly what I had in mind. Nice try, though.
Wrong. Let's see what the OED actually says:
6. To take for granted without warrant; esp. in to beg the question: to take for granted the matter in dispute, to assume without proof.
1581 W. Clarke in Confer. iv. (1584) Ffiij, I say this is still to begge the question. 1687 Settle Refl. Dryden 13 Here hee's at his old way of Begging the meaning. 1680 Burnet Rochester (1692) 82 This was to assert or beg the thing in Question. 1788 Reid Aristotle's Log. v. §3. 118 Begging the question is when the thing to be proved is assumed in the premises. 1852 Rogers Ecl. Faith 251 Many say it is begging the point in dispute. 1870 Bowen Logic ix. 294 The vulgar equivalent for petitio principii is begging the question.
Such a losing battle (or is it a "loosing" battle?). I'm seeing the misuse more and more. I despair.
Oof, no.
As an English major, you'd be better off arguing that the colloquial usage is so well established that it's fine that you didn't follow the grammatical rule, and that everybody knew what you meant, which was "this raises the question" (in which case, you should just say "raise" the question to avoid the grammar police)
You could actually beg the question by saying something like "Juwan would never leave Michigan because he's a great coach and he's the best person to turn this thing around"
OP seems to be begging the question that Juwan develops talent, as that is by no means established. Jett, Houstan and Diabate being drafted does not prove the assertion that OP is taking for granted.
They are young and had to rely on a freshman point guard.
That is it. However there's one point that seems to elude some of us. With no lead dog, per say. Everyone,"thinks" I'm the man. Therefore yes, it's on Juwan to make it work, however most people in here couldn't get their own kids to work together to clean the kitchen. We had lots of talent. Talent does win games, cohesion wins Championships.
Admissions, NIL ad infinitum
well, they lost an absolute mind-boggling stinker to CMU and would have had 4-5 more wins if they could hold 5+ point leads in the last 3 minutes of games.
but, yea, this has been discussed like eleventy seven times already
Mediocre season? That's generous. That season was an abomination.
dudes play for juwan to go to the NBA. good things will happen eventually
Ah, a post that misuses "begging the question" and prompts comments ridiculing the OP for having or sharing an opinion or raising a question. Two of my favorites for the price of one!
This is such a dumb question. There is ONE player drafted in the entire first round that went to the Final Four. Having NBA players does not mean that you are going to dominate in NCAA.
I give up! Nobody likes this topic. So, here we go:
1. Rubber Soul (UK)-Beatles 2. After the Goldrush-Neil Young 3. Beggars Banquet-Rolling Stones 4. Highway 61 Revisited-Bob Dylan 5. Who’s Next-The Who 6. Untitled 4th album-Led Zeppelin 7. Smash Hits-Jimi Hendrix Experience 8. Greatest Hits-Sly and the Family Stone 9. Blue-Joni Mitchell 10. Katy Lied-Steely Dan
Discuss lol
I don't think one should include greatest hits compilations in a discussion of best classic albums.
Not a single artist… I enjoy the “Guardians of the Galaxy” soundtracks.
That’s a legitimate view. I’ve been making lists like this since I was in junior high in the mid sixties and I always wrestled with this. For years, I agreed with you. However, when I started seeing guys like Christgau including greatest hits compilations on his best albums list, I changed my mind. And as great as the JHE three studio albums were, I was introduced to this music from a neighbor who had the Smash Hits album. He brought over Smash Hits, Best of Cream and the first Zep LP for me to listen to back in 1969-70, 10th grade. Changed my life.
Exile on Main Street is the best stones album
It's close but Sticky Fingers is better.
Sometimes a team just.....doesn't work. We needed some experienced guard play, and injuries took away our shot at that. We needed some offensive cohesion, and for whatever reason the skills of Bukfin, Jett and Hunter didn't mesh into a unstoppable force. And we needed to play defense and that was a glaring weakness for Jett, a "less-than-it-should-be" for Hunter, and the rest of the gusy were mostly just *shrugs* at it.
You can blame coaching - certainly some of it is on the coaches. But sometimes when you're cooking you put everything in the pot, do your best, and what comes out is inedible. This season should dutifully show whether our coaching staff is a problem or not. Cobbling together a roster of transfers and young guys, if they build something that looks like a basketball team and surprises some people, that's good coaching. And if they languish and miss the tourney again I think we will have our answer about the future of Michigan basketball. So let's see!
Who says Juwan isn't going anywhere anytime soon?
I like Juwan. I don’t follow the NBA. I love Michigan and it’s athletics… (I love the academics too!)
Individual performance / development vs a team. The NBA is drafting players.. individuals. Success on the field is the result of a collection of players working together.
The timing of injuries and depth - or lack thereof - of certain positions on the roster, can have an impact. It doesn’t seem to me that the NBA rosters face the exact same challenge - such as the loss of a young point guard to injury. The NBA can bring up a player from the G League during the season - or make a trade. These aren’t options at the college level.
Beilein was a great coach. He knew what he could sign and develop. And, after a few years, the team flourished and excelled - usually with tenured players - who played in his system. I’m not a fan of one & done - but, my opinion means nothing.
I’ll cheer on the players, Juwan and the staff, and hope they find the success we’d like to see.
Go Blue!
Michigan with 2 of the top 10 college players drafted. Should i feel good or bad about this? My gawd! Plus the number 1 transfer in college basketball? And Michigan could not even make the tourney?
BTW, looking at the Thompson twins, statistically and physically they are identical. I find it interesting that the one we got actually put up slightly better numbers (in slightly less minutes!)....
Ausar Thompson 16.3 pts, 6.9 rebounds, 6.1 assists, 2.7 steals, 1.3 blocks, 27.6 minutes a game.
Amen Thompson 16.3 pts, 6.4 rebounds, 6.2 assists, 2.4 steals, 28.3 minutes a game.
Ausar seems to be the slightly better defender also (although both are really good). Did we get the slightly better one?
There's a misnomer that lottery pick = good college player. Jett has ideal NBA size, can shoot the 3, and flashed shot creation potential. He was also an awful defender, didn't rebound, and had a terrible basketball IQ. The NBA historically doesn't care much about that stuff so they liked him, but from a college prospective, he was statistically a negative while on the floor. Bufkin was a great player, but only the second half of the year and by then his play was not enough to overcome the severe flaws of our roster
Is that a misnomer or a misconception? lol jk
How did we have 2 top 15 picks + HD and not make the tournament?
One of those top 15 picks was not a good college player - probably would have been a very good sophomore player though, ala Kobe.
IMO, HD makes a team collectively worse, not better. Yes, he is an outstanding postup offensive player. But he was not a good rebounder (esp for his size), he was not a good defender, and despite what every color commentator said on TV, he was not a good passer.
Overall youth (Michigan was something like 330 in age among the ~360 D1 teams) led to youthful mistakes that led to some of those close losses.
Lack of production from the PF spot.
Lack of team chemistry. Sometimes a team is greater than the sum of it's individual parts (think 2004 Pistons). Sometimes a team is less than the sum of it's individual parts (2023 Wolverines). Some of this goes back to my thoughts on HD.
I’m intrigued to see what the Juwan can do no wrong and Hunter was the problem folks say when they go 12-20 this year
I certainly don't think Juwan can do no wrong (inviting grammar policing on that one!) and you are misrepresenting us by saying we think "Hunter was the problem" when we actually think Hunter was part of the problem
We already know how the Juwan haters will react if the team rebounds since we already saw that with Harbaugh and Beilein.
This is a straw-man argument. Saying "we haven't given up on Juwan yet, and we're hopeful he can turn the team around," is not the same as saying he "can do no wrong."
People were trashing Beliein a few years ago. People (including me!) had concluded Harbaugh had lost his team and needed to go. Sometimes coaches turn things around. Seems like you want Juwan to fail, so you can feel better about predicting it.
Personally, I like the guy, and I hope he succeeds this year. Is that such an outrageous position?
Trust me...I want Michigan basketball to succeed more than I want to be right.
But predicting that this years team will be an improvement from last year is delusional and purely hope based.
They replaced 2 of the top 15 players in the NBA Draft with guys who couldn't get off the bench so they came here for playing time.
The Tennessee guy seems like a good get but isn't going to replace Hunter's offensive production.
Do you understand how unlikely is it that a team with 3 All-Big Ten players misses the tournament?
You hear a ton of excuses (Inexperience, injuries, chemistry, the best player isn't scoring 40 PPG, my favorite bad luck) to deflect from the fact that Juwan can't coach. It's that simple.
It is impressive that you can both predict the future and assert with such certainty that Coach Howard, who has been successful here and elsewhere in his career, can't coach.
I’m sorry, where else has he been a successful head coach?
> HD makes a team collectively worse, not better
What an insanely stupid take.
Logged in to upvote. I liked HD but playing around his flaws exposed a lot. As raw as Diabate was, you could see the flow and play change dramatically when he was out there instead. HD was good enough that you had to play him, but gave up a lot in exchange.
We might be having a very different discussion if the projected starting lineup for this fall were Dug, Kobe, Jett, Nkhamoua, and Hunter -- with T Will, Tarris Reed and hopefully a fully healed and improved Jaelin Llewellyn coming off the bench.
I'm not sure in what universe that lineup is actually possible, but setting discussion of Juwan Howard's coaching acumen (preparation, strategy, in game decision making, ...) aside for the moment, what specific things do folks think he should have done differently in terms of roster construction? Should he not have recruited his own son, since one could (potentially reasonably) project him to leave for the NBA well before developing his game? Or not recruited Bufkin? Or should he simply be better at convincing his players to stick around?
And how good a team would the names above have actually made next year -- top 15? top 10? top 5? I could imagine having a shooter coming off the bench along with a really solid backup PG would help. But maybe Tschetter or Khayat could step up and be effective in a very limited role as a shooter off the bench.
I'm really not sure how good this hypothetical team would be -- the names together look really good to me, but there is a part of me that is concerned about both the coaching and the roster -- perhaps that group doesn't gel, or isn't quite athletic enough, or doesn't have enough fight in it.
It seems pretty clear that the team is missing something. I don't know what it is. Let's hope that the head coach does.
Jace and Tschetter should never have been recruited.
When your kid doesn't play defense - bench him.
The NDA drafts on potential. Kobe and especially Jett have a ton of work to do to live up to their potential.
That said, of course they are talented. This past year's UM team performed at a level less than the sum of its parts. I personally think that always points to a failure of coaching. I hope this year turns out better.
I’m purely in a wait and see mode. I would be lying if I said that there weren’t any doubts that are starting to creep in my head a little about Juwan’s ability as a head coach and that includes recruiting, roster management, in game coaching, etc.
That said, I’m giving it time to see how he finishes with this off-season and how next year turns out before I go to “abandon ship” mode.
I’m really hoping it was a combination of a youthful roster, Jett not fitting in with the team in some aspects and Hunter being disinterested in the early part of the season that caused last year to go off the rails.
Wait and see mode for me.
NBA drafts (largely) on potential. College games are decided on merit as it exists at present. Pretty simple.
They're also just played in completely different ways, shaping the meaning of "potential."
For example, after his first year, HD had tremendous potential to continue developing his skills as a post player. In college, where shooting is much, much worse than in the NBA, the math of post-ups still allows teams to be successful playing through the post (though, I think, with a real ceiling). In the NBA that potential was virtually meaningless, because of how little the game is played through the post and how much offenses have become about hunting slow-footed defenders in order to put defenses into difficult rotations to free up shooters.
I haven't looked an enough examples outside of the B10, but I suspect that having marginal NBA prospects that stick around is better than one & dones (or in Kobe's case two & dones but he is also the age of a one and done). Essentially, you need some Eli Brooks/Isiah Livers types along with some impact freshmen. Yes, we had Hunter, but he didn't progress as well as we'd hoped.
My hope for next season is that the defensive emphasis is effective, and that someone (TWill, Khayat, Reed etc.) takes some big steps forward.
we havent had the point guy play needed the last 2 seasons.
Michigan was really awful to watch play basketball last season. I'm not smart enough to know why they were so bad but they looked like a poorly coached team with little to no chemistry. Plus at key moments when coaching can make a significant difference (time outs near the end of the half or the game, etc) my fan eyes did not see Juwan's decisions pay off.
I have no idea how much last season's performance was an anomaly either, but once again, in my view as a lifelong Michigan basketball fan, Juwan's teams have become increasingly difficult to watch (e.g. they appear to be poorly coached) in the past two years. Fair or not, this coming season will show us a lot about his coaching ability.
My question is, does he have to make the NCAA tourney in order to demonstrate that he's doing as good a job as he 'should' at Michigan?
I coached varsity hoops in the state for 15+ seasons and the thing that kills me about college basketball the most and has really caused me to fall away from the game is the NBA drafting these kids on potential not production. When you look at what U of M has lost in two years: Houstan, Diabate, Jett and Bufkin. If you want to say Bufking produced last season I can probably roll with him as he was vastly approved over his freshmen run. The bottom line is Michigan continues to lose players they never saw their best from. You are asking for bumpy roads doing that unless you are replacing them with blue chip recruits or hitting the portal well and finding instant impacts. The bigger issue in roster management is the hurdles Juwann has had to get over with anyone in the portal that isn't a grad transfer or more then a freshmen. It limits your possibilities greatly. I thought Juwann should have been let go after "slapgate" had nothing to do with his coaching or roster building abilities. I think he is going to struggle long term in the college game at Michigan because we are going to see him continue to bring in great talent that leaves before its realized for a large magnitude of reasons out of his total control.