ball denial

3/2/2021 – Michigan 53, Illinois 76 – 18-2, 13-2 Big Ten

It does a body good to snap back to reality after a pleasant daydream. A splash of water; a bracing winter wind; a playful pinch from a person you love. All of these are ways to return to a full, unblinkered view of your surroundings. There are also other ways. Ways that are less good. Ways like being shoved out of a plane by a bear, and then having that bear jump out of the plane and plummet into you, flipping you off the whole time. This is guaranteed to make you hyper-aware of your surroundings for upwards of ten seconds.

Anyway, a basketball game. Technically. Yesterday's… uh… event felt less like a sporting contest and more like one of those nightmares where you show up to an exam with no knowledge of the subject matter, wearing only your underwear and maybe an unflattering hat. A fever dream of how Michigan bombs out of the NCAA tournament.  So bad it felt unreal.

I don't really know what conclusions to draw. It started off as an ugly slugfest where Hunter Dickinson and Kofi Cockburn took turns demonstrating that the other guy was pretty good on defense, too, and then Andre Curbelo came in and broke the game open. Curbelo got to the basket almost at will; he went 6/7 there. Michigan—the whole team—had a total of 7 makes at the basket, period. Three of those came from Austin Davis, who occasionally bamboozled Cockburn with sheer persistence.

Eventually it became clear that Michigan was getting Michigan'd.

lol so this is what other teams have been feeling like all season

— Noah Neidlinger (@candor_for_sale) March 3, 2021

The preview noted that Illinois was very similar to Michigan statistically: eFG kings on both ends, turnovers optional on defense, limit threes, limit assists, no post doubles. Illinois, unsurprisingly for a team that has a couple of lead-footed centers, is a drop coverage team that doesn't leave shooters. Jordan Sperber's diagnosis of what happened last night is almost word-for-word what Michigan did to teams like Wisconsin:

Then came the point in the game where UM handlers stopped trying to attack Cockburn/Bezhanishvili & started probing

Illinois did a GREAT job of still not helping off shooters. With the Illini staying home on players not involved in the screen, UM's probes led to late clock iso pic.twitter.com/z1EIVwZtXI

— Jordan Sperber (@hoopvision68) March 3, 2021

Michigan got up 7 threes, 15 shots at the rim, and had 27 midrange shots. Seven of the latter went down. That's a cool 0.52 points per possession.

You don't need any explanations other than that, which is unfortunate because you can weave other problems that are ephemeral. Their legs were shot, they had a bad shooting performance, Franz saw the wrong kind of dog that morning, etc. These are often thrown out when something inexplicable happens; what happened here was nothing of the sort. It followed from the actions Michigan could run and the shots they could get. Since those shots were largely garbage, Michigan scored 53.

In a way, this is a blessing. Illinois stuck a finger into a heretofore unknown weakness and started ripping out big chunks of wall. Minnesota did the same thing earlier in the year when their rampant doubling neutralized Dickinson and forced him into five turnovers. Michigan fixed that emphatically.

This one feels like a tougher fix, but at least the recipe to throw at Michigan is much tougher than "double the post." To replicate what Illinois did you have to be able to play Dickinson one-on-one, relentlessly stick to shooters, and overwhelm their guards athletically. A lot of teams might be able to do one or two of those things. Three is a tall order. And now Juwan Howard will go back to the lab and see what he can do.

[After THE JUMP: perimeter ball denial]