drop coverage

3/2/2022 – Michigan 87, Michigan State 70 – 16-12, 10-8 Big Ten

Say what you want about Tom Izzo—please do so loudly and publicly—but you have to give him one thing: he offers satisfaction. You can beat guys like Chris Holtmann and Matt Painter and yeah it's nice to win a basketball game against a good team. They'll talk about what happened and it'll be nice. But at no point will you feel that cosmic justice has been done. You can woof at them and they'll say "he's a good player." They'll probably even mean it.

Not Tom Izzo.

https://t.co/19TJPrlt05 pic.twitter.com/nxsmy3siqq

— Patrick Barron (@BlueBarronPhoto) March 2, 2022

When Hunter Dickinson is dropping 33 and four blocks and woofing like he's going for 70, Tom Izzo will not sit on the sideline in stony silence and then graciously tip his hat in the post-game press conference.

Instead, he will wander onto the court to berate an official because the tall man is being mean. He won't get a technical for this, for reasons, but he will sputter and mewl and yell at his players for betraying him; only then will he descend into the stony silence. When it's clearly time to pout. He will give Dickinson the blow-by in the handshake line he just valorized in the aftermath of the Trohl Center incident. Then in the press conference he will say things like "give them credit, I guess."

Tom Izzo is a delight to beat, because he's a thin-skinned maniac. One time Izzo was getting hammered by Michigan and spent two full minutes of game time pointlessly fouling because he would not give up on the 0.01% chance Michigan would hurl all their free throws into the stands along with their clothes and get called for indecency technicals. This is what I am saying.

To beat Tom Izzo is to watch him rend his clothes and go bug-eyed and threaten to kill an official who will pat him on the head because he's a lovable wee scamp if you're the kind of lunatic who referees college basketball. One day someone will beat him so badly he will lie down and die on a basketball court, out of spite.

BULLETS

Mmm drop coverage. AJ Hoggard only played 11 minutes with leprosy or whatever, but even though MSU's most drop-coverage vulnerable PG wasn't a major factor Michigan still spent the whole game in it and MSU did little against it. Tyson Walker was hesitant to pull up despite having significant off-the-dribble game. In particular, I think he attempted one pull-up three despite Michigan constantly going under screens against him. He is capable:

He just doesn't want to do it much. This was fairly typical:

He has all the room in the world to pull up; he's hitting 55% from three on the year (and was 35% last year on 113 attempts); half of his threes this year are unassisted. It is flat out weird that he's averaging just over 2 3PA per game.

Also:

Instead of an aggressive ball screen coverage "showing" above the level of the screen, tonight Michigan went under almost every ball screen & had Dickinson drop near the paint.

MSU's PGs were reluctant to shoot off the dribble & the coverage was significantly more effective: pic.twitter.com/9qiFqLywv8

— Eric Shapiro (@eric_shap) March 2, 2022

This performance makes the blitzing from game one all the more baffling, but at least that mistake wasn't repeated.

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]

12/3/2019 – Michigan 43, Louisville 58 – 7-1

The John Beilein era was not exactly thick with offensive debacles, so everyone was probably thinking of the same two games as Louisville constricted Michigan's offense last night. One was last year's Sweet 16 game against Texas Tech. That ended Michigan's season, after which three guys and the coach left. Also that was a historically great and very weird defense. So there's no data on how Michigan recovered from that.

The other, though, was Michigan doing this at South Carolina three years ago:

points, twos, threes

This, too, came after Michigan had just lodged a couple of encouraging wins in a tournament. They'd hammered Marquette and SMU in New York. The trip to Columbia was Michigan's first road game of the season. Like Louisville, South Carolina had played no one of note, winning a couple of games against fringe top 100 foes and mixing in some cupcakes. Any spare prep time they'd had all season got applied to Michigan since it was the first real test on the schedule. And Michigan got blitzed.

The good news is that result had close to no bearing on the rest of the season. This was the Maverick Morgan year. Until mid-January Michigan's defense did a fair job of obscuring what would end up the #4 offense on Kenpom. The South Carolina game (and a Texas game a couple weeks later Michigan actually won) were so far out of trend that they look like a different team took the court for a couple nonconference games. Torvik's chart of adjusted offensive efficiency that year:

red: ncaa average efficiency, thick yellow: moving average, thin yellow: linear trend line, dotted: 5 game moving average

I don't have to tell you which one is South Carolina. For their part, they had an elite defense all year, finishing third, and went on a Final Four run after landing a seven-seed. Louisville is going to have an elite defense as well.

It'll be fine. If you'd offered me three of four against Iowa State, UNC, Gonzaga, and Louisville—with none of them at home—you'd lose your arm because I shook it so fast. Eating a schedule loss at the end of that sequence is hard to watch but less indicative of what's going to happen down the road than Atlantis.

[After THE JUMP: Phil Martelli on fjords]