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.

[Campredon]

The dunks will continue until morale improves. Barely a post double from Michigan State all night, and the results were ugly: Dickinson went 13/18 from two, had nine free throws, and MSU bigs racked up ten fouls. That strategy worked okay at Breslin when Marcus Bingham was giving Dickinson trouble with his pterodactyl arms; in this game Bingham had nine minutes. He did get bashed under the basket by Dickinson for a layup but he also blocked a Dickinson shot in there as well.

I don't get it, especially when Julius Marble is doing virtually nothing on the other end. Marble had two buckets in the first three minutes, one of them an uncontested dunk, and then didn't score the rest of the game. Maybe put the pterodactyl guy in? Instead Izzo let a 6'9" guy and Mady "Vaporware" Sissoko try to check Dickinson. By themselves.

Okay. Guess we're exchanging baffling defensive approaches this year, like it's a white elephant party. Dickinson:

On if he took it personally to not be double-teamed:

I kind of liked it, I’m not gonna lie. I appreciated it, if anything.

Same.

[Campredon]

Frankie isn't slowing down, exactly. Two quick fouls on Devante Jones—the second one silly frustration—led to the most extended playing time Frankie Collins has had since the Maryland game in mid-January. I assume everyone was, like me, sure this would be a disaster. It was not. Collins drove into traffic, looked like he was going to careen into the stands, raptor-style, and then had two drop-offs to Dickinson for buckets at the rim.

He had a couple of steals, one of which rescued a turnover of his and turned it into a Brooks layup. He also had a couple of defensive rebounds he skied for.

A+. This is funny:

I'm not sure how Izzo is going to handle the Maize Rage chanting "We Want Steven" at his son, but I have a feeling we might hear about it from him later.

— Chris Solari (@chrissolari) March 2, 2022

"Put your walk-on son in because it's time to empty the bench" is not beyond the pale. Cumong man.

Injustice. Thank you, Donyell Marshall, for being insistent this was excellent D:

I was slightly upset about that call.

Bufkin defensive issues recur. In a short period in the first half Bufkin failed to box out Hoggard and gave up a putback, then fouled a three point shooter. He's improved a great deal from that period where he was a layup line for Sam Sessom; still very much a freshman doing freshman things.

Run off makes count: 2. Most frustrating thing about playing MSU is when your team gives up transition off of a make. By my count this only happened twice in this game, once with Michigan up 18 with 3 minutes left. So consequential transition-off-makes: 1.

Bracket updates. Torvik has Michigan as a nine seed in projection land and and eight in "if the season ended today" land. Humans are not so kind. Jerry Palm has them last four in; Lunardi has Michigan in the last four byes. Bracket Matrix folks universally have them on the 11 or 12 lines.

The big gap here is strictly Michigan's record. They have the sixth-hardest schedule in the country, per Kenpom, and they're 16-12. Replace a road game at #98 UCF with a home game against a tomato can and Michigan probably isn't on the bubble. This is an edge case where scheduling well can bite you because there's a point at which a bleah record starts outstripping your actual accomplishments.

Usually I start poking some projections into Torvik at this point to see what pops out, but since humans have Michigan two or three seed lines worse than Torvik's computer I don't know how useful they are this year. 1-1 to finish plus a first round loss to Maryland in the BTT has them end up a ten seed but with only a 69% chance of selection. Winning out gets them up to a 5 seed(!), though. Heck, just winning the final two regular season games and beating Maryland in the tourney sees them projected as a 6. That feels optimistic to me.

Even Torvik's projections have Michigan missing the field if they lose both remaining regular season games and go 1-1 in the BTT.

Calling my shot: Michigan needs two more wins before Selection Sunday.