[EDIT: Comments now on]

An irregular series on the 2019-20 basketball team. In rough order of roster certainty.

Previously: point guard.

ROSTER

Jon Teske (Sr.): Brilliant defensively beyond any ability of stats to reckon with it. 79th in block rate, just 3.2 fouls per 40 for Big playing 30 MPG is all we have. On offense absurdly low TO rate was 4th nationally; hits 61/30 from floor. A dude.

Colin Castleton (So.): Stick insect type person was locked on the bench until forced into a few minutes at Iowa, where he seemed instantly a better defender than any non-Teske on the roster. Offensive game has not yet been displayed, but it's there.

Austin Davis (Jr.*): Deemed unplayable except during emergencies about halfway through the nonconference season. Bigs do develop late, but… yeah not looking like it's going to happen.

Isaiah Livers (Jr.): Small-ball C was surprisingly effective in certain situations (vs Bruno Fernando) and a defensive liability in others (vs Iowa's Various Tall Persons). Moving into starting lineup at the 4, in all probability, but will draw in at the 5 against certain matchups.

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

Where does Teske go from here?

The post. But first, let's marvel at some stuff.

If All Big Ten is supposed to be about what you did during league play it's outrageous that Teske was not on an All Big Ten team. Nick Ward was third team! So was Tyler Cook! Meanwhile, Teske in conference:

• Shot 62/36 with a 4.6(!!!) turnover rate for a 127 ORTG.
• Played 30 MPG for a defense that was only second-best in conference because Michigan was 18 points worse per 100 possessions when he was on the bench.

Ward couldn't play for Michigan State down the stretch even when he was healthy and Tyler Cook had a 97 ORTG on the worst defense in the league. Cumong man.

Teske doesn't have the flashy block stats that pogo-stick centers do but there's a case to be made he's the best defensive center in college basketball. Michigan switched him on point guards in late clock situations because, eh, it's fine.

Jon Teske just showing everyone why he's one of the best defenders in all of college pic.twitter.com/T898BAiarR

— Zach Milner (@ZachMilner13) March 23, 2019

That mobility made him a superior hedge-and-recover guy against persons not named Cassius Winston. Every few weeks some NBA guy watching Michigan games for non-Teske reasons would be moved by Teske's team defense enough to post a video of it.

This might be the best defensive possession that I've come across this year

Michigan's team defense on this possession is amazing, but Jon Teske stands out the most. It's crazy how many things Teske does in one possession. Pay close attention & let me know what stands out to you pic.twitter.com/08AxHAxJVB

— Zach Milner (@ZachMilner13) February 7, 2019

Halfway through the season Luke Yaklich started calling one of his sons "Jon," I bet you one dollar.

[After THE JUMP: Teske's next step and Castleton coming.]

So what now? It seems unlikely Teske can improve significantly as a defender. Maybe he refines his body that last little bit over the summer and gets that much more agile and alters a few more shots. Maybe there are occasional mental blips he can iron out. Those impacts are bound to be small. It's hard to envision someone more locked in on D than Teske was.

If there's going to be a major development it'll be on the other side of the ball. Teske was astoundingly efficient at the rim largely because of his near-total lack of turnovers. As is usually the case for Beilein centers, zero of his buckets came on post-ups. 94% of his makes at the rim were either assisted or put back. There was the occasional dump-down against a switch; other than that Teske was exclusively a roll guy or jump shooter.

You do not need to be informed that opponents successfully gummed up Michigan's offense late in the year by exploiting Beilein's longstanding aversion to post play. Folks who could switch centers onto Simpson and live with the consequences crushed Michigan's approach. Michigan was unable to effectively feed the post mismatches the switches created, and frequently opponents were able to switch back into less disadvantageous matchups—ie, swapping out Kenny Goins for Winston in the MSU games.

A large portion of the futility here was Michigan's inability to feed the post. Teske's part in offseason project Exploit Post Mismatches is two-fold. Part one is making sure he's a big target who can be fed. The GIVE ME THE BALL kind of post up you see from a Ward or an Andre Wesson is not something Teske excels at. He's a big target on rolls, and frequently not quite big enough when trying to post.

Part two is having enough back-to-the-basket game that the secondary switch to a 6'6" guy is also exploitable. Teske will still be a half-foot taller than almost any wing who gets switched to him. Many post guys would eat that alive. Teske is an open question.

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

The other obvious area for improvement is outside shooting. Teske flirted with 40% from three at one point midseason, then ended on a 3/19 thud. Once teams started pushing up on him he hurried his relatively flat three-pointer and things fell apart. This was never more evident than against Maryland, which had a mobile NBA-level center who thoroughly contested most of Teske's attempts. Teske was 2/13 against Bruno Fernando, and that was  the pattern at the end of the year.

Maybe Teske can refine that further, but it feels like he's going to be a guy for whom a very open three is a good idea and all others are not so much. His efficacy depends more on the rest of Michigan's players drawing attention away from him than anything he can manage this offseason. Even Goins, this year's best exemplar of a three point shooter coming out of nowhere, got the vast majority of his looks in wide open situations.

Can sophomore Castleton be sophomore Teske?

wingspaaaaan [Patrick Barron]

In 2017-18 Michigan fans tasted the nectar of Having Two Centers At The Same Time, and, lo, it was good. Moe Wagner started and was the offensive linchpin; Jon Teske played 12 minutes per game, grabbing a ton of OREBs and providing a vast defensive upgrade on the always-iffy Wagner. Michigan was in fact better with Teske on the floor:

cupcakes excised

Some of this was the luxury Teske had as a bench player. His OREB rate would have ranked 30th nationally if he'd gotten enough minutes to qualify for Kenpom leaderboards, and his steal rate of 2.9 was absurd for a big. The cost was a few fouls, but who cares about 5.3 fouls per 40 when you're a backup?

Fast forward a year and one inadvisable swipe down on an Iowa guard eventually leads to five different guys trying and failing to be you in an ugly loss. So you have to dial it back. Teske's OREB and steal rates dropped by 40%. So did his foul rate. The line, it is linear.

Meanwhile, when Teske was off the floor:

Yikes doesn't quite cover it. The offensive collapse has some harsh three-point luck in it, but some of that was the real impact of not having a roll man on the pick and roll any more.

Returning to the land of Having Two Centers At The Same Time would be real, real nice both for the ~30% of the season in which Michigan was –9 in (unadjusted) efficiency margin instead of +25, and the 70% in which Michigan was excellent. Get a reasonable backup center, push a couple hundred more possessions his way, and a more liberated Teske may be able to follow up on the possession-generation stats from his sophomore year.

So: is Castleton up for it? Probably. Maybe. Probably.

This is mostly feelingsball. There's not a ton to Castleton's on/off splits since he got just 126 possessions once you excise the cupcakes and a significant number of those were desultory ones late in already-decided games. You get down to 85 once you take out the various human victory cigars Michigan deployed over the course of the year, which is far too few to conclude anything about anything… except maybe one thing.

Michigan couldn't rebound when he was on the floor, at all. This is a great deficiency for a spindle-thin freshman to have, because it can be solved with tacos. The only other issue Michigan had during non-garbage time defensive possessions with Castleton on the floor was its free throw rate, which shoots up because of Castleton's 8.6 fouls per 40. That, too, is an issue that tacos help fix.

Michigan's defense otherwise barely budged when Castleton was in the game. They were a hair worse at defending twos but still excellent, and the rest of the numbers barely moved. A Camp Sanderson offseason should get him to a point where he's able to take contact without ending up in the next county.

On the other end of the court, Castleton's minutes saw Michigan's two point shooting drop ten points. That's probably just a sample size issue. Castleton himself was 7/10 from the floor in his 6 Big Ten games, which IIRC were the only non-garbage time minutes he got all year. He beat up on Nebraska—admittedly not hard to do—but more than that, he displayed a calmness around the rim and a shot fake that got opponents up in the air. He worked to get a couple of his shots, and his length made him a relatively easy target on switches. Stick around this video for about a minute for the Castleton-vs-Nebraska experience:

That's a guy you can work with. Castleton felt like an offensive option in a way that Austin Davis was not. The difference between a guy like Teske, who fires in dunks from awkward positions on alley-oops, and Davis, who watches them sail over his arms, is large. Castleton trends towards the former:

This was Colin Castleton's Jon Teske dunk over Isaac Haas. pic.twitter.com/zoYn9n9ivg

— Brent Yarina (@BTNBrentYarina) March 4, 2019

And as I've mentioned repeatedly on this here blog his high school tape indicate there are depths to plumb yet. This is a guy who can be Moe if it all works out:

Castleton was a 38% three point shooter in high school and has a much quicker release than Teske. He's got crazy potential. Michigan needs him to start realizing it next year.

A bust-out would not be out of character for this program. One year before Teske was secretly more effective than a first-round NBA draft pick he got barely more than a minute per game and was 1/7 for the season.

What about, you know, Others?

There are three players who may see time at C in the event of matchup issues, foul trouble, or nuclear holocaust. Austin Davis has been mentioned a couple times in this column already. Those mentions are in the form of "see, this guy can do this thing that Austin Davis cannot." This is not a great place to be entering year four.

Your author thought Davis could be a suitable Generic Backup C that rebounds a bunch and plays solid defense. This did not transpire, but if you want to deny the evidence of your own eyes there is a case that he was hard done by. Seriously! Come back here and read the rest of this post.

Davis's ~120 possessions against non-cupcakes without the rest of the end-of-game squad:

Those top lines are extremely ugly and also 90% the product of horrendous three point shooting luck at both ends of the floor. Davis is what he is and Castleton should zoom past him, but there's a case to be made that Davis could survive okay in a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency situation.

If anyone's still reading this post, option #2 is Isaiah Livers, who played 330 non-cupcake possessions without any other Cs on the floor. This did not improve the offense at all and resulted in a very common sense cratering on D, with Michigan getting beat up on the boards and getting way worse at defending twos.

Michigan did force a lot more turnovers and prevent threes exceptionally well with Livers at the 5, so there are situations in which returning to that look is viable. These will almost exclusively be other teams' small-ball lineups. So: situational, but nice to have in your back pocket.

Option #3 is Brandon Johns, who should be a 4 and let's never talk about him at center again.

OUTLOOK

Like point guard, center is a spot where the floor is getting All Big Ten level performance from the starter in deed if not in name. The situation is slightly more unsettled because centers cannot play 36 minutes per game. If DDJ and Eli Brooks evaporate Michigan's going to be more or less fine (next year, anyway). Castleton failing to come through is a much bigger deal. In real games Michigan was 34 points per 100 possessions worse(!!!)* with Teske off the floor, and that was 30% of the season.

Teske should be more or less Teske with the hope that we can add the Post Up Value-Pack over the offseason. Nothing about his offseason matters other than punishing switches, but since that is exactly the same as doing regular post-up stuff. Improving the three point shooting is nice, I guess, but post-ups are priorities 1-10. I have no idea how that'll go. It seems like it should be in his skillset but until you see it you haven't seen it.

Castleton is in line for a breakout. He has the profile of someone who's going to get vastly better because the main thing he needs is not skill but simply beef. His lack of it will probably hamper him some even next year, but he should be good enough to be the league's best backup C.

*[!!!!!!]