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[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

Sawdust And Diamonds Comment Count

Brian March 5th, 2021 at 1:18 PM

3/4/2021 – Michigan 69, Michigan State 50 – 19-2, 14-2 Big Ten, Big Ten regular season champions

I have now watched a year of pandemic sports, and I can say that the most surreal thing to watch with nobody in the stands is college basketball. This was made plain when I turned on the Baylor-WVU game, which was about 20% full, and recoiled at the strangeness of an audio record of whether things were going well or not. People were furious at certain things. It was a sad (and unwise) echo of the Before Times, and at the same time it injected a fervor into the proceedings. It felt like a top-ten matchup, or at least the ghost of one. 

Alone amongst major sports, basketball puts fans directly adjacent to proceedings. Malices at the Palace do not transpire in other sports because there are barriers between athletes and the hoi polloi. Opportunities for portly gentlemen to confront and get absolutely wrecked by Jermaine O'Neal are limited.

This gives a basketball crowd an immediacy other sports lack. When you are close to the court the sport literally vibrates for you, each bounce of the ball resonating in your ears and feet simultaneously.

On top of that, a college basketball crowd puts several hundred dubiously sober students in prime position to mock, taunt, celebrate, wobble unsteadily, and wear varied animal costumes. The reduced number of games relative to the NBA, and the various ways in which you could succeed or fail heightens stakes. An NBA version of this MSU team is wondering whether it's worth making the playoffs just to get obliterated instead of clawing desperately to maintain a 22-year tourney streak. This turns up the volume further until a band-box arena in Vermont with maybe 3,000 people in it feels like a nuclear reactor during Championship Week.

Deleting that leaves you unsteady. The resulting season feels tangibly less real.

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eight minutes to tip [Campredon]

When the confetti came down and Michigan paraded around a sign that said "2021 Big Ten Champions" I was happy, of course, but the emptiness of that building—the failure of several hundred people to appear on the court and mill around aimlessly—hit hard. A true and proper title celebration is far from the most important thing the pandemic has taken from us, but it could only be bittersweet to see Michigan be this team, to win this thing, 358 days after the 2020 Big Ten Tournament was shut down and Zavier Simpson skyhooks unceremoniously vanished into the G-League ether.

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You may have noticed that my output on this blog has dropped substantially. There have been more weekdays without a post from me in the past couple months than years-long blocks of time prior.

I have struggled. My weak connections to the people around me have been severed and the few strong ties leaned on unto their breaking point. A lack of reliance on other people has morphed from a marker of rugged individualism into a blank, gray loneliness. Existing addictions—mostly to video games, which I compulsively click at even when I am thinking about how boring this activity is—were exacerbated. Relationships strained. My personal life roiled until there was a sudden break. A look into an abyss, and a turning away from it.

I can't say the roiling has exactly stopped but at least I have a path I can see that leads forward. It is a repeated agony that it buckles and warps, cracks and shudders, rises and descends. Work gets put in and sometimes it seems like it amounts to nothing. But I suppose if Austin Davis can put Luka Garza in a blender, there is no depth that cannot be surmounted brick by brick.

This is a stupid and flimsy thing to latch onto, the actions of college players attempting to throw a ball through a hoop, but since a large part of this years-long slide was sitting on my computer staring at a football game I had no desire to comment on I'll take it and nestle it into place. Belief starts somewhere. An ability to take joy from other people starts somewhere.

Here at what feels like the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of being locked away from each other I have concluded that the only thing to do is get up in the morning and try again.

[After THE JUMP: a regular-ass bullets section! Like nothing even happened!]

BULLETS

The most accurate tweet. Ah yup:

Celebrations. A brief roundup of things. Moe Wagner's instagram:

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Mike Smith:

This hug got to me:

From Marc-Gregor:

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[Campredon]

This was the best net-cutting photo but his entire set is amazing.

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lol [Campredon]

Easy buckets and turnovers. Hunter Dickinson was so close to a monster game reminiscent of the first half of his season. Three buckets that were nearly back-to-back-to-back on Thomas Kithier looked and felt like the period of time he was putting in 75% of his shots. Going from Cockburn to Kithier must have felt like the first rain after a drought.

MSU didn't want to double because they got obliterated by Iowa when they swarmed Garza, but yeah even a wide open 3 isn't worth the same amount of EV that a virtually uncontested two-foot hook is.

Unfortunately, Dickinson had a spate of turnovers that were almost all unforced: a couple of fumbles out of bounds, a sloppy travel after receiving a post entry, etc. Getting a full-on Dickinson Smash game before the tournament would be nice.

Dickinson has also started to getting into some foul trouble because he's not being judicious enough at certain points. He picked up his second late in the first half when he switched onto Henry and Henry beat him with a jab step. Dickinson put his hands down on Henry for an and-one.

I'm sure this is an adjustment period as Michigan puts him in much more one-on-one coverage against guards and wings. Dickinson did endure a period at the beginning of the second half where everything MSU did was an attempt to put a third foul on him. They did not succeed.

First half ref show. Sometimes an ugly, foul-filled game is ugly and foul-filled because the teams are making it so. This one was not that. The ref show got started with Malik Hall's second foul, which was some harmless post jockeying after Mike Smith got switched onto him. A chintzy moving screen on Dickinson followed, and then we were off.

Bingham got hit on a post entry to Davis. Brown was called for a foul when he was vertically contesting Watts. Johns got a loose ball foul on a 50/50 rebound that fell to MSU anyway. Bingham got another ridiculous loose ball foul when Livers bumped into him a little, again on a rebound that fell to M anyway. Henry got hit for a mysterious foul when Livers tried to back him down. Johns got hit on a Langford screen flop. Wagner's foul immediately before getting elbowed was nonsense.

All of this was garbage that didn't need to be called, and when mixed in with a fairly normal number of actual fouls you had an ugly, disjointed first half. One wonders if there was a directive from the league office to clamp down given MSU's recent foul flurry and the Sissoko ejection.

And then the second half was completely different. Not everything has to be a Monty Python episode, guys.

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a rare instance of chasing over [Campredon]

Ball screens: not for you. Michigan alternated between going under screens and icing them (overplaying them so that the ballhandler cannot use the screen) into one-on-one matchups with Dickinson. When Michigan went under MSU pulled up just once, when Henry (a 28% three point shooter) missed short and off line. This is something I probably should have called out in the preview: Henry, Langford, Hauser, and Brown have a total of 5 unassisted threes on the season. They barely shoot off the dribble.

Michigan did go over screens without a post switch a few times and gave up some looks at the rim. Livers in particular got driven past a couple times by hugging up on guys who are <30% three-point shooters. One of these was Henry's admittedly rad dunk. (Livers did offset this with a couple steals.)

Ball screens: for me. On the other end of the floor, Eli Brooks pulled up for three when Langford went under a screen before the first TV timeout. This was repeated by others.

MSU drop coverage was repeatedly exploited by Michigan in two ways: Mike Smith pull-up jumpers and dumpoffs to the roll guy. Turns out it's pretty hard to split the difference between the ballhandler and the roller when you are not easily mistaken for a mountain range, a la Kofi Cockburn. Brooks did put an attempted pass to Dickinson in the sideline when Bingham was out there; everyone else plainly lacked the size to deal.

The result. MSU took 31 midrange shots and hit 10. Game over. Henry and Langford combined to go 3/16. Some of these shots were incredible to watch. Rocket Watts managed to get an 18-footer up with 25 seconds left on the shot clock(!). He followed that up with a 15-footer with 17 seconds left after Dickinson switched on him in drop coverage. It was like the last 20 years of basketball had ceased to exist.

MSU's going to get some guys who can play on campus next year but I don't think a bounce-back is likely, at least not to the Big Ten championship contender level.

Brooks high off the glass. Eli Brooks has tried a wide array of tough shots this year, almost all of which have missed. In this game he was hitting. This shot hit the backboard here and went in:

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Okay then. Look at this thing.

Zone blips. Michigan didn't use their zone much, probably because MSU was able to exploit the devolution into man a couple times. Henry would end up with the ball near the top of the key; Mike Smith ended up swapping into man coverage on him, and that ended up with a couple of easy buckets at the rim.

Later when Smith was able to get him to take a jumper it was the variety of jumper he's excellent at—one just outside the restricted circle. With two easy buckets in a handful of possessions (and another crossmatch against Eli Brooks that looked like it was headed the same way before Franz's gumby arms raked the ball out to force a turnover) it was clear that the zone wasn't a great idea in this game.

I think we can look directly at it now. Franz Wagner is now hitting 39% from three on the season. He's now hitting shots that seem like bad ideas, like the secondary transition three he took while seemingly off-balance, and off the dribble:

Oddly he seems like he's a little better a foot behind the line instead of right on it.

Computer says it's locked in. Bart Torvik's Teamcast allows you to project the rest of the season and see where you end up. Michigan's worst case scenario—back to back losses—does not budge them off the one line, or even down to the #4 one-seed. This is not a guarantee, of course, but Torvik has been pretty accurate historically.

Gird thyself. I don't think John Beilein's going to be on BTN much longer.

Brian Rauf is reporting that both Archie Miller and Richard Pitino are done at the end of the season. I'm at DEFCON2 for Beilein-to-Indiana. This feels way less bad since it looks like Juwan Howard is a home run hire, but it still feels bad.

Even the Illinois folks. Apparently the controversy about not playing a few of the worst teams in the league wasn't enough to swing the Illini fans away from a visceral distaste for Tom Izzo and company:

It's earned.

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