1/6/2021 – Michigan 82, Minnesota 57 – 10-0, 5-0 Big Ten

Lopsided basketball games, like most other uncompetitive sporting events, have a desultory ending period where players go through the motions but aren't giving maximum effort. You get turnovers and runouts on both ends as passing gets lackadaisical. Not much about the last ten minutes of Michigan's blowout of Minnesota was unfamiliar.

One thing was: Chaundee Brown going from vaguely on-screen to full-on Tasmanian Devil. There were two separate incidents. On the first (as Ace detailed), Minnesota tossed the ball into the back court for an over-and-back that both Mike Smith and Marcus Carr couldn't catch up to. Brown came from seemingly nowhere to grab it and shot upcourt for a dunk. This one was precisely calibrated to not quite cross the chin-up-tech line.

Okay, that's one thing. Basketball players like to score. Gimme gimme gimme the ball because I'm gonna dunk it. Etc.

The second one, though. The second one was one of those Kenpom Time turnovers that was about to lead to a Minnesota  transition bucket. Brown tore at this like Tayshaun Prince going after Reggie Miller. He didn't get there—it was a goaltend—but it was literally a 34-point game when he did this.

Getting there is beside the point. The vibe is the point. Chaundee Brown isn't here for desultory. He's had enough of that in his career already. Chaundee Brown is here to feel alive on a basketball court.

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[Campredon]

More quietly, Mike Smith is also busy busting his ass. I've been loathe to mention this for a couple weeks because of its general unlikeliness, but I just saw him stone a Marcus Carr drive late in this game: he is now an acceptable-or-better defender. Much of the discourse here and elsewhere during the early part of the season consisted of worries about defense, and Smith in particular came in for a lot of fretting.

This was because he got blown by regularly. Michigan, in general, was giving up a number of straight-line drives to the basket. They are no longer. Smith also had a tendency to over-help and blow closeouts. That, too, is a receding issue. Michigan is fresh off two dominant defensive performances against top-60 Kenpom offenses, the kind of performances that you can't manage unless everyone is doing most of their job. Smith is doing his job.

Since he's a Micro Machine that means staying in front of guys and living in the breadbasket of three-point shooters. This he has done admirably. He's developed a closeout style where he sidles up to you without jumping and just sort of, you know, insinuates himself in there. It's awkward. It works. Gabe Kalscheur got a couple of buckets by going off the dribble and shooting over him, and that's always going to be a thing given Smith's size. If those are the things Smith is giving up, you'll take that and run.

Smith has also been remarkably unselfish, especially since he's coming off multiple seasons of giant usage. Even when he takes a difficult stepback, as he did early, he's not just shooting to shoot. A couple possessions later he roasted Carr with a threatened stepback to set up Dickinson for a dunk:

His main problem is trying too many audacious passes so his teammates can dunk. He's seamlessly faded into a role, and repaired his glaring deficiency in a couple months.

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Everyone wants to win. Mike Smith and Chaundee Brown are dying to win. Everyone else in the rotation is either a freshman from a DMV power or a guy who's been kicking around the Michigan program for at least a year or two. They come from good cultures that emphasize doing the things you need to do to be successful. They have been successful.

So they don't know. They don't know what it's like to go 14-42 in three whole years of ACC conference play. They don't know what it's like to put up 34% usage for a 1-13 Ivy League team. They don't know what it's like to drive into the lane against UNC and dump it off for a teammate who does not do the Hunter Dickinson thing (catch it and dunk it) but rather some bad Ivy League process where the ball is the subject of a multivariate analysis before being goofily booted into the third row with a business plan attached to it.

These guys know. Early this year Smith was asked how it felt to be 2-0; he said something to the effect of "I've never been 1-0." Brown runs around clapping his giant meaty arms and smiling so wide his head seems like it's about to fall off. Together they've injected Michigan's culture with the only thing it lacked: desperation. Even when you're up 34.

[After THE JUMP: Richard Pitino's face!]

BULLETS

FACES OF DESPAIR. This might be a running thing if Michigan keeps doing this to teams. I had Richard Pitino's zoom presser on in the background last night and whenever I looked up Pitino looked even more despondent than before. Ace clicked on random points in a five-minute interview and this was the result:

gonna stop at eight screenshots, probably pic.twitter.com/hJV6H28LtY

— SOUP YEAR UNTIL THE INK DRIES (@AceAnbender) January 7, 2021

There is no other way to react as members of the press ask you to examine the entrails that used to be inside of you but are now being paraded around the Michigan locker room. Brendan Quinn has an article to this effect; it was morbidly amusing to hear him apologize for the question he was about to ask.

The burden of giant blowouts. Once again we must suss out the actual starters-involved performance of the team since the last few minutes was walk-on time. Minnesota had 7 possessions against the deep bench and scored 12 points. Their other 61 possessions yielded 45 points, 0.74 points per possession.

This is probably not their worst outing since Minnesota needed an 11-0 run in Kenpom time to get up to 65 in an 81-possession game against Illinois, but that's the only competitor.

[Campredon]

Next. I'd say a 28-5 point disparity and Michigan going 21/23 at the rim(!!!) rather answers "quien es mas macho?" Hunter Dickinson gave it to Liam Robbins, who now has a distinct pattern of demolishing guys who aren't true centers and getting demolished by the top-end guys in the league.

Robbins actually knocked Dickinson over for his first bucket; then he hit a three. And that was all. This is the second consecutive game that the opposition's center has gotten some early points and then failed to score for the final 36 minutes, though the previous outing saw Franz Wagner draw the Pete Nance matchup.

Adjustment du jour. Minnesota closed a 12-point gap to six at the end of the first half when Carr came off a couple of screens and launched his patented pull-ups. Michigan went to the locker room in full knowledge that Minnesota's second-half emphasis was going to be Carr pick and roll, and they came out with something extremely unusual for Juwan Howard thus far: hedging. Hunter Dickinson has thus far played drop coverage almost exclusively, as befits a traditional big.

So watching him blitz Carr was new. Dickinson did not commit a foul or get exploited on his rotation; he did get out far enough to blow up those actions. Carr's second half was no more impactful than his first half. Those two shots at the end of the half were the only threes he hit. Even more impressive: Carr got to the line once. He entered this game with a giant free throw rate.

Michigan was judicious with its hedging, which made it harder to predict and helped prevent those ack-I've-been-shot perimeter blocking fouls. Those bedeviled Jon Teske and are a main reason I don't expect that hedging will be anything other than intermittent going forward. The scariest words in the Michigan basketball fan's lexicon right now are "Hunter Dickinson foul trouble." Michigan had the luxury to hedge because Dickinson got through the first half without a foul. That won't always be the case.

[Campredon]

The spirit of Jacob Young. Michigan's first half offense was buoyed by three different pick-six perimeter steals, one from Brooks and two from Livers. These were largely Minnesota sloppiness, particularly the second from Livers where he whacked the ball out of Eric Curry's hands, but they were nonetheless good to see since Michigan's one hole on defense is a lack of turnover creation.

Michigan forced 12 in this game, which was 18% of Minnesota possessions. Hack out the deep bench time and that's bang on the national average against a team that is 20th nationally taking care of the ball.

Apologies to Eli Brooks. I thought that Carr might be a bit much for him because of his size and ability to pull up. This was not the case. Aside from those pick and roll issues at the end of the first half, Brooks put Carr in his pocket. Carr's few comfortable outside shots were usually rotation issues, and when he ventured inside the line Brooks consistently made him finish through his chest:

None of Carr's makes from two came with Brooks as a primary defender. One was against Johns; the other two came after he left the game for dental work.

Let's pick that nit. We talked about this on the podcast some: Isaiah Livers is a career 40% three-point shooter. Shoot!

His decision-making seems off this year. I know he hit 5/6 twos in this game but none were drives into a set defense. He had the two pick-six steals, a fadeaway we're about to mention, a transition drive with no one under the basket, and an and-one off a cut into the lane. He had two turnovers on items like the above.

I don't know if it's NBA evaluations telling him he needs to be more diverse—false, ask Duncan Robinson—or his desire to be a high usage alpha in his senior year, but a relatively high percentage of Michigan's questionable shots are coming from him. Yeah, this goes down but it's a stepback long two with more than 20 seconds on the shot clock:

These are limited to a couple per game, so it's a nit.

[Campredon]

Don't look at it directly. Franz is shooting 38% from three in Big Ten play. Also he has an assist rate a hair short of 20 and a TO rate under 8. His last three games: 13 assists, one TO, 7/15 from three. Don't spook it. A few more games and it'll settle in.

The repost. Difficult to pick out a favorite offensive possession these days; I'll go with the Dickinson repost, which kicked off the second half demolition:

Bardo marveled at the level of maturity required to execute this; that leapt out to me as well. In the cold light of day this was probably more about Juwan Howard calling this out of the locker room than Dickinson and Wagner having massive basketball brains. I still enjoyed it. It's a great way to nerf a potential double team since the guy to your side is literally closing out when you get the ball back, and Dickinson did work in the moment Robbins relaxed after the kickout.

KPOY Festivus. I gotta lot of problems with KPOY stuff all of a sudden! Specifically, Hunter Dickinson vs Trayce Jackson-Davis. This argument is going to center around usage vs efficiency so let's first consider the KPOY components that don't factor into either that much given the gaps:

• Dickinson has a slight rebounding advantage with 12/22 O/DREB rates. Jackson-Davis is at 11 and 21.
• Jackson-Davis has a slight advantage in A:TO rates, where he's 10:14 while Dickinson is 8:16.
• Jackson-Davis has a slight advantage in defensive stats with a 6.1 block rate and a 1.3 steal rate; Dickinson is at 5.3 and 0.4.

We will agree that this is pretty close to a wash.

So let's talk ORTG items. Jackson-Davis has a 31% usage rate and a 109 ORTG. Dickinson has a 25% usage rate and a 132(!) ORTG. That's a significant gap, and as usage goes up efficiency is difficult to maintain. But! We're talking about a 15-point gap in True Shooting %, which takes FTs into account. If my napkin math is correct, Dickinson would have to miss ~31 consecutive shots to drop his TS% to Jackson-Davis's level. I feel like not doing that is better than doing that.

I'm guessing that the minutes gap between Jackson-Davis and Dickinson is also playing a major role—Dickinson is still only at 65% of Michigan's minutes.

No chin-up: no tech. Long, ostentatious hang from the rim, but no chin-up:

In this way you can determine whether a hanging on the rim incident is a tech.