1/16/2021 – Michigan 57, Minnesota 75 – 11-1, 6-1 Big Ten

This season, and the strangeness surrounding it, has forced a number of smaller conferences to adopt college-hockey-style scheduling: back to back games between the same teams, at the same place. This has led to a lot of results that are baffling. Check out Wright State's last six:

That makes no sense.

Meanwhile Colgate was briefly in the top 20 of the NET rankings because at the time all they had for the Fightin' Paste was a 101-57 win over Army. The next day they lost. To Army. Colgate has also made a habit of wildly divergent results. They've beaten BU by 44 and 7. They've beaten Holy Cross by 40 and 9. That's their whole season, alternating giant blastings of the opposition with competitive games.

As we sift through the ashes of an 18-point loss to a team Michigan hammered by 25 just ten days previous, we can take comfort in the fact that Michigan is far from alone in this department.

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That is a cold comfort because until Saturday we dreamed that Michigan basketball existed on another plane from the Colgates and Wright States of the world, a higher plane in which Michigan's suffocating defense and metronomically efficient freshman center insulated them from the wild swings buffeting mortal programs. Alas. Mortality returns.

I do not know but suspect that Liam Robbins yelled "Icarus shit!" after each of his three-pointers. Ditto Eric Curry whilst swishing face-up 18-footers. A 43-6 run against Wisconsin appears to be the limit. The basketball gods decided Michigan was flying too close to the sun, and zzzzzzzzap.

Whenever you get clunked that badly there are a bunch of different reasons it happened. In approximate order of lethalness: 20 turnovers, Minnesota doubling Hunter Dickinson into his worst game of the season, Eli Brooks sitting out, The bottom falling out of Michigan's shooting, Both Gach disaster contagion.

Everyone just kind of… played badly. Minnesota did crank up the intensity, did play much better on both ends, but also there's no Michigan player who didn't lose his composure and do some things that baffled. Maybe that's playing on the road, but with no fans I find that explanation lacking.

More likely is that they got punched in the mouth by a relative equal for the first time this season, without the guy they call "The Professor" and started pressing. Prior to this game Michigan only faced significant deficits against Oakland and UCF, and was able to overwhelm mid-major competition afterwards. They were down two to PSU late but that's not a situation like Minnesota's steadily burgeoning lead. That's a spot where you can call a timeout and work something out on the sideline; it's not that sort of glazed-eye panic Michigan has induced in most of their opposition and finally got hit with this weekend.

Ah well, burn the tape and build some more wings.

[After THE JUMP: keep the ball]

BULLETS

not enough of this, too much turnover businesses [Campredon]

Turnovers are a problem. You can probably forgive Mike Smith for coughing up three TOs when he has ten assists on just 22 Michigan makes. But when literally every other player aside from the deep bench has a TO and Dickinson has 5, that's a big hole to dig out of.

Compounding that is the fact that 12 of those 20 turnovers were steals. Minnesota had a 64% eFG on 14 shots in the first ten seconds of the clock and 45% on everything else; Synergy had the Gophers with a 14-8 edge in transition opportunities. M turnovers' contribution to Minnesota's offense was a fair chunk of the final margin without even considering the fact that Michigan didn't get a shot on 28% of its possessions.

M is now dead last in conference play in TO rate.

Depth is a problem. Like last year, Michigan is a very good team with depth issues that leave it much worse off if certain key players are out. Last year we spent a bunch of time comparing Michigan's performance with Isaiah Livers (excellent) to its performance without him (not excellent). We have not repeated the exercise with Austin Davis because Michigan was able to endure his absence just fine since Brandon Johns is a functional backup big.

In this game Chaundee Brown was able to cover about 10 of Brooks's minutes. Brown had some blips on both ends but that was more or less fine. The others came from:

• Mike Smith not coming off the court until Michigan waved the white flag. I have no idea how to quantify the hypothetical drop in performance you get when a player goes from ~30 minutes a game to all of them. FWIW, Smith was 0/6 from the floor.
• Zeb Jackson getting 9 minutes. He went 0/3 from three and had a turnover. Michigan was seemingly fighting its way back into the game when Chaundee Brown asked for a blow, and Jackson was close to personally responsible for a 7-0 Minnesota run that more or less closed the door permanently.
• Weird guys lineups.

Michigan only has two ballhandlers on the roster; missing one of them is rough. I don't know how you get reserves to stick around these days but hopefully Michigan can have a reasonable third option next year.

[Campredon]

Toe on the line, cumong. Brown had would-be corner threes that ended up being twos because his toe was on the line. He's not quite as automatic from the corners as Dakich was saying on the broadcast, but if you move those two toe-on-the line shots into the bin he is hitting 8/20.

Synergy

He's actually been better outside of the corners, where he's 12/27.

In any case, Brown is in the same category Livers is. If he gets a shot, it should go up.

On the other end. Minnesota was able to use Brown's aggression against him. Carr got a bucket after Brown tried to pick him up full-court and got caught on Carr's back after a Minnesota screen. He got back-cut a couple times in the second half (although one of those was an impossibly small passing window). Carr roasted him a couple times by threatening his pullback.

None of this happened with Brooks, who was content to fight over screens and stay in front of Carr so he could spend his time shooting junk. Carr still did a fair bit of that against Brown, but Brooks limited him to two assists instead of six.

Carr's ability to get in the lane didn't just result in four more assisted buckets for the Gophers, it was also key in Minnesota's major improvement from inside the line. They went from 38% in game one to 56% in game two. This was due in large part to a massive increase in Minnesota's ability to get to the rim, where they went 14/25. That's more than double the 11 attempts they had in the first game. Minnesota is the first team in a long time to get more shots at the rim than in the midrange.

Filed under "just one of those days". In addition to that, the bricklaying Gophers also went 11/19 in the midrange. Ten fewer shots, three more makes than the first game. Gach, Johnson, Curry, and Mashburn went 7/8 collectively.