3/5/2023 – Michigan 73, Indiana 75 (OT) – 17-14, 11-9 Big Ten

There's a special agony in losing a close basketball game that outstrips any other close loss in other sports, because the margins in basketball are so razor thin. Close losses in other sports often aren't that close. Losing by a goal in sports like hockey or soccer is often losing by a fairly wide margin. You can lose a football game by a field goal and Bill Connelly will hop on twitter the next day and tell you that your team had a 22% win expectation.

In basketball, losing by a point—or in overtime—is losing by a point. It summons up a huge litany of coulda-shoulda moments. A 24% three point shooter draining one. Three or four buckets by the opposition that bounced around the rim for days on end before dropping. Two blatantly wrong out of bounds calls. Missed free throws—always missed free throws. A series of obvious charges that resulted in an and-one instead of an offensive foul. Remembering any one of these will set teeth on edge; remembering them all is a special form of self-waterboarding.

What this year's Michigan basketball team asks is… what if we made the whole plane out of agonizing moments?

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If you are like me or anyone on Twitter yesterday, you eventually loathed watching this team play. Not just because of the close losses but because of how Michigan got there. It's telling that in Michigan's do-or-die road games to make the tournament they got wrecked by glue guys. Even if you ignore the three Race Thompson made, he was 6/9 from the floor with three offensive rebounds and four steals. In Michigan's previous overtime loss, freshman Ty Rodgers was also 6/9 from the floor with five offensive rebounds, a block, and a steal.

Neither of these guys initiates offense, or posts up, or is a quality shooter. They live off the scraps their teammates give them. Correction: the scraps their teammates and the opposition gives them, and Michigan is excellent at ceding scraps.

Meanwhile Michigan's nominal glue guy, Terrance Williams, lost his starting job to Will Tschetter. Tschetter has not attempted a two-pointer in his last four starts. He's a massive defensive liability who offers virtually nothing on the offensive end of the floor, and Michigan played him 19 minutes in a do-or-die game for a bid. The usual reason insiders offer when asked "why is this person playing" is that he tries hard in practice. This is where the program is at: playing a guy who does not look like a high-major player in an attempt to send a message to the rest of the team that you should give a shit.

Combine that with an incredible stretch of tight games lost and you get the least watchable Michigan team since at least the Tommy Amaker era. There have been worse teams, and equally cursed teams, but watching Spike Albrecht try to figure out how to be a starting Big Ten point guard is sort of fun. Watching a team with a junior Hunter Dickinson and two guys who are candidates to go in the first round of the NBA draft fail to make the NCAA tournament is an entirely different level of Clockwork Orange basketball.

There are reasons for this: Terrance Shannon couldn't transfer enough credits. Jaelin Llewellyn tore his ACL. Frankie Collins transferred because having all of four guards on a roster spooked him. They're 310th in D-1 experience. The way this season played out, any nudge in a positive direction and Michigan is talking about seeding. If they managed anything that made them one bucket better per game this team is 22-9 and in sole possession of second place in the league. As disaster seasons go, ranking in the top 40 on Kenpom is not exactly Eddie Jordan Rutgers. This team is not good… but it's not bad. It's just there, ranking 330th in "luck" on Kenpom.

If drinking bleach and driving a thousand miles an hour into the ocean was a basketball team, this would be it. It is virtually impossible to maintain any semblance of detached smart-guy business at this point. And the worst part is that they might do this again next year, because the NBA doesn't care that Jett Howard is a stunningly one-dimensional player and has cottoned on to Kobe Bufkin being pretty good. The treadmill Michigan finds itself on where their players are mediocre in college and also of interest to the pros is one we must get off immediately, before this fanbase self-immolates.

Because they really did it. They ended the Pax Beilein:

pic.twitter.com/GR1t4msjeZ

— Michigan Wolverines Discord (@MichiganDiscord) March 30, 2021

In Soviet Michigan, basketball has once again become the donkey sport.

BULLETS

I don't want to do this. But: Torvik says Michigan's not dead yet. Beat Rutgers and Purdue to reach the semifinals of the BTT and Torvik has Michigan as the last team in the field. Torvik is an algorithm that does not account for human factors, and one human factor working against Michigan right now is that the committee tends to devalue conference tournament games that occur too close to Selection Sunday. I think a Friday quarterfinal against Purdue is probably far enough away for it to count fully. But also it will be really easy to leave Michigan out: they have no nonconference wins of note and a boat anchor loss to CMU.

About late game luck. I am in the camp where I believe that the first 38 minutes of a basketball game and the last two minutes are similar enough to believe that close game out comes are pretty close to random. There are factors that can make teams better or worse, but in general when you're dealing with an outlier as extreme as Michigan this year you're talking about luck.

Now, Michigan's problem is that they were in an absurd number of close games. 16 of Michigan's games were within six points at the end of regulation. Very good teams don't play 16 close games. But I fundamentally believe that Michigan is about as good as the teams around them in Kenpom, virtually all of which are headed to the tournament. YMMV. I dunno.

Details, details. I could drill down into the hows and whys of why Michigan lost this game but the fundamental answer to why they are less than the sum of their parts is that the only have four reasonably good basketball players. Dickinson, McDaniel, Bufkin, and Howard scored all but four of Michigan's points. They are 310th in bench minutes and probably worse than that in bench production. Having a complete zero at one spot on the floor for a full season—like, not even a stand-in-the-corner-and-shoot guy—is a large reason Dickinson's production has suffered.

Anyway, time to drink bleach and drive into the ocean. Lake. Whatever.