JB’s system will do more for Poole than Livers in terms of optimizing his production.
I don’t think Poole is going to be an impact player next year, mostly a catch and shoot guy that will struggle in all other areas of the game.
Unless Ibi can really improve his handle or defense, I don’t expect him to play much next year because he’s not a great shooter either. Based on what I’ve seen from Watson in practice, I think Poole is better in literally every single facet of the game with respect to skill.
Who do you expect to have the bigger impact, next year: Poole or Brooks? Would Elliott’s be bigger than either? The question basically seems like, who will be worse next year: X or MAAR?
Hard to imagine that many (any?) teams have gotten an at-large berth with only 1 road win. And if that win were at Rutgers? Yikes.
Michigan’s RPI would be solid, since it would include some good home wins. But the committee always excludes a few teams with decent RPIs for various reasons. (Florida was 13 ahead of Michigan last season but got left out.) Beating only Rutgers on the road would be a clear-cut such reason.
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Potentially two top 25 neutral court wins will carry a lot of weight.
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It’d be one heck of a unique resume, that’s for sure. One road win but too many top 100 RPI wins to keep out.
Also, like @lilweezy19 said, those two neutral wins will carry some weight.
I just don’t think you leave that out, but never know.
So I remember Jordan Tucker’s name coming up. I don’t remember what anyone said here on him. Were those rumors false?
Also I’m looking over our schedule I believe we wil get at least three road winds. Particularly if we step it up. I like Nebraska without morrow for sure, northwestern and Rutgers. I also feel pretty good about winning at the Breslin on Sunday too. Then again we could continue to play horribly/ inconsistently and lose all of them minus Rutgers. Really depends if we step up.
I think we have more talent then those three and probably more then state at this point in their freshmans career.
Also I live near cuse so every game is on. It’s a real shame we don’t have battle. It really is, starting him next to zak and allowing maar to come off the bench would dramatically improve our roster. Battle is pretty damn solid frosh. Ibis last highlight reel in his senior year made me think he had really improved and that he’d be comparable to battle someday but it’s not the case. I still think Ibi will be ok though. He looks like s guy who needs minutes to get comfortable.
It’s also shocking to me that maar has lost all confidence. If he could get his game back to where it was this time last year we’d be very dangerous. He gave us an option to the rack and a guy who can create. Let’s hope he loses this mental block
You hit the nail on the head, it’s not necessarily about who is better between JP and Eli, because both will likely have similar roles next year, but rather who is the bigger downgrade from X and MAAR.
Not totally bubble-ish yet…
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I’m an optimist but that just seems crazy! Marquette REALLY bumped up the quality of our resume after their week. No road wins yet but these neutral court Ws mitigate that.
RPI still isn’t the greatest metric at all, but the Michigan resume stacks up going off those numbers. Even if you want to go the Kenpom/Sagarin route, they stack up. Overall, still very much on the bubble but I think the resume is better than most think.
Lunardi had them in the play-in earlier this week.
Marquette as a top-50 win certainly helps. Gonna come down to winning some of these important home games.
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I still can’t reconcile our defensive effort against SMU and Marquette (both of whom are pretty good, it seems) versus our effort against Iowa, Illinois, Maryland (also very good, but a team we have to beat at home), and Nebraska. Night and day. And then we come back against Wisconsin and Illinois and play pretty good defense again.
The only noticeable connection is they were the underdog in all the good effort games, with the only outlier being Illinois at home. (We know they had motivation there)
This team just may thrive more in the underdog role.
Yes, and the breaks of the game. Have lost 7 and were in–what?–all but two to the end. You gotta win 'em, but competitiveness should be adjusted for. Then again, in my ideal algorithm you excuse erratic play in the early season and–injuries aside–hold it against teams late.
My theory is that before the season started, we knew we had to get much better on defense. JB acknowledged it, and hiring Donlon was further proof. Thus, we probably spent a lot of time practicing defense, and it paid off in those early season games.
But, as the South Carolina and Texas games showed, the offense wasn’t special at times. That probably concerned JB, and he focused on fixing the offense. And certainly the offense was very good against UCLA, Iowa, Nebraska, and Maryland, and for the early part of the Illinois loss.
With this group - and I hope JB now realizes it - he doesn’t have the horses to have an elite offense. We’ll score plenty of points against the middle-to-lower tier Big Ten teams, but we can’t beat the better teams (Maryland, Purdue, IU, MSU, Wisconsin) by outscoring them 85-80 - we have to scrap with them and really buckle down defensively, kinda like the way we knocked off Purdue at home last year. Can we do it? I don’t know. I watched Indiana-MSU this past weekend, and MSU-Purdue last night, and I don’t feel like we match up very well with any of those three teams. I hope I’m wrong.
I feel like the Big 10 tournament this year is going to have a lot to do with who in the middle tier of our conference plays themselves in and who plays themselves out. The seeding is going to be interesting.
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First challenge for a lot of these teams: get to 10-8. Get there and I think most teams will be safe. At 9-9 or worse I think you better be ready to make a run in the Big Ten Tournament.
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All plausible points and I agree, I think they did come out a bit more focused on D than O.
I also agree on the elite offense, which was my concern in an earlier thread a while back. They’ve been elite statistically, and they are a great offense no question, but I don’t see them outscoring better teams like you mentioned. (Or at least not consistently doing that I should say)
We’ll find out tomorrow night if they keep it up and can slow down Indiana enough. Big, big one tomorrow.
I put forth a thesis like this a few weeks ago; it’s my hunch that something like what you describe happened. I don’t think that Beilein has neglected defense because he hated it in the past but because getting the offense flowing took a lot of practice time. I’m sure they’ve been eager to avoid any sense of panic, but it could also be that when they went back to the D for a few practices the players just found themselves in a fog.
On a related note, if Beilein ever DID find himself with a bunch of one and dones, could they really function in his offense? It’s not just a matter of players being bright, as the coach has several times noted. . .