Joey Hauser shouldn’t be a crippling level defensive player. Especially w/ Watts, Brown, Henry, all on the team. The issue is that the Centers have been really really bad on D
I think they have a bunch of smaller issues:
-
They really lost the guy that was their offensive identity in sum total for two years, and they also lost the guy who was the sum total of their defensive identity for the same time period (who was also their 2nd leading scorer last year). They lost the guys on each side that made others better, and I think that will take some time to replace.
-
At least last night, I think they suffered from having not played a team they felt could handle them since Duke - they were visibly disengaged for much of the game. I think playing against the conference bottom-dweller on the road on the Sunday night before Christmas in the middle of a pandemic could just be a tough situation.
-
I’m not that sanguine about either their offense or defense - Izzo is obviously a great coach, and I think he’ll manage to improve things from here, but no defense anchored by Joey Hauser in the middle is going to be that great, and no offense whose highest usage player is Rocket Watts is going to score that much. The problem of course is that Hauser is arguably their best offensive player, Watts their best defender…you can’t really throttle their minutes, you just need people to pick up slack, either by helping Hauser defensively or taking the ball out of Watts’ hands offensively.
Finally, and I CANNOT believe I am saying this - maybe NW isn’t as bad as we all think? Prior to this, their wins are against nobodies, but:
They have 3 top 100 kids on their roster (only MSU, UM, Maryland, Illinois have more). They returned nearly all their minutes and scoring save the lacrosse guy from last year (admittedly a terrible team but one that returned 3 rotation players and one of those guys managed to only stay healthy for 10 games). I’m not saying they’re GOOD, and I’m not saying they’re a tournament team, but we assume scouts are generally pretty accurate and experience matters, they’re arguably in a better spot than Minnesota, Penn State, certainly Nebraska, and maybe even Ohio State. It’s possible (and I don’t dismiss the idea) that Chris Collins just sucks too bad for them to function. MSU shouldn’t lose to this team, but maybe it’s not quite the embarrassment it seems?
3 Likes
I could have easily clipped 10-15 more plays; it was really bad.
I think a decent amount of MSU’s issues were effort and focus-based (knowing the game plan), which are theoretically fixable. Will be interesting to track through Big Ten play.
3 Likes
Good discussion here, gents. I like this point from MGL, which is similar to other points made here but exactly how I was thinking about it in the summer:
They really lost the guy that was their offensive identity in sum total for two years, and they also lost the guy who was the sum total of their defensive identity for the same time period (who was also their 2nd leading scorer last year).
Exactly. This was going to be a huge rebuild on both sides, and in each case you’re replacing a serious talent with a poor fit. No offseason tiers ranking made sense if it had this Sparty team in the top tier.
Another talking point I liked from AC1997:
Izzo likes having centers as part of his offense and this year they are a mess.
Yeah. As you pointed out, he doesn’t have bad years. But he did win the conference in 2018 even though that love of centers possibly hurt the team’s ceiling and ability to beat Michigan. He didn’t try to shrink Ward’s role and run with JJJ and Bridges as his 5 and 4 combo. A year later it was Ward’s injury that forced him into a Plan B – starting Tillman – that was better than his Plan A.
There are lots of games left to be played and we know that by March they’ll be better, but this could again be a year in which Izzo is hurt by his desire to only play 5s at the 5. I agree with the notion that you can put Hauser at the 5 and gain toughness and defense from your backup fours that you don’t get from your actual 5s on the roster.
We should also mention Cissoko maybe? He was supposed to be the guy that solves these problems by playing through his mistakes and breaking through as a starter at some point and being an experience kind of freshman by March. As of now he’s not getting the minutes required to do all that.
1 Like
There are some people on here at owe Pete Nance an apology (myself included). He has turned himself into a player and was a PROBLEM last night.
3 Likes
Michigan is in a similar situation where they lost two seniors that set the team’s identity. And have returnees that haven’t shown growth in their games (yet.) The difference between the two being Hunter and a couple transfers with defined roles.
2 Likes
I also think “is Michigan any good?” is still an open question. One thing I will say is that I think Michigan’s roster fits together a bit better than MSU.
10 Likes
Big Ten on Torvik without preseason projections:
3 - Wisconsin
9 - Illinois
11 - Iowa
13 - Indiana
17 - Northwestern
18 - Rutgers
25 - Penn State
30 - Michigan
35 - Purdue
55 - OSU
63 - Maryland
67 - MSU 
83 - Minnesota
96 - Nebraska
Northwestern at 17 shows the danger of relying on these too much, but the league is playing very well overall, with some notable exceptions that are good schadenfreude.
4 Likes
As I said - I think there is a way NW isn’t utterly miserable. They aren’t a tournament team, and they’re still bottom 25% of the league, but it wouldn’t shock me if there are 4 teams worse than them.
I think we have to be careful to compare Michigan and MSU. Say what you want about ND and Duke (and NW)…but they’re better than anyone Michigan has played. You may be forgetting the constant frustration after recent WINS when we talk about shooting, Franz not fitting in, too many minutes for Davis, not enough minutes for Johns despite his ups and downs, whether the D is good or bad… Our day is coming.
My hope for Michigan is that we have a relatively easy transition into conference play to hopefully work out some of these issues with some ugly wins not ugly losses. I think we’ve also seen Dickinson step up and hide some of our issues at other positions. While we also have clear depth issues at guard, it feels like our guys are meeting expectations and we aren’t counting on them to be more than they’re ready for right now.
3 Likes
Nice to see M jump to #19 in AP poll without playing last week.
3 Likes
I am not saying Michigan is better (I dont think they are)
But one advantage we have is that our five best players can play together (I will leave you to argue whether Smith or Brown is in that lineup, but the point remains)
MSU’s top 5 is three guards and two power forwards.
How is it that Indiana is not in the top 25. They are ranked around 10-11 on both Kenpom and Torvik.
I think PSU having 2 losses, including a head-to-head against us, while being ranked 5 spots higher in Torvik is a bigger problem than Northwestern being 17. I can understand Northwestern jumping by beating “the #4 ranked team” according to polls, but there is no explanation for PSU being over us with the head to head included.
PSU has played one of the toughest schedules in the country (4 of 5 games against teams better than Michigan’s best opponent, which is Penn State and was a 4-point game).
4 point road loss - not that bad (I know there was discussion about Torvik’s home factor being somewhat mitigated this year, just too lazy to look it up).
1 Like
Doesn’t Michigan get credit for destroying a UCF team who’s two other games were an 8 point win over Auburn and a 12 point win over #15 FSU?
I sort of see where you’re coming from. Let’s compare how each team has tried to replace their PG/C duo:
Michigan:
- Simpson replaced by Smith, who is a limited player but a true PG that knows how to run PnR and isn’t being asked to replace his usage.
- Teske replaced by Dickinson, who is playing at a level above even where Teske was for the most part.
- Other - Michigan’s wings (Brooks, Brown, Wagner, Livers, Johns) have all had their ups and downs so far but are hanging in there. We need them to step up in conference play to avoid putting too much pressure on Smith/HD and avoid what just happened to MSU.
MSU:
- Winston replaced by Watts, who is not a true PG really and being asked to shoulder a role and usage that may not fit what he’s best at.
- Tillman replaced by…well…a collection of spare parts that don’t seem to add up to a whole right now.
- Other: MSU’s collection of other players (Loyer, Langford, Brown, Henry, Hauser) have all been okay, but none have shown the ability to be the focal point so either they need to step up or they need Watts to settle into his role.
2 Likes
Penn State is solidly better than Notre Dame FWIW
7 Likes
I mean, I’m not arguing for aggressively using early-season ratings with the priors removed. That’s not particularly useful data for anything other than “ha look at this”.
As it is, Michigan and Penn State are ranked almost identically and that kind of makes sense because they played a game that came down to the final seconds.
PSU has played a much more difficult schedule, Michigan is undefeated against a weaker schedule. You can only adjust each number so far.
1 Like