You need good defensive players to be good defensively and I think that means either: very talented individual defenders or upperclassmen starters.
Usually some combination of both like Michigan had in the COVID year.
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I cited things that arenāt features of any specific system. I donāt want Michigan to emulate another schoolās system ā on offense, at least, for sure. There isnāt any one system that gives you the things I cited. You see those things regardless of system.
This has always been the most impressive part of his coaching resume IMO.
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I think you could argue that Michigan has done this in large part (you can see what role guys like Dug, Kobe, Houstan, Diabate, Tarris, Jett, Dickinson, etc. fill). However, Michigan has a significantly greater roster turnover than Wisconsin since they recruit better players. Steven Crowl stunk and barely played as a freshman. He was an ok player last year. Now heās pretty good as a junior. Tyler Wahl stunk as a freshman and sophomore and became good as an upperclassman. Last year they had 5th year Brad Davison and the unusual Wisconsin NBA talent with Davis.
Iāll bet if Michigan has this same roster, but Dug and Kobe and Jett and Tarris are all still on it as juniors and seniors, that team is SIGNIFICANTLY better than Wisconsinās teams. But when you lose guys to the draft and have to replace with young, inexperienced players, it is tough. Would you prefer Michigan recruit players rated 200+ so that they stick around for 4 years and become good as seniors?
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For example, the top 5 defensive teams on Kenpom right now feature these starting lineups:
- 4 seniors, 1 junior
- 1 Sr, 3 Jr, 1 (5*) Fr
- 3 Sr, 2 Jr
- 3 Sr, 1 Jr, 1 (5*) Fr
- 4 Sr, 1 fr
Seems like that gives you a pretty good outline of what makes up a good defensive team from a personnel stand point
3 total under classman. 2 of them are 5*. S/o to Otzelberger who has 1 non 5* freshman in his elite defense (whoās backup is a senior btw). Holy cow the ISU team is so effing old. Crazy stuff. The portal has changed the game.
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Good question. Conversely, we brought Frankie Collins in, and if thereās anything in our ``systemāā thatās a must itās a skilled halfcourt ballscreen operator. Maybe the better alternative wasnāt a kid in the 200s, but perhaps surely lower in the rankings there might have been a player who actually would fit in the offense? I would also argue that when you have Hunter Dickinson, you cannot expect to have a good defense if you have guys even less apt at defense than he is, but thatās what weāve recruited at 3 ā bad defenders who donāt project to stick around all that long. We also had Moussa last year, who was a talent you take but also not a guy who was going to be an easy fit or a program guy.
IMO thereās very likely a sweet spot, and many people put it at the top 75 kind of recruit. Iām definitely minded to give Juwan a pass, since he arrived just as NIL and the portal blew up probably everything he figured he knew about recruiting. Heāll get it. But heād have a much higher floor in the meantime if this were more like some other programs in extracting a consistently high effort level on a possession-by-possession basis. Is that solely a function of getting old and staying old? I doubt it, but itās certainly a huge part of it.
Sort of random question but as Dylan and others have discussed, Michigan has the best adjusted efficiency in conference play for the Big Ten this year. I know that the point of āadjustedā is to normalize for things like SOS, but i still cant help but wonder if it factors into their ranking at the top. Basically its a great indicator that Michigan is playing better, especially defensively, but should we hold back our excitement a little bit because Michigan has mostly beaten the lesser teams in the Big Ten?
Basically, should I trust that āadjustedā is correctly adjusting for schedule strength?
To expand on this more I went to the top 20 and itās really crazy. The one outlier team is everyone hereās fave rave Nate Oats and Alabama. They have 3 freshman, a sophomore and a junior starting. So there is a way!! Otherwise I implore everyone scan through the top 20 defense teams on kenpom and its extremely clear that being old is important in having an actual good defense.
And I didnāt even look at how many of those seniors were covid seniors. I noticed at least 3 just from scanning off the top of my head(Castleton, Kihei, Mcconnell)
Only Alabama starts more than 1 freshman of the top 20 teams. Only Bama has 0 seniors. The average number of seniors is 2.5. Average number of juniors is 1.4. Average sophomore + freshman combined is 1.1
In case you forgot, Michigan has 0 seniors, 2 juniors, a 19 year old sophomore, and 2 freshman. And people want to bench one of the juniors for a sophomore with almost 0 experience or a freshman.
In that context I genuinely think Michiganās D is not actually doing half bad.
I really think any implication of Juwan needing a Donlan/Yakilch is just not correct. Besides the fact thatās not how most programs operate, itās not really fair to Juwanās defensive schemes and ideas at the moment. The last two years the main issue Michigan has is all roster related and IMO things that can be worked out ESPECIALLY if the portal is a bit more open to us moving forward. But getting seniors to transfer in might still be hard and thatās pretty much the cheat code. Think about what having Shannon would do for us.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk
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Makes sense, but also glaring seeing it laid out that way. Upperclassmen are essential for a good defense.
Michiganās elite 2021 defense had:
4 seniors in their top 6 rotation pieces plus an elite NBA sophomore (and Freshman Dickinson who obviously had a lot of his warts covered up by all the experience and defensive ability around him)
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Wow, itās getting a little chippy in hereā¦
Wisconsin is a really well run regional program. They have a system that they can execute with kids recruited locally. Look at their roster - Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana kids. They have a nearly unbreakable pipeline of middling athletes with whom they can be competitive in the Big Ten. When NBA talent shows up in their backyard, they can make the Final Four.
This is nearly the same strategy Beilein used for the first act of his Michigan career. With the exceptions of Morris and THJ, everybody was from the Big Ten footprint, New York or Ontario. But once he had made it to the Final Four, he realized that Michigan can be a national program and he started signing kids from Oregon, California, Florida, Texas, Brandenburgā¦
Howard is obviously running a national program, and in a time when the landscape is shifting rapidly. Heās recruiting kids with high ceilings, which in turn gives the program a high ceiling, but it also lowers the floor - if too many kids leave early, the team can take a severe hit. Figuring out how to mitigate that risk is one of the things that remains for Juwan to master.
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Great stuff here. Maybe GOSO (get old/stay old) is more true than ever. Or maybe itās a Covid-years thing.
I really think any implication of Juwan needing a Donlan/Yakilch is just not correct. Besides the fact thatās not how most programs operate, itās not really fair to Juwanās defensive schemes and ideas at the moment. The last two years the main issue Michigan has is all roster related and IMO things that can be worked out
Fair conclusion. There are times when it just feels like Juwan has a magic touch with the offense and the opposite with the defense (last year @ MSU, for example, with the press and the blitzing screens on Hoggard), and IMO it could be the case that itās time for some change to the assistants. But if 19 of the top 20 defenses this year are SR/JR rosters, what it says without a doubt is that right now GOSO is the way either way.
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It tells you how Michigan has played pretty accurately I think, there are good signs there. Michigan is playing way better than it was earlier in the season.
But as you kind of get at ā¦ it is a product of playing better than you should in good spots, more than in tough spots. Beating Maryland by 30 instead of 7, for example.
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Final thing on this Wisconsin/system/etc. topicā¦
I think it is really important to remember the tradeoffs involved in any decision.
You can recruit sub-250 type players and build them up for years and fit a system. You can probably get something out of thatā¦ For Gard it is defense. For early Beilein, it was shooting. But you are trading off.
Wisconsin has squeezed a great defense out of that limited talent but it is running its entire offense through the least efficient player in the Big Ten. Tyler Wahl has an 88.5 ORtg on 30.7% usage. Thatās 47th out of 47 players who use 20% of possessions.
You can get everything in the world out of Steven Crowl but Trayce Jackson-Davis can still make him look like a JV player.
Everyone loves Michigan Stateās vintage transition attack but always complained about the turnovers. Those two things obviously go hand in hand because now they arenāt running (or turning it over).
You can recruit pro prospects and the top transfers in the portal (if you can get them) but that is going to lead to more volatility in your roster year over year.
You can put shooting all over the floor around Jalen Pickett at PSU but you probably arenāt getting a great big guy too and you are going to get abused in the paint every night.
Rutgers recruits the baddest dudes on the block and plays with its hair on fire defensively but canāt really run any offense and usually has one guy on the floor at most who can shoot.
Hunter Dickinson is an elite offensive force but there are obviously defensive concerns.
All of these tradeoffs go into every decision that coaches make. Thereās no right or wrong answer but it is very easy to see the strength of a different program and try to pencil that into the one you follow. The problem is that other teams can do the same thing.
I know people are very frustrated with Michiganās defense this year, for example, but what would the discourse be if Juwan Howard was running the entire offense through a guy with an ORtg in the 80s and the offense was 40 spots worse than Michiganās defense is now?
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Forget defense - arenāt the best teams in general all very old?
Houston, Tennessee, Kansas all play basically one freshman, etc
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Yes, Covid and the portal are making this especially true I think
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I still think that one and done freshmen and fools gold from a roster building standpoint, even when the COVID guys are gone.
Theyāre more often Caleb Houstan than Zion Williamson (not saying Caleb was bad, but he wasnāt an all conference performer of any level). Thereās a ton of less talented guys who deliver more value because theyāre 22
(Or maybe the one who can start are good as third fourth guys, and itās the lesser freshman/sophs who are not yet good but you hope will be are the fools gold)
You need both. You need young talent good enough to play in the NBA and experienced upperclassmen. Even better than that is a sophomore first rounder but thereās a very fine line between that and a one-and-done you donāt think you got enough out of.
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Yeah, and you canāt recruit that difference with any reliability really
We all knew Caleb was gone after 1 year, we all knew Barnes wasnāt
But the Jaden Iveyās and Johnny Davisā are harder to parse
This Duke team has me wondering if coach K just knew how to make those freshman teams work, if Whitehead/Lively are just not as good as those other guys, or if Scheyer is doing a weird anti-rook thing
Regardless, these programs like Kansas who mostly develop internally but sprinkle a one and done and a transfer into the stew seem to be a sweet spot (Houston and Tennessee like this too)
(I just realized that I described Juwanās second team)
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I think college has gotten older in general at the same time Michigan. Got a little younger. The portal can be a bandaid but thereās a tradeoff there too as you get the benefit of age but not system fit so you have to build that. I think having some old vets on the bench who are limited but know the system would help a lot. Imagine if our backup 4 was a senior Tschetter instead of a RSf. He might still not be a starter quality players, but his 15 minutes would be more useful. Thatās part of Wisconsinās benefit.
With the exceptions of Morris and THJ, everybody was from the Big Ten footprint
Pulling Morris out of L.A. was a huge recruiting coup for Beilein. Especially since he committed before we ended the tourney drought in '09. That really helped get the ball rolling.
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