Here at Big Ten Media Day today

Livers taking over from JP as best-dressed UM hoopster. That is a nice suit.

I spent the entirety of the round table session with Juwan because he’s the one we are trying to figure out here, but I laughed at this quote from X:

“I’ve been through it three times,” Simpson said Wednesday at Big Ten basketball media day. “I don’t know why that is. I’m not sure why people rank us low. At the end of the day, that’s their opinion.”

Michigan was picked 2nd last year… They could be picked to win the league and he would still think they are underrated. Love it.

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Couldn’t it be a case of not knowing/caring where they were predicted to finish? He was asked about it and was told by the questioner that they were picked fifth. He didn’t appear to be aware of that.

Just poking fun at the fact that he has this idea that Michigan was ranked low every year he’s been at Michigan. There were pretty big expectations for Michigan last year. They were coming off of a Final Four run.

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Juwan had a lot of praise on Eli Brooks. Basically an overflowing fountain of praise. It will be interesting to see how Brooks impacts in games this year and to see if he carries over his late upward trending form from last season.

My take on Juwan’s “praiseometer”:

  1. Highest rated: Franz Wagner. Juwan says that he sees Franz as a future NBA player, very high praise. Indicates that he has every chance to start (I think he will start, sooner or later).

  2. Next: Livers. Juwan says he has a good chance to play at the next level, which is not quite as good as what he said about FW. Still plenty of praise for Isaiah. And we all know Isaiah is a stud.

  3. Eli Brooks. JH praises Eli’s basketball IQ. Coaches like to have guys with high IQ on the court, so I see him playing a decent amount.

  4. Brandon Johns. Lots of praise for BJ as well. Still, it’s not clear how much he will play, because he has to compete against Teske, Livers and Castleton.

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Hardly no takes on Bajema, Nuñez, or DDJ.

Worth noting that he was asked directly about the four players above. He wasn’t asked about the second group.

Might have been half a question about Dejuluis, can’t remember exactly.

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Really cool idea for an article. I enjoyed this. No Michigan players, unfortunately, but cool to see what different Big Ten players would run in an end-of-game BLOB, down 1.

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That’s all Dog!