I think you’ve forgotten about Donnal. He and Wagner were expected to get about all of the minutes at center, with the distribution between them a question.
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Pet peeve. Walton gets a bad rap on passing and setting up teammates. After he took over running the team he spent at least two year throwing it to several teammates who could not catch a cold (handle simple passes no less anticipate a pass) or finish if somehow they held on to a pass. Senior year was much better once clutter hands were gone or benched.
Now Z is not anywhere near Walton’s level offensively other than transition (he’s better) and although he is better defensively (quicker and uses hands to deflect balls) he is not as strong as Walton. Now I will leave the past alone and focus on now and the future.
Yep, brain fart forgot about Donnal. So actually it was about 170 of the 200 minutes last season and the staff was just looking to fill 30.
Part of the reason I do not feel bad about criticizing Walton is that he figured it out at the end. He was awesome to end his career and I am very happy for him! I don’t buy the story that Walton’s struggles should be attributed to him having a weak supporting cast for several years. Besides, isn’t that just shifting the blame onto other players, who, like Walton are not here anymore? For most of Walton’s college career it was pretty obvious, to many imo, that Walton was surprisingly deficient at seeing open teammates and deficient at seeing plays opening up. I do not know if it was a lack of focus or a lack of aggression but it was frustrating to many people. This frustration for many even occurred into the first half of Walton’s Senior year when, as you rightly pointed out, there was an upgrade in the supporting cast and their abilities to catch passes. …Z has his issues that he will need to overcome, but Z, from the beginning, has shown the potential (and actuality imo) to see the floor better than Walton ever did (if we exclude the last two months of Walton’s career). We even saw flashes of Z’s very good vision last year. I don’t read Mattski as putting Walton down, rather he is just sharing his excitement of a skill that Z can build off of in the future.
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I watched a lot of the game on YouTube. I’m not as nervous now. THe talent is definitely there, it’s much more the team not knowing their roles/ feeling eachother out. If they get a handle on blending together and play to their strengths the team will be tourney good for sure.
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Yeah, I don’t buy that Walton’s struggles were due to a bad cast. He was struggling well into the start of Big Ten play last year with distributing. I found this gem of mine from the infamous Illinois game:
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I’ll love DWalt until the day I die, and was happy to see him confound the haters because I always believed. But I stand by this observation about Z. There is a hugely promising zip and anticipation there that I don’t think we saw from his predecessor.
I would make the counter argument that Michigan really didn’t have any “gold star” non-conference wins last season — lost to the 3 best non-conference opponents. Avoided bad losses and the 2 neutral site wins over Marquette & SMU gave UM a pair of reasonable wins away from home.
The equivalent this season would be beating LSU & splitting the final 2 games in Hawaii plus win the neutral court game at LCA (for 3 wins away from home) and avoiding bad losses. Combine that with a 10-8 B1G record and 1 win in the B1G Tourney and the resume matches up with resumes that made the NCAAs the last few seasons.
I do agree that a win over UCLA or at Texas or at UNC would be a nice bonus for the resume and would take a lot of angst out of B1G Tourney time.
I see your point. And to some degree agree with much of what you say. Ultimately they are two different players. As you describe it Walton was more of a lead guard. But sometimes it take a while to either develop or develop confidence in your teammate also.
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Yeah, I thought about what you said too. After thinking about it for awhile,I do think it is possible that a contributing cause for Walton playing (I’m not sure what to call it) “overly cautious”, for a lack of a better term, may have been that he got into the habit of not trusting some of his fellow players. I’m not sure…Like, maybe after throwing multiple failed alley-oops to Doyle, Dawkins and Irvin, he just did not feel confident throwing an alley-oop to Wilson when the opportunity seemed to be there? Not really sure.
Does anybody know if Walton has ever articulated the factors behind his mid-season transformation?
Well, you can win a game that you’re favored in and still have it be a quality win. The point, and the problem, is that we don’t project to be favored in ANY of the NC games against quality opponents. Any such wins will probably have to be by way of upset, and so far, we have looked more likely to BE upset.
Obviously we’re only two games in, and this is all somewhat speculative, but based on what we’ve seen so far, this team may very well come together, but it may not be in the next 2-3 weeks. It’s fine to say that we’ll improve, but so will the teams we’ll be playing, and it’s not a given at this point that we will improve more.
Obviously its hard to project right now, but the UCLA game we could very easily be favored since we are at home.
And they will likely be short 3 players…
I doubt the UCLA players will be suspended that long.
That said, I favor us against Texas, and will do so until John Beilein loses to Shaka Smart.
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UNC just lost Cameron Johnson for the season. Luke Maye, Theo Pinson and Kenny Williams might be their best players…they’re beatable.
ESPN’s BPI gives us a 75% chance to beat UCLA. Kris Wilkes looked great but they barely beat a Georgia Tech team whose starting backcourt was suspended.
Texas might be pretty good especially with Bamba but as @UMHoopsFan mentioned, JB owns Shaka and I like the matchup.
We won’t win all three but id be very surprised if we lost them all. Beat LSU and go 2-1 in Maui and take 1 of these 3, and I’d feel fine with those results
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We could win any of the UCLA, Texas, UNC games. We could also lose any of them. If you give us a 30% chance to win @UNC, 35% @Texas, and 50% home UCLA, the chance we lose all 3 would be 23%. And those were pretty conservative numbers.
So take at least 1 of the non-Maui games, beat LSU and VCU/Marq in the 3rd place game and I’d be feeling just fine about the resume. Any other wins would be gravy.
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I hope we win Maui just to see the conversations here change to discussing where everyone is booking their hotel for the Final Four and what we will do if we lose Moe, Matthews and Zavier to the NBA draft!
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What we did NC last year was really about the minimum we needed to, though. It might not have been enough if we had not finished unexpectedly strong and racked up more than our share of quality wins in the Big Ten. We also have the ongoing disadvantage that too many of our NC wins are going to be against very low rated teams. For some reason, we keep scheduling all of these 300+ opponents.
Wish I could be that positive, but come on…30% against UNC in Chapel Hill? That’s like saying if we played there 10 times, we’d win 3. That seems wildly optimistic to me based on what I’ve seen so far. I mean, how often does North Carolina lose to unranked NC opponents at home? Not very. As far as Texas, it’s all very well to say that “Beilein owns Shaka”, but that’s one of those things that’s only true until it isn’t. If you’re looking at trends, Beilein’s record in true road games against quality NC opponents is not very strong. I would frankly be delighted to win even one of those games.
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Yeah not belabor the point but… Simpson is an elite passer, and he makes it look so easy. Take 13:30 mark of the second half; shot clock situation, Simpson drives to the basket, turns his body a little to give himself an angle, and delivers a crisp, left handed dart to Livers in the corner for a missed Three with :02 on shot clock. That is not an easy pass and he completes it flawlessly and effortlessly. He does this type stuff on the regular. He’s really fun to watch distribute the basketball.
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