Hey everyone, got a chance to stop by Crisler tonight and watch Michigan’s practice, which was open to all Michigan students. As you can imagine, they didn’t do much (ran drills for awhile before ending practice with a short scrimmage), but still saw several things I thought were notable.
Tony Paul over at the Detroit News mentioned he had heard from a source who attended Michigan’s closed scrimmage against Akron the other day that Jon Teske has the edge on Austin Davis for minutes behind Mo Wagner and Mark Donnal. From the way Michigan ran its scrimmage during tonight’s practice, that appeared to be true. Teske subbed in for Wagner — who ran with the first team — while Davis subbed in for Donnal, who was on the second team. What was notable about this was that initially, Teske came in for Donnal for the maize team and Davis for Wagner, but Beilein yelled at hiim to switch because he wanted him coming in for Mo and playing with Walton, MAAR, Irvin and Robinson (the first/blue team). Earlier, Davis also got run with what appears to be Michigan’s scout team in drills. The scout team is Fred Wright-Jones, Andrew Dakich, Charles Matthews, Brent Hibbits and Davis.
Back to the scrimmage — both teams struggled to handle the ball and run the offense, and both players and coaches seemed disappointed with the sloppiness. Donnal actually came over to the students after the scrimmage and personally apologized for how sloppy it was. One thing I noticed was that Simpson runs the pick-and-roll well, and with clear vision: he was actively looking for the big man diving to the hoop off the screen. DJ Wilson’s length and quickness caused a few problems for the blue team; he was able to get out on Robinson two or three times and prevent Duncan from getting a shot off.
In drills, a couple guys who looked good were Matthews and Teske. Matthews has some bounce and decent handles. They ran this one drill with the big men where they wanted them shooting short-to-mid range jumpshots after catching the ball while posting up, and while it was just a drill, Teske made (I believe) all of his shots.
And then some other overall things: Beilein was pretty animated today. Stopped practice a ton to yell at players when they messed up. There was one drill they did where they wanted to practice transition 3s, and I don’t know if it was the first time the players were running the drill but they could not get it right the first few times down the floor. Beilein really wanted the ball-handler coming down the middle of the floor, and several guys like MAAR and Matthews ended up dribbling straight to the wings — Beilein was not pleased with that. He also got pretty heated toward the end of the scrimmage/practice and started yelling about how you’ve got to be a smart player if you want to play for Michigan. Donlon was pretty involved as well. Seems like a rah-rah guy, which is the opposite of Saadi Washington — he was pretty quiet.
I’ll stick around in the comments for awhile if you guys have any questions. Also wanted to say I’m really excited to get started, if you couldn’t tell from my intro post. Read this blog a lot while growing up, never thought I’d be contributing as a writer.