Kick it off with some kp stats. I’m looking forward to this one!
Wish we were playing Oregon State 
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This looks like a great matchup for us. They don’t pound it inside and they don’t appear to have any of the quick twitch guards that can blow by us. They are a solid team but not one that presents a mismatch or exploits our weaknesses. I think Irvin will do a great job on Dillon Brooks. I like our chances that Dorsey doesn’t shoot 10 of 11 or whatever it was again.
lol. oops!
They lost their best big man, I wonder what those stats look like without him? Do you have those by chance?
I think their only loss since he went down was to Arizona. He went down during the Pac12 tournament, I believe.
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Per barttorvik, in the small three game sample since Boucher got injured, their defense has taken a huge step back. Worsened by about 11 points per 100 possessions from their season average. The offense has correspondingly improved by about 8 points per 100 possessions from their season average.
It’s hard to draw conclusions from adjusted stats when the sample size is soooo small. But, I would guess that the defensive fall off is not a fluke. Boucher had a very high block rate and I’ve heard anecdotally that he was the defensive centerpiece.
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If you put Irvin on Brooks, who is Wilson gonna guard.?
Hopefully someone he can help off of.
Well, their starting line up is:
Ennis 6’2" 37% 3pt shooter
Pritchard 6’2" 37%
Dorsey 6’4" 40%
Brooks 6’7" 41%
Bell 6’9" not a shooter
I think you just have to do normal matchups 1-5 and depend on DJ to get as much against Brooks as Brooks gets against him (or try to force switches so that Mo matches on Brooks).
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A few initial thoughts:
Dana Altman is a very good coach. In his last 13 years at Creighton, they never finished lower than 4th and finished 1st or 2nd nine times. After a rough first year at Oregon, in his last 6 years the Ducks have never finished below 3rd and have finished 1st or T-1st the last two. This is the third time in the last 5 years he’s made the Sweet 16, getting to the E8 last year.
Both teams like to fire up 3s. We are significantly better at stopping the other team from doing so. Their 3pt% defense looks a little lucky to me too.
They are a good but not great offensive rebounding team. Bell and Brooks will crash the glass though. I don’t think we’ll get destroyed like we did against OkSt and, to a certain extent, Louisville, but if we can even keep them at or below 30% rate we might really be in good shape.
They do like to get TOs but I think we’ve shown we are very unlikely to give them many.
All the guys besides Bell are pretty versatile, multi-dimensional guys, which shouldn’t be too surprising with some former Michigan targets on there. Brooks and Dorsey are a pretty impressive combo They have a fair amount of experience and tourney experience too. Should be a really good, fun game.
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ESPN reseeded the sweet 16. They put Michigan at #5 and Oregon at #12. Also, Wisconsin was up at #3.
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They looked pretty disinterested in defense, until about the last 5 minutes. It seems the only way teams who are either bad at defense (OSU) or not great at offense (Louisville) are going to keep up with our current machine of an offense is to 1. Hit the offensive boards hard (as OSU and Louisville did, successfully) or get super hot from deep.
Anybody know if they’re a good offensive rebounding team?
All I know is they had 15 vs Iona and 15 vs Rhode Island. I’d expect that due to Oregon having much better athletes and are bigger overall. I think we should be able to contain them in that aspect and give up only around 7-9.
If there was ever going to be a game this year where Wilson and Wagner can both have 7-8 rebounds in the same Game, this one could be it.
Ken Pom doesn’t produce stats based on injury situation AFAIK.
I meant the last 3 games without Boucher. Then I looked and they’ll be inflated anyway due to level of competition. They’ve beaten 2 average at best teams in the first two rounds.
I say this with the caveat that I understand “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”…
I’d like to see us work a little this week on our post entry passes for this game. It’s clear that we’ve been able to create the mismatches we want, whether it be for DWalt or the big guys. What we haven’t done a great job of is finding a way to pass the ball into the post when Wagner or DJ have the small guys on them. We have a size advantage against Oregon that needs to exploited somehow.
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No idea how you could possibly put Wisconsin ahead of Michigan, lol.
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Good point. Maybe since they beat the number 1 overall team? Makes no sense to me either but to me, we are definitely a top 2/3 team right now. I honestly feel the only team who can beat us right now is North Carolina and it’d be a toss up with a rematch vs ucla. I think we’d only have to play one of those teams right?
Probably because they beat the tournaments number one overall seed.
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