ANN ARBOR, Mich. — You had to have been there to fully grasp the awkward silence that replaced the air at Crisler Center. It was Tuesday night. A shot by Jett Howard was forced up in front of two Virginia defenders. A pause. A whole building waiting, hoping for a bailout foul call.
Then, nothing. No whistle. A final horn. That, and Juwan Howard standing with his arms extended, before pressing his face into the palms of his hands. That, and a crowd gazing up at a scoreboard reading Virginia 70, Michigan 68, mouths agape, seeing a potential marquee win fizzle in the night. That, and further emphasis on a question that’s percolating in Ann Arbor nowadays.
What should one make of this 2022-23 Michigan basketball team?
It’s a tough one.
This Michigan team, as it stands, has the distinct look and feel of a sweater snagged on a crooked nail. The record is 5-2 with losses to Arizona State and Virginia. So, on paper, things are relatively tame and together, right? No need for panic over a 5-2 start? At the same time, bouts of poor play, stretches of hapless defense — you can’t unsee them. The same goes for those shoddy performances against lower competition. They don’t exactly feel like flukes. Move forward too fast, and the thread unravels.
Tuesday’s home loss to No. 3 Virginia followed a less-than-inspiring victory over Jackson State, a currently winless team from the SWAC. That came after the Ohio Bobcats came to Ann Arbor and took the Wolverines to overtime. Before that, Michigan was humiliated in Brooklyn when Arizona State, a few days removed from losing to Texas Southern, teed off in an 87-62 romp. The opening week of the season, meanwhile, included a too-close-for-comfort win over Eastern Michigan (currently 1-6) in Detroit.
What’s the level of concern? That’s up to you.
The overarching issues are very real. Look at the numbers, watch some film or speak to a few opposing coaches who’ve faced Michigan so far and the same themes echo over and over.
• The defense has issues. And those issues can be a moving target. Sometimes it’s plainly poor defensive personnel. Other times it’s a lack of discipline or missed assignments. Yet other times, poor effort.
• Jaelin Llewellyn is in the weeds. More on that later.
• The Wolverines are, for the second straight year, a poor 3-point shooting team. When it comes to primary ballhandlers like Llewellyn, Kobe Bufkin, Terrance Williams II and Dug McDaniel, opposing defenses can both go under perimeter ball screens and cheat off them to send defensive help versus Hunter Dickinson. The offense is often hamstrung.
• That hamstringing is only exacerbated by a general lack of anything resembling dribble penetration.
• Which all leaves Dickinson in an unenviable position of both being asked to carry the heaviest load and be the most exposed.
• Opponents can attack the offensive glass because 1) Michigan isn’t a particularly good rebounding team and 2) there’s little need to fear U-M’s transition offense.
There are other concerns, more minutia, but you get the point.
There are also, it needs to be said, important positives.
• Dickinson’s primary per-40 stats — shot attempts, rebounds and scoring — are all up from his sophomore year, while his turnovers and fouls are down. He’s mostly living up to his All-America billing, though the 3-point shooting that emerged last season appears holstered.
• Jett Howard is a legitimate star. He’s one of the best freshmen in the Big Ten, a clear No. 2 opposite Dickinson, and a budding alpha. He was billed as an elite 3-point shooter and is living up to it (21 of 48).
• Bufkin brings so much to the table. The sophomore’s overall game is a pleasant surprise, even with the lofty expectations he carried. If his 3-point shooting struggles (5 of 27) relent, Bufkin will be a major issue for opponents.
• Despite the loss, Tuesday was Michigan’s best performance of the season. The first-half offense hummed as shots fell and Dickinson dominated, and the starters’ defense was sound down the stretch.
Add it up, and you have a team that’s high on talent, but currently low on margin for error. That sounds awfully familiar to last year’s version, a group that generated early concerns after opening the season 4-3, the program’s worst seven-game start since 2010. That team landed at No. 63 in the 2021-22 season’s first NET Rankings. At the time, logic said patience was a reasonable course of action — that a young team would improve and rise to its upside.
In some ways, that never happened, resulting in a 17-14 record on Selection Sunday and a No. 11 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
In other ways, it did, resulting in a trip to the Sweet 16.
When it comes to 2022-23, it’s easy to forget now this Michigan team got a head start on things. Howard‘s team traveled to France and Greece in August, playing three games and utilizing 10 additional NCAA-permitted practices to prepare for the trip.
One of the great clichés in college basketball is coaches touting these types of trips as an elixir to speed up early-season growing pains. They all do it. In this case, Howard said: “Talk about being able to bring a team together that’s very new. … That was the most important time for us this past summer — getting away. That really helped our team in a lot of ways of forming that brotherhood and chemistry that we always talk about.”
The trip did indeed feel especially useful for this version of Michigan. An overturned roster including four freshmen, three sophomores, two transfers and zero returning seniors could use any extra time it could get. Michigan lacked two things — experience and continuity.
Most specifically, the trip was to serve as a dry run for Llewellyn, the program’s third graduate transfer point guard in as many years. Predecessors Mike Smith and DeVante’ Jones never had the benefit of spring training and went through marked growing pains in the early stages of their regular seasons. Llewellyn playing in Italy, in theory, would flatten the learning curve.
Things haven’t played out that way. Through seven games this season, Llewellyn looks wholly uncomfortable making reads out of ball screens and is second-guessing every step he takes. The discomposure seems to be permeating every facet of his game. He’s struggled badly on the defensive end and, after shooting 38.3 percent on 3s last season at Princeton, is 5 of 25 from deep.
Llewellyn is undoubtedly a far, far better player than the version seen thus far. His production at Princeton was not fictional. That’s the good news for Michigan. Question is, though, how long will his process take to play out? Smith got there relatively quickly in 2020-21, but was surrounded by much better personnel. Jones took longer in 2021-22, but did indeed find his way.
Llewellyn will get there, but when and how is guesswork.
That’s something Michigan will have to live with until then.
The defense can improve, too. Despite giving up 1.13 points per possession to Virginia, the recent loss was a step forward. Dickinson stressed the unit is growing more “disciplined.”
“I think sometimes before this game, we’d have like three guys playing defense and then two guys would miss an assignment or it’d be four guys playing defense and one guy would miss an assignment on a certain play,” the junior said. “I think this game today we had all five guys really locked in on defense and they just made some tough shots.”
At the same time, until further notice, opposing offenses have a pretty clear picture of how to strike at Michigan — keep Dickinson in ball screens, pulling him away from the basket and moving laterally; attack Llewellyn in isolation; and force Jett Howard into help defense responsibilities.
That, too, will have to continue to strengthen with time.
Problem is, Michigan doesn’t have much of that. Roughly 100 days since returning stateside from its preseason trip abroad, the Wolverines are heading back overseas for a weekend matchup with Kentucky, another team fighting to find itself. After that, they’re heading to Minnesota for a Big Ten road game. Not long after that, a trip to Charlotte for a matchup with North Carolina in the Jumpman Invitational.
There’s reason for concern that this is where Michigan finds itself right now. Much of the season remains, but much has to improve. In roughly 100 days from now, it’ll be Selection Sunday.
(Top photo of Jaelin Llewellyn: Mike Mulholland / Getty Images)
