How Analytics Propelled Michigan to a Championship + Roddy Gayle Jr. Update | Ep. 45

[Hail Media Group presents Go Blue Hoops, where Michigan basketball’s past, present, and future all come together in one show. Hosted by former Wolverine great, 10-year NBA veteran, and longtime ESPN and NBC college basketball analyst Tim McCormick. Each episode goes beyond the box scores from championship memories and recruiting stories to sharp breakdowns of the season ahead. Insight, legacy, Michigan basketball.

This is Go Blue Hoops. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Go Blue Hoops podcast, episode number 45. We’re presented by the leaders and the best at Michigan Medicine. There’s a difference between an answer and a Michigan answer.

To find your Michigan answer, visit MichiganAnswers.org. I also want to thank our sponsor, OLIPOP. It’s prebiotic plant fiber, healthier, and less sugar than other sodas.

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I really want to tell you a little bit about this podcast because it’s a little bit different. I’m going to talk about the podcast we put out regarding Roddy Gayle. A lot of you watched it and had a lot of great commentary. I also want to talk about Dylan Murphy, the new assistant coach hired by Michigan.

I think he’s going to be a big addition to Mike Boynton’s staff, and he brings a lot of unique things to the table. So, I want to tell you about that. But we had a really special Michigan Man interview today featuring Jacob Kohn. You don’t know that name, but he had a massively important impact on Michigan’s 37-3 record and the national championship.

He’s the director of analytics. And for those of you that are saying, you know, I that’s pretty geeky. I don’t want to go into the numbers and the metrics and all of this, it’s really pretty fascinating all of the different impacts that Michigan’s coaching staff focuses on from an analytical standpoint. So, stick with it.

It’s long. It’s 40 minutes long, but I think it’s got some fascinating things. And if you love going in-depth about this Michigan team, check it out. All right, so let’s recap the weekend.

Roddy Gayle we had a special podcast specifically about him and I shared a couple of thoughts. Number one that I talked to Mike Boynton and he said, “I love Roddy Gayle. He led us to a national championship. He’s a leader.

He’s a strong defender. He’s a great cutter, the best cutter on the team. He brings so much to the table. Yeah, I would love to have that guy on my team.

Who wouldn’t? And when I talked to Roddy Gayle, he said, “I love Michigan. I won a national championship. I’ll never forget about it.

I would love to come back and play a fifth year.” Well, the interesting thing is that the court system in Colorado declared that the former college basketball players played four years and now they’re done. They can play one more year because of the changes in the NCAA with the five-year rule. Remember, in today’s current system, a player has five years to play five years of eligibility. And because Roddy Gayle and 20 or so other guys were done playing, they didn’t get a chance at a fifth year.

The court system said that you can go ahead and play a fifth year. And Roddy was thrilled by that. I think that there’s a very good chance he’s a Wolverine next year. The NCAA came out and said, “No, we’re not going to appeal this.

We think it’s great that players have a chance to play that fifth year.” So, we’re going to keep an eye on this situation. I hope that there’s going to be a commitment by Roddy really soon. And one thing that I think is worth pointing out that if he does come back, it creates a real log jam at the small forward position. How does the rotation look?

Well, I personally think that Roddy would start, but Brandon McCoy is a five-star and could be in the NBA next year. It wouldn’t be a crazy thought for him to start. Oscar Goodman can play the three and the four. He’s so darn physical.

I think that would move him more to the front line. And Ricky Liburd who we’ve been talking about on this podcast since last say December and his potential as one of the best shooters on the team as a defensive stalwart as a guy that loves to play in transition. You know, he’s going to be in competition there as well. Now, the good news is you can slide any of those guys to some backup Trey McKenney minutes at the two and some of them could even you go small ball and play with one of them at the four.

So, a lot of options. As I said, I’m a huge Roddy Gayle fan. I loved him in March. Michigan made some great adjustments that Jacob Kohn will talk about on our Michigan Man interview.

But all good stuff for the podcast. All right, one other thing I think is important to talk on. Michigan finalized their coaching staff this week with the hiring of Dylan Murphy. He has head coaching experience in the G League.

I think it’s interesting that Mike Boynton hired Mike Martin who was a head coach at Brown and now Dylan Murphy who has head coaching experience for the Magic. He has been on their bench as an assistant coach. His team has won the G League, so he’s highly successful. And he has two areas of expertise.

He’s an offensive guru and an analytics expert. He’s very cutting edge, very modern, brings a ton of value to this Michigan team. I spoke to Dylan two weeks ago and he’s elated. His wife grew up in the Fenton area.

He calls it a wonderful opportunity and so the Michigan basketball family is pretty fired up to welcome Dylan Murphy. On a side note, after practice on Saturday, the Michigan team and the coaches and the staff did a team bonding event, they went bowling as a squad. And the winner, new assistant coach Dylan Murphy, he rolled a 171. I don’t know how anybody could just step in and put a number up like that without practicing on a regular basis.

That’s exceptional. The top player, everybody was surprised by Moustapha Thiam. I don’t buy that. I bet they had no size 17 bowling shoes for him.

I can’t imagine him playing in his socks. But they said that Moustapha was really good. All right, so let’s get into the Michigan Man interview. The goal is to bring access to players and coaches and staff that makes up Michigan basketball.

And you’re going to love hearing and learning a little bit about some analytics. Hey Michigan fans, we will be right back. But first, a word from our sponsor. For generations, Knight’s Steakhouse has been an Ann Arbor tradition.

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Org. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast and we have a very special guest with us today. I’m excited about there’s a lot I need to learn.

Jacob Kohn is the director of analytics for Michigan basketball. He played a huge role in Michigan’s 37-3 record and national championship. He’s widely renowned as one of the best in analytics in his industry. And so today you’re going to learn about cutting-edge numbers, information, new-age basketball, analytics, metrics, and the numbers behind college basketball.

So Jacob, thank you so much for joining us. How you doing? Thank you for having me on. I’m doing well.

I’m excited to be on the podcast. Sounds good. So you’re the director of analytics. What exactly does that mean?

If you were trying to describe it to a 10-year-old, what would that sound like? Okay. I would say there are so many numbers that you can collect sort of around the game of basketball and you can put numbers to different areas of the game. So for us that’s, you know, scouting, self-evaluation, recruiting, and player development.

And so it’s my job to sort of synthesize like all these numbers in these different areas and try to help us just have more data points and details to work off of and track over the course of the season or to look at opponent’s strengths and weaknesses when we’re scouting or, you know, try to come up with player projections or things that we might see through the data in a high school prospect or a transfer portal prospect that you might not be able to see just by watching or because there’s so many players who we would be evaluating, you might not have time to look at all of them, but when you have data on all of them, you can sift through them pretty quickly and narrow down a list of who you want to be looking at. I’m excited to get into the numbers specifically about this upcoming season. Before we do that though, how did you get into the numbers and the trends of basketball? Take us back through your journey.

I started coding in high school. I took a intro computer science class and I grew up in Seattle so there a bunch of big tech companies over there who did a lot of work to improve computer science programs in the Seattle public high school system. So, I was really fortunate that I could start early and I didn’t really think I was going to like it that much, but I ended up loving it. And so, kind of just started to, you know, code more things, work on different projects throughout high school.

And then when I got to college, I took a data science class and I sort of realized that I could marry my love of sports with, you know, coding and things that I like to do. And from there, it kind of just took off. I started with baseball modeling because baseball data tends to be the most publicly available or widely available online. So I kind of started with scraping a bunch of baseball data and trying to put together some interesting projects which led me to getting an internship at my former company Big League Advantage after my junior year of college.

And then I just stayed on and worked on a bunch of different projects. Some basketball, some baseball, some football. Until the COVID summer was right when I graduated. So, August of 2020 when BLA signed Duke as their first college basketball consulting client.

And then they called me and they said, “Hey, like you just graduated from Duke. We just signed Duke as a client. Would you want to be the point person between us and Duke basketball?” I was like, “Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. I don’t have any plans of what I want to do.

So, you know, I’ll do that for a little bit and see what see how it goes. And then that kind of, you know, developed. We started working with more teams. And then we got in with in Dusty’s first year, we consulted for them.

And then very early on in the BLA-Michigan relationship, Dusty made a joke about how he was going to hire me on a three-way phone call with my former boss. And my former boss goes, “Nope, nope, you can’t do that. He’s got, you know, a non-compete.” And Dusty said, “I don’t care. Like, it’s Michigan.

We have lawyers.” And I thought he was joking at the time, but it turned out he was not joking. Cuz about 9 months later, he called me and said, “You remember like when I said I wanted you to come work for me?” I was like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Yeah, I want you to come work for me.” And that’s how I ended up in Michigan. You kind of breezed over the fact that you graduated from Duke and being involved with Mike Krzyzewski. What did you learn from him?

Who were some of the players that you worked with from Duke? And are there any good stories about how analytics have helped Duke basketball and their players? Working with Coach K is really cool. I wouldn’t say that I worked like closely with Coach K.

But I did I got to go to some of his practices. And while I wouldn’t say that Coach K was the biggest, you know, analytics guy, you know, I don’t think he was really caught up in what the numbers were saying. A lot of his philosophies and the things that he taught actually aligned with the analytics. One of the practices I went to, a player, you know, had a corner three and someone was coming out to contest it.

Shot faked, one dribble, mid-range pullup, and he stopped practicing and said, “Hey, like either shoot the three or dunk the ball, like don’t do don’t take the one dribble pull up mid-range.” And there wasn’t really a mention of like what the, you know, expected points or like the field goal percentages are on those shots, but the idea is really that the one dribble pull up mid-range is not a very efficient shot for most players, whereas, you know, a three or the rim is significantly more efficient. So, while he wasn’t necessarily like diving into the numbers, I think a lot of what he thought with the game, I it would align with what a lot of analytics people would say. And they had they had some good teams. So, we started in 2020 and the second year we were there, they went to the Final Four.

That was Paolo Banchero, Mark Williams, AJ Griffin, a lot of lot of NBA guys. And then I was there through the Cooper Flagg, Kon Knueppel year and then I left come to Michigan after that year. So I definitely want to dive deeply into the Michigan players and the way that you’ve helped them. Before we do, what’s an example for our listeners of how numbers and data can impact what’s happening on the court?

Give us an example of something that you saw. For instance, you know, if you’re playing too slow at halftime and you notice that your scoring is not what it needs to be, can you make an adjustment and all of a sudden your coaches are playing faster in the second half? What’s an example of how numbers impacted Michigan’s team last year? So, we don’t do a ton of in-game adjustments based on the numbers.

The most of the data that I work with is things that we’ll get after the game. But like as far as scouting goes, it’ll be a, you know, a lot of how we guard ball screens or how we guard certain players will be based on how they shoot on certain types of shots. So a ball screen if a guy, he might be a good like three-point shooter off of set shots, but if he’s not very good on like off-the-dribble threes on a ball screen, we might go under even on a very good three-point shooter. But like one area which I think we’re exploring more this summer is a lot of times people talk about like offensive rebounding and the like giving up transition and it kind of you know follows that if you send more guys to the glass that you’re going to give up more transition opportunities to the other team and that’s actually not really the case.

So the NBA is kind of trending in more of like a sending more guys to the offensive glass and then you know last year we would talk pretty much before every game about how an offensive rebound is a stop. And we want to crash the glass. We want to get more players on the glass and I think that’s an area where we’re going to improve this year. I think we’re going to be a better rebounding team this year.

When you talk about rebounding, Jacob, last year I was mesmerized by the jumbo lineup with the three bigs, and I just kept saying, “This can’t work, can it?” And you talked a little bit about how the early numbers showed some weaknesses with a big lineup, but as you went on, you were able to make changes. Tell me about that. Definitely. So, we definitely we struggled pretty early in the year.

Like I mean the first four or five games were really clunky and the jumbo lineup was not performing as well as we’d hoped to because you know that lineup putting three lottery picks on the floor was our most talented lineup but it was also like very unconventional because Yax when he was at UAB like he played center at times Rez when he was at Illinois would play center and then Aday is very much a center. So it was unconventional. And I think we weren’t really sure how it was going to work or early in the year. But when it was kind of struggling, we took a deep dive into the numbers and what we found out was that we were actually doing a good job forcing opponents to take tough shots.

We were getting pretty good shots on offense, but where we were sort of lagging behind the rest of our team was that lineup wasn’t rebounding well. And I don’t know if I have a great explanation for why they weren’t rebounding well. I think part of it could have been because we had so many good rebounders on the court, there may have been some bystander effect of, oh, you know, Rez is going to get this ball, so like I don’t know if I need to go get it. So, something like that.

Or just more guys in the paint on offense. But yeah, that was really what the struggle was for that lineup. And when we were able to sort of diagnose why that lineup was falling behind, we were able to, you know, emphasize like, guys, like we still need to go get the ball, like we’re forcing tough shots, but we still need to finish it with a rebound to get a stop. And I think that was a big area where that lineup grew over the course of the season to becoming a very good rebounding lineup, whereas in the first half of the year, it was a below average rebounding lineup.

Wow. Fascinating. That jumbo lineup with three lottery picks, Yaxel, Morez, and Aday. When you look at their numbers, who is the most impactful of those three players over the course of the season?

Wow. I mean I would say they were all very impactful. I think Aday and his rim protection was I mean paramount for us when he was on the court. Teams struggle to get to the rim.

They struggled to finish at the rim and it forced guys to take some really tough shots. But I think Morez’s ability to, you know, play on the perimeter as a defender, to play, you know, at the center position as well. He was an incredible rebounder. And then his ability to step out and shoot later in the season.

I think helped a lot. And then Yax was just, I mean, all around a fantastic player. And that, you know, I really dodged your question. You totally did.

It was very it was very political. Yeah. I would say if you were to go look at a an analytical model, it would tell you that Yax was the most impactful player. Good answer.

Good. Roddy Gayle. Hopefully, he’s back. I saw him at practice the other day.

It would make sense on a lot of levels. He had some mediocre stretches last year, but seems like every year in March, he gets better. There were some subtle adjustments that really opened up his game that you saw in analytics. What were they?

So one thing we saw with Roddy was that his efficiency was significantly better with Aday on the court offensively. And so basically from I think around February 1st through the end of the Big Ten tournament, he was only playing about 40% of his minutes with Aday. And then in March Madness, we were able to get that number up to about 60% of his minutes. And I think that helped because Roddy’s such a good cutter and a guy is such a good passer.

I think that the combination of the two of them just worked really well. And then I think obviously Rod’s, you know, an extremely talented basketball player. But I do think that there’s something to be said about everyone in the world just, you know, gassing him up once it hits March 15th, saying, “Oh, you know, it’s March time.” I think that gave him a huge confidence boost going into March Madness and he really met the moment. He was fantastic for us.

Jacob, there’s a shooting program called Noah that uses artificial intelligence to chart every shot a player makes when he’s doing individual work, when he’s in a practice, in a scrimmage. And I believe it uses facial recognition. So, Mike Boynton will know the result of every shot that guys get up at 2 in the morning or 10 in the morning or whatever. Can you share a little bit about the importance of Noah and what types of things does it measure?

We got the Noah installed back in November, like right basically right when the season started. And you’re right, it uses facial recognition to track every shot that our guys are taking in the practice facility. So we have this, you know, massive data set of shots. I think Trey McKenney probably has 80 to 90,000 or more shots that are tracked back to November.

And it tracks where the shot was taken, the type of shot, so you know, catch-and-shoot, off the dribble, free-throw, and then it’ll track the arc of the shot. And then where it lands on the rim like in terms of in the middle like you know on the sort of x axis or and the depth sort of the y axis and so because it came about and we got the data in the middle of the season there wasn’t a ton that we were really doing with it but now that we’ve had some time over the summer to you know talk to some NBA teams about how they use it and sort of think about what we can do with it. I’ve started to build out some more, I guess, impactful or some more detailed reports on our players. So, every morning I send out a shot report, which is all the shots that the guys took.

Yesterday, it just has total number of shots and when they were in the gym, which is, you know, used by our coaching staff to just know when guys are in the gym. And then it’s also used by our strength coach Matt Aldred to sort of make sure that his training plans are working with the player load. So, you know, if a guy takes 600 shots and, you know, 300 of them are at 9:00 p. M.

And they have a workout at 8 a. M. The next morning, you know, Matt can kind of tailor the plan to knowing that player is going to be a little bit more fatigued than usual. So, that’s one area where it’s been helping us.

Jacob, I’m completely intrigued with the play of McCoy. He is so athletic. He makes wow plays like plays both ends of the court. As a freshman, you’re kind of getting to learn him and I would imagine that when freshman come in, there are some bad habits they have or some tweaks that need to occur.

What would you say about Brandon McCoy and his shot? Is there like are is it under construction or do you just let him figure it out on his own? I think it’s a little bit of both. So we are using the Noah data with Brandon.

So when he got to campus the arc on his shot was outside of the range that is optimal. So he was up at closer like 50° when optimal is 45. And from talking to NBA teams and asking them how they use the Noah. Basically, you want your the arc on your shot to be between 42 and 48°.

And then you want it to be consistent. So like some guys like Trey McKenney, for example, has a like a flatter shot. His arc is below 45°, but it’s very consistent. He’s always at that, you know, 43ish degrees.

So with Brandon, he did that, you know, 50 or 51 degrees when he got to campus. So, and basically what that leads to is it’s just it’s hard to be it’s hard to make shots consistently when you’re outside of that range. So, we worked with him a little bit on his release to shoot the ball at a little bit of a lower angle. And, you know, he’s not going to be Steph Curry tomorrow just by, you know, changing the angle on his on his shot.

But, we have seen some early improvement in his field goal percentage over the last few weeks. All right. I put you on the spot before. I’m going to do it again.

Based on the Noah shooting numbers, who are your three best shooters? Oh, well, that’s an objective answer, so you’re not really putting me on the spot. What do the numbers say? That’s Trey McKenney, Quinn Costello, and Ricky Liburd.

Okay. For the three best shooters in the Noah data. All right. I love the Noah.

I think it I think it’s fascinating. Another area that people may not know about you when there’s a questionable call from the officials, and there’s the question, is it going to be a replay challenge? You are the guy that is holding the iPad and in those frantic moments when the coach is saying, do we challenge it or not? You’ve got to make that decision.

What is the plan to appeal between you and the head coach? Yeah. So, this was not part of the of the job description when I signed up. I found out that I was going to be doing this about like a week before our first exhibition game.

And basically anytime there’s a close play, Dusty or Mike this year will just kind of look at me and I’ll be, you know, looking at the iPad trying to see, you know, most of the calls we would look at would be like out of bounds calls because you can only challenge in college. You can only challenge out-of-bounds goaltending or if a block or charge was inside of the restricted area, which I don’t think that one time this year, especially with how they’ve, you know, kind of the block charge rule is, you know, there aren’t really, you know, it’s not really called that much anymore like and also in the restricted area. But so basically the ball will go out of bounds and then as soon as the ball goes out of bounds I’ll start looking at the iPad trying to see if you know it should be our ball. And sometimes like I’ll look down quickly and I won’t even realize like who the call is.

I just know it’s a close call. So I’ll have our grat assistant Nick Chahowski will be right next to me and I’ll be like whose ball is it? Like who’ they call? And so that’s kind of what that’s like.

It’s pretty frantic. And you only have like 15 to 20 seconds. So, I want to go back to a really important play and get your opinion on what happened. Michigan State last year, close game.

Yaxel gets called for a hook-and-hold. That would have been his third foul. Could be a big momentum changer. What did you see?

What happened? What was the outcome? Yeah. So, so the hook-and-hold is a flagrant foul usually on rebounding.

And before the game, Keem basically told me, he said, “Hey, like you need to look for hook and holds this game because like it’s going to be super physical. We might be able to get one.” And so on a rebound with I think about like 2 and 1/2 minutes left in the first half, Yax gets called for an offensive foul on a rebound. And so just like looking and like watching it, you can see that he doesn’t really foul the guy on Michigan State. The Michigan State guy’s like pulling his arm in as Yax is trying to jump.

And given that it was like Yax’s third foul, I don’t think it was necessarily the most obvious hook-and-hold ever, I would say the one in the national championship game was a textbook hook-and-hold. But given sort of the gravity of Yax picking up his third foul, I thought it was worth taking a look at it and appealing for the hook-and-hold. And so what ended up happening was instead of Michigan State coming down to shoot two free throws, we got two technical free throws and then a baseline out-of-bounds play where given the time of that the review took, Dusty was able to drop a baseline out-of-bounds play which led to an and-one basket. So, in the span of like, you know, a few seconds of game time, it was basically like a seven-point swing, which was definitely the most significant replay we had all year.

Did you get credit for making that call from your coaches, your players? Did they like were they dousing you with bottles of water after the game or does it just it’s part of the game and move on? We’re just part of the game and move on. I mean it was just I mean I knew that we hadn’t won in East Lansing in a long time.

I think I know Will Tschetter had never won a game in East Lansing. So just for a team to go up there play really well. I think it was a top-10 matchup at the time. Like that was that was just awesome and was a lot of fun.

So another area of analytics that you help out with is roster construction and recruiting. Transfer portal. It’s a big part of your job description. How can you impact recruiting decisions when Mike Boynton is looking at player A or player B?

What do you look at that might determine which player might be a better fit? There’s a lot that goes into fit and it’s not just basketball. There’s a lot of other stuff that’s involved like you know character and then of course we are in the NIL era so you know player A and player B are very similar and one of them wants a million dollars and the other one wants one we’d probably take the player who wanted $1 million as opposed to 10 million. But basically from the analytics perspective we have data on all of college basketball we have international leagues.

We have like youth tournaments. We have, you know, EYBL and the Adidas circuits. So, we’re able to get pretty good predictive models on these players and just like numbers that we can have that we can look up and just say, okay, so like what’s this guy good at? Does he fit with our team?

Does he project to be better? You know, it to improve in certain skills. So, for example, like free-throw percentage is a good indicator of future three-point percentage. So, a player might not be, you know, he could be shooting 31% from three on the EYBL circuit, but he could be shooting, you know, 88% from the free-throw line.

And that’s actually a pretty good indicator that he’s going to be a better three-point shooter in the long term than a player who might be shooting, you know, 34 and a half% from three, but is a 67% free-throw shooter. Based on the shooting numbers, one of my concerns about this team is how is their three-point shooting? Based on what you’ve seen from the summer numbers, what Noah indicated last year and what it is this year, do you think that Michigan could have a better shooting team this year or last year? I think the frontcourt could dictate some of how good we are shooting the three.

Moustapha can shoot the three. He can make threes. J.P.

Did not shoot a lot of threes at Tennessee. I think he took 10 over three seasons, but he’s actually based on what I’ve seen, he will be able to shoot threes and he should be able to make a few. So I think that will be not necessarily determinate, but how many threes those guys take and how well they shoot it will definitely impact that overall percentage. But based on just having Elliot Cadeau, Trey McKenney, Ricky, Quinn, I think those guys will be able to make a lot of shots in practice.

So far, Jacob, who are a few players that maybe exceeded what the numbers would have guessed? So, we haven’t we haven’t done a ton of five-on-five, which is where we, you know, track most of our data. I think there have been a lot of guys who’ve been really impressive on different areas. Trey McKenney is shooting the absolute cover off the ball right now, which isn’t, you know, anything new for him and isn’t surprising to anyone, but it, you know, it’s good to see.

And then Quinn’s shooting ability is really, really impressive. I’ve been really impressed by his ability to shoot the ball. Good. And, and what would you say is a statistic or data point that Michigan coaches value that fans probably don’t even know what it is?

What’s that important stat that you can teach us about? The most the most important number, I mean, overall is just your efficiency or your points per possession. So, that’s probably the biggest thing that we’ll look at, you know, after a game. Kind of pretty much after every game in the locker room, you know, the coaches will sit down and that’s the first number that they look at on offense or defense.

That’s basically every time you take a trip down the floor is one possession and then how many points you score is just points per possession is just points divided by number of possessions. And so typically our goal on defense is the old teams the under one point per possession and then offense we don’t necessarily have goals for offensive points per possession. Like within a game more is obviously better, but basically after every game when we’re in the coach’s locker room, you know, the defensive coach will be like, “Hey, under a point per possession or not under a point per possession,” and then they’ll be a little bummed. But, I would say those are those are really the two most important things, the offensive points per possession and defensive points per possession.

Yeah, thanks for that. That’s good. When you first start to do a scout like we’ve talked about player development, we’ve talked about Noah, we’ve tal like so recruiting, so many different things actually the in-game scouting that you do in preparation for maybe going to Purdue. What’s the first thing you look at when you look at Purdue and try to figure out some weaknesses that maybe you guys can attack as part of the preparation for the game plan?.

So, it kind of depends on, you know, where we are in the year. By once you get later in the year, especially in Big Ten play, I’ve watched pretty much every team play at that point. So, I kind of have at least somewhat of a sense of what their play style is, who their, you know, main guys are and that sort of stuff. My the first thing that I’ll usually do is I’ll generate sort of my scouting report without the notes that I write and just take a look at that and I’ll go through and you know read every page and write a couple notes on what I’m thinking just based on the numbers.

I like to start with the numbers as opposed to like sitting there and like watching a game first and trying to build it off of watching the game. And my reasoning for that is because we have coaches who do the scout that you know the players see with film and with clips and stuff and they start with the film and they know more about basketball than me and they’re much you know they have much more experience like watching and breaking down film and like learning opponents like tendencies and stuff through the film. And so my reasoning for not starting with the film is because if there are people who are better than me at doing that, why would I do the same work that won’t be as good? So if I’m going to add something on top of what we’re already doing, I need to approach it from a different way.

That’s why I like to start with the numbers as opposed to going straight to the film. It’s kind of interesting. I’ve been trying to figure out, are you a numbers guy that really understands basketball or are you a basketball guy that’s great at math? I think it’s probably the former.

I think as especially from a basketball standpoint, like not having played basketball at a high level, I think I still have so much to learn about basketball. And even like watching games in full speed, it’s if I’m like really trying to like, you know, nitpick and, you know, take notes and stuff like it’s still almost like too fast for me at times. So I’ll have to like, you know, slow things down, rewind, like watch a possession, you know, three times, like really figure out what’s going on. But it’s awesome to be around so many people who know basketball so well at work because I’m learning every day.

And that’s definitely been, you know, a pretty steep learning curve for me, like trying to, you know, jumping like right into it. When we started working with, you know, Duke and all the other programs back at BLA, like I did not have like the foundational basketball knowledge that I probably should have had to get hired for the job. So it was a lot of learning on the fly, reading, you know, a lot of blogs and stuff, watching YouTube videos, trying to figure out, you know, what all these terms that are flying around are. I want to apologize for keeping you so long, but this is just tremendous.

And so, if you’ll bear with me, I’ve got more questions I want to learn about. You guys beat a terrific UConn team for a national championship. Before that game, what did the numbers say that you guys needed to do to win? And how confident, just based on all the analytics, were you?

So, I mean, there’s analytics, then there’s, you know, having watched UConn play for, you know, the last four or five years and just knowing, you know, what an absolute monster that team is. They’re so skilled, they’re so well coached. Like, we knew it was going to be an extremely challenging game just because of how talented they are and they just they win basketball games. They just find a way to win.

And so, you know, from a number standpoint in particular, UConn plays at a at a slower pace. You know, they run these extremely intricate half-court sets. And so, they’re also they were a very good offensive rebounding team, especially with Tarris Reed Jr. And so we knew that especially given how long they were going to take on offense, defense and rebounding was one of the biggest keys that we had set up for that game because we knew we were going to have to guard for 25 seconds almost every time down the floor.

And finishing that possession with a defensive rebound was paramount. That was one of the biggest things that we stressed pregame and it we didn’t execute flawlessly on that, but we did enough. I’m intrigued by Moustapha Thiam. I don’t feel like I know his game very well, but from watching two practices, he’s so long.

He’s a good kid, good teammate, rim protector. There’s a lot of good things, but it doesn’t really look like a Aday Mara was a post player. Moustapha likes to move around. He likes to shoot from the perimeter, and it seems like mid-range jump shot is his game.

Mid-range is not loved by analytics guys. Break down Moustapha Thiam’s game and what you’ve seen so far. He’s definitely he’s definitely different than Aday, right? Aday is kind of, you know, more of like a facilitating offensive hub where you can throw the ball into the post and, you know, he’ll throw some behind the back pat or, you know, he’ll get the ball in the per on the perimeter and, you know, throw it between his legs, something crazy like that.

Moustapha doesn’t isn’t the same in terms of like the, you know, facilitating ability. He’s not going to have as high of an assist rate as Aday, but his game’s a little different. He can step it out to the outside and he can shoot the ball. He is a good passer.

That’s just not the biggest, you know, that’s I would say was a massive strength of Aday’s game and that’s something that Moustapha is developing. I think the biggest thing that he’ll do differently than Aday is play on the perimeter a lot more, maybe put the ball on the floor a little bit and he’ll be making some threes for us this year. As far as the mid-range goes, it’s definitely something we’re going to be trying to do is making sure that we get him deeper post catches so we can kind of avoid some of those, you know, face up mid-range jump shots that he’s not going to make at as high of a rate as he’ll make his hooks or if he can put a good move on a guy, you know, get to the rim and dunk it or lay it in. Dusty May was your head coach last year.

Now it’s Mike Boynton. How do you adapt to both of them? Maybe one’s more analog, one’s less. I mean, I don’t know the answer to that, but how have you been making that adjustment?

So, so far there really hasn’t been that much of an adjustment. We basically have been running things pretty much the same way that we were last year. There hasn’t been a huge change in how practices are run, how our, you know, meetings are run as a coaching staff. There hasn’t been a big change.

And you know, we’ll see kind of what it looks like when it gets to the season and how that looks. But Dusty, when he first hired me, I you know, I asked him, I was like, “What do you want me to do? Like, what’s the job?” And Dusty said, “I don’t care what you do. Just do whatever you think can help us win basketball games.” And he was very true to that.

He didn’t, you know, micromanage at all. He, you know, he’d ask questions and stuff that, you know, he was curious about. And he basically let me do whatever I thought would be most beneficial to the team and that’s still what I’ve been doing since Mike took over. Is there a type of technology out there that we don’t even know about yet as AI becomes more in-depth and cutting edge?

What might basketball look like five years from now that could be different than today in the college space? The biggest thing is I think that’s coming next is sort of computer vision and player tracking on the court. So in the NBA they have this technology they have like Hawkeye cameras I believe are what it’s called and basically in every NBA arena they have you know 30 cameras around the gym that track you know the skeletal movement and court positioning and speed and of every player on the court in college it’s a lot harder to do because there you know 365 teams and then they’ll play games in you know a ballroom in the Bahamas and in a gym in Hawaii. So, it’s not really feasible to get these, you know, millions of dollars worth of cameras into every single gym in college basketball.

But what some companies are trying to do now is use the TV broadcast feeds and running computer vision. So basically like a neural net type of model on the videos of these basketball games and track sort of what the these cameras are doing in NBA gyms but using TV broadcasts which is a way to try to expand this throughout college basketball. Almost done. Jacob, can analytics measure chemistry and guys that play well together?

I think to some extent yes and to some extent no. When you look at lineup data a lot of times like when players are on the court together especially when you start to look at when you know four or five players are on the court together you end up not having that much data. So you’re kind of dealing with like a small sample size and you don’t want to overreact to a smaller sample size. Now, you could look at things like how many alley-oops did, you know, Elliot Cadeau throw to Aday Mara last year and you could look at that number be like, okay, yeah, there’s something that’s working with these guys.

But I think that probably watching a game and especially like being around a team and seeing how the players interact and how they talk to each other and especially with Elliot, you know, and we’ve seen it in practice, he might throw a lob to Moustapha and it’s not quite there or something. Watching them like walk over to the side and then talk about it where Elliot will be like, “Hey, like this is what I’m thinking. Like I want you here.” And then Moustapha be like, “Okay, like this is what I saw.” That’s kind of I think seeing that and being around those interactions tells you a lot more about the chemistry between two guys than numbers will ever be able to show. Got it.

So, final question, most important question. When you look at all the numbers based on what you’ve seen so far of Michigan is going to play in the Final Four again this year. What are some areas that you think the Wolverines need to strengthen? Well, I think we need to get we need to get everyone healthy.

I think that’s first and foremost. I think Jalen Reed is going to be a big part of our team this year and I think you know getting him all the way back and healthy is going to be big. I think the chemistry as it kind of was just talking about with Elliot and Moustapha I think is going to be big because that you know just if we were ever in trouble on a possession an Elliot and Aday pick-and-roll would get us out of pretty much any trouble that we were in. So, I think them kind of building the connection and building the trust up over the next few months is going to be big.

And then I think that also J.P. And Moustapha playing more together and developing that connection. J.P. Was one of I don’t remember what the exact number is, but he was very highly ranked in big-to-big assists. So, him passing to another center when he was playing the center passing to the power forward. And I think there’s a lot of cool stuff that we can do with those two guys on the court playing off of each other.

Jacob, thank you so much. Michigan is lucky to have you. I learned so much. I think our fans did.

Maybe we can come back and do it again sometime. Be awesome. Thank you for having me on. Thanks, Jacob.

Go Blue. Go Blue. And thanks everybody for joining us for another edition of the Go Blue Hoops podcast. Thanks to our sponsors, Michigan Medicine, OLIPOP, and Knight’s Steakhouse.

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