Michigan basketball: Data-driven approach guiding new-look staff

The Michigan Wolverines are in the middle of a complete overhaul of the men’s basketball program under head coach Dusty May, and sitting at 1-1 on the season, the group is still finding ways to learn from its experiences each night out.

May’s inaugural team has some intriguing pieces up and down the roster, but those things need to work in unison. Sunday’s loss to Wake Forest was not the worst thing in the world in that regard, and an opportunity for more progress comes in the form of Friday night’s game at home against TCU.

“We don’t know our team well enough, our team doesn’t know us well enough,” May said during his Monday press conference this week. “When I say well enough, I mean to compete at a championship level right now. It’s November, so our job as coaches is to figure out solutions for our problems. And some things we know, you just don’t know the extent of it. You don’t know how much you can be exposed in certain areas.

“It’s good for us to be exposed in some areas, as long as we respond the right way. That doesn’t hurt our confidence, but I think we have a group that’s confident by nature. As long as we take the lessons the right way, and we’re not worried about protecting ego, then we’ll be fine.”

Since arriving at Michigan, May has taken a data-driven approach to building his roster and gameplanning. The coaching staff has numbers and analytics for just about everything, but there’s still the human element of knowing your guys and what you do well that is being honed in.

“I’d say it’s probably 75 to 80% data-driven,” assistant coach Mike Boynton Jr. told the media on Thursday. “But there’s an element of knowing your team that you kind of have to throw the numbers out with. We’re learning some of that because we have so many new guys. We’re new to each other, some of us have known Dusty for a long time, but I never worked with him.

“So I’ll give you a great example. I was helping him with substitutions in, I think it was maybe our second exhibition game, and Rubin [Jones] picked up a second foul in the first half. Well, my philosophy, we hadn’t talked about that. So in the game, I didn’t sub him in, but I asked [May] about it afterward. And he’s like, you know what? I would probably have been okay with it. So those are some of the things that we’ll learn as a staff. Some people are trying to do two fouls in the first half, you sit, right? Some people are less restrictive on that.

“Those things will evolve as we learn our guys, how they handle those situations. As you saw the other day, we played Rubin and Nimari with two fouls in the first half on Sunday, right? So those are things that we’ll continue to learn about ourselves as a staff, but also about our team, what they can handle.”

Boynton said that it usually takes a month or so into the regular season to get a legitimate idea on what a team might be, whether it is an opponent or your own squad. He’s liked that the early tests Michigan has faced has thrown a lot of data points at them.

“It won’t necessarily be December 4th, but I think around that time, we would have played enough games, home, neutral, high major, mid-major, and different styles,” Boynton said. “We saw some zone against Oakland. We saw some pressure defense against Wake. I’m sure we’ll see something a little bit different from TCU in terms of maybe how they guard ball screens. Typically, they kind of ice them or try to keep us on the side of a floor. We haven’t seen that yet. So I think we’ll have enough at least entry points of beta where we can say, okay, this is how this team needs to become good over the next month. And so then December’s a month about fine-tuning those things before you really get to the grind of conference play.”

Friday’s game at Crisler Center against TCU tips off at 6 p.m. ET on Fox Sports 1. Michigan is listed as a 7.5-point favorite with the over/under set at 152.5, according to FanDuel Sportsbook.