‘It’ll look a little bit different this year’: Michigan’s bigs embrace the three (to a point)

After two years of playing supersized lineups, Michigan’s paint presence seemed lacking in its first two exhibition games. According to Mike Boynton Jr., that’s a feature, not a bug.

“I think some of it is going to depend on, honestly, how teams decide to guard us,” Boynton said. “So I think naturally over the course of the year, we’re going to shoot more threes. We’re a better shooting team than we are necessarily a finishing team, and again, Roddy will add some finishing and force to us. Ricky, when he gets healthy, he’ll add some of that. But still, the strength of our team is going to be our ability to create leverage at the rim to shoot, catch and shoot threes as much as possible.”

Against Eastern Michigan, the Wolverines took just 29 two-pointers compared to 31 threes. Friday was another 3-point-heavy performance against Oregon State, with 36 twos to 31 threes. That’s a 49% 3-point rate over two exhibitions, well above last year’s 41.4%, which would rank in the top 25 nationally last season.

Of course, some of that depends on how their opponents are playing. Oregon State was packing the paint with two seven-footers on the floor and as a result, the outside shot became more attractive. Still, the game plan and Moustapha Thiam and JP Estrella’s offseason work point to the three-ball being a bigger part of many of Michigan’s possessions.