Big Ten Basketball: Preseason power rankings for 2023-24 season
By Tuck Clarry
9. Michigan Wolverines
There may be no more confounding team in all of college basketball, let alone the Big Ten, than Juwan Howard’s Michigan Wolverines. You can’t deny the tournament success for Howard, who has reached the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight in his four years in Ann Arbour. But the journey to the postseason has been mired by inconsistent play, underwhelming performances, shocking player departures in the offseason and a couple of unnecessary distractions.
It’s impossible to not view Michigan’s 2022-2023 as a colossal failure, with First Team All-Big Ten center and former Second Team All-American Hunter Dickinson playing 34 games just for the team to go 18-16. The holes left by Moussa Diabate and Caleb Houstan’s surprising leave were never really patched up and now Howard is starting all over again with losses of Dickinson to Kansas and Kobe Bufkin and Jett Howard to the NBA, larger absences even than what they faced last season.
Dickinson’s role will be assumed in part by Tennessee transfer Olivier Nkamhoua, a fifth-year senior coming off of a season were he averaged 10.8 points, 5 rebounds and 2 assists. Nkamhoua is able to offer scoring at multiple levels, though not to the level Dickinson has shown over his career. Nkamhoua had a similar perimeter shooting volume as Dickinson with a near 10% worse make rate (32% to Dickinson’s 41%). Nkamhoua is a decent shooter in the midrange, something that Dickinson also excelled at.
Along in the portal with Nkamhoua comes Alabama transfer guard Nimari Burnett, a former McDonald’s All-American who was lost in a loaded Crimson Tide backcourt. Burnett has had an injury-plagued college career but could unlock his potential with a Wolverines team that badly needs to find offense.
The Wolverines need major contributions from their two returning backcourt guards, graduate senior Jaelin Llewelyn and sophomore Dug McDaniel. Llewelyn was supposed to be Dickinson’s co-star but was lost early in the season to an ACL tear. McDaniel performed admirably (8.6 points and 3.6 assists), considering he learned on the fly as a freshman but clearly struggled due to experience and size against a conference loaded with upperclassmen.
If the backcourt and Nkamhoua are able to rise to the occasion, Michigan might be competitive in the Big Ten. But it’s hard to imagine it will be enough to battle in the top half of the conference.