A lot of sports blogs are stats-heavy. It makes sense: bloggers aren’t generally close enough to teams and players to report on the mood in the locker room, but many of us can crunch numbers like a CPA. (Many of us might actually be CPAs.) But while that approach can be a good way to carve a niche of unique expertise, it’s not really the plan here. The reason is that I plan to have fun with this site, and we all know math is not fun.

But even so, I thought I’d give it a shot anyway tonight, because I wanted to see if Michael Curry is using his bench more than his Pistons coaching predecessors. After hours spent playing with spreadsheets and at the great site basketball-reference.com, I have this to report: I don’t know. But I can conclusively add a second point to the list of reasons this isn’t called the Stats Mitten. 1) Math is not fun; and now 2) I am not good at it.

Michigan hoops exhibition debut. In other news, Michigan’s basketball team won its exhibition game against Division II Saginaw Valley State 81-55 tonight, pulling away in the second half after leading by just four points at halftime. Highlights included DeShawn Sims’ 19 point, 9 rebound effort in 27 minutes, as well as forcing SVSU into 22 turnovers versus 7 assists. Michigan actually shot better in the first half (52%), when the game was close, than in the second half when they built their lead (44%). But by dialing up the aggressiveness, Michigan went to the line 32 times in the second half, hitting 19, compared with only five free throw attempts in the first half. Here’s the box score.

In the postgame press conference, John Beilein deferred on an in-depth analysis of his team’s play, saying he wanted to review the game tape first and that he is “a big tape-watcher.” We need to introduce this man to Rod Marinelli.