Illinois 76, Michigan 53
Step one: Compile the game film.
Step two: Burn the game film.
Step three. Salt the earth.
Step four: Hope your three best players don't shoot 4-for-24 in a big game again.
Step five: Beat State.
Every team plays some clunkers. At full strength Michigan had won theirs, against Oakland and Penn State and, sure, include the first half of the post-layoff Wisconsin game if you so desire. Even without Ayo Dosunmu on the floor, Kofi Cockburn presented a challenge unlike any they've faced this year, and for the first time they didn't come up with a suitable response.
Andre Curbelo got to the basket with great frequency, Trent Frazier caught fire a couple times, and Cockburn was brutally effective in limited minutes after a slow start. Michigan was taken out of their rhythm by an aggressive Illinois defense, got beaten badly on the boards, and never found any consistency on either end. Chaundee Brown airballed a free throw.
It wasn't Michigan's night. They're still on track for the Big Ten championship and a #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. All they need is one win in two games.
My primary concern out of tonight is the health of Isaiah Livers, who didn't look 100% after Austin Davis fell on his right ankle early in the second half despite returning to action. Getting back on the court means it's unlikely to be serious, one just hopes it doesn't linger.
[Hit THE JUMP for the box score, if you dare.]
I guess we know who's the best team in the B1G.
Tonight. Probably see them again once or twice.
I wont concede that. Illinois has some bad losses and an easier schedule. They were a lot better tonight, but its not a one game season
All I wanted this year was a shot at the BIG. Idgaf if we back into the championship on our collective ass. Team was picked to finish middle of the pack.
Michigan fans might collectively hara kiri themselves if MSU somehow wins in football and plays spoiler here.
Illinois is a mismatch nightmare for M as we’ve seen now for the last 2 years.
we led them by two with under a minute left last year, and that was after livers re-injured his groin and was unavailable for for most of the second half (and three games after that). we matched up fine.
Refs.
Did the refs out rebound us by 16? We lost this all on our own. Total lack of effort. The Ayo shoot-around was pure gamesmanship and our guys fell for it. It’s natural to get up for a big game, and then letdown when you think it should be a walkover because the other team’s best player can’t play. We got in a funk and never got out of it. There was one opportunity to get back in the game when Kofi got his third. Carstensen was quick to give HD his third and that was that.
Rebounding was the main difference, although Michigan was outplayed in all facets of the game.
Having acknowledged that, the officiating seemed bad. I could recognize perhaps 1/4 of the fouls. Critical fouls against Dickinson and Cockburn were hard to detect. Major wrestling moves were uncalled. I know it's an impossible job, but it seemed unusually arbitrary tonight.
Anyway, the best team won and Michigan's got to find a way to block out and rebound the ball.
They were better today. But if they were the best team in the conference, they wouldn't have lost four times and needed OT to beat Nebraska.
Just not our day.
^^^^^This^^^^^
Every other take is superfluous
See you Thursday
That seemed like a strange game to be flat on. At home for the big ten championship? But it happens and they will bounce back. Ive seen some dominant teams lose before in strange situations and the next game they are fully weaponized again. Shake it off fellas and lets get back to work.
Wonder if they got cocky when Ayo was out? Illinois wings looked so much faster than our guys. Our offense was completely stagnant.
You're completely missing the subtext that they wanted to clinch vs sparty!
Once you get that, not so strange ?♂️
They looked tired to me... Shots were short, energy was down even thought you could see them trying to pick it up. Maybe the layoff and rapid series of games is finally taking a toll.
I am not happy that they played poorly and lost-but these game do make me smile. This is what playing the game is about-the challenge, the joy and the disappointment. All pathologically partisan fans deserve these games. These young men will be fine...on to the next game.
This is the kind of game that Gonzaga will never face. Which is why they won't be playing basketball in April.
You mean the gonzaga team that’s made 5 straight sweet 16s and is tied for the most tournament wins in the last five years including a finals appearance? Even beyond that gonzaga has as many quad 1 wins as Michigan and beat multiple top 10 teams this year it’s still a stupid comment. Michigan plays games like this all the time and we have the same number of championships in the last decade
After all the talk about how we'd match up vs Gonzaga this might be a welcome wake up call. Unfortunately this wasn't just a "shots didn't go down" type of loss. We got taken completely out of our offense, and frankly had we won it would have been like winning the proverbial 35 coin flips in a row. The Illini had better looks and seemingly wanted every rebound and every advantageous spot on the floor more than us.
Agree, the real concern is Livers' health. Once he came back in I just stared at the clock, wishing for Triple 0's so he could get treatment. Here's hoping we figure out how to counter a team that completely takes away every action we had in mind tonite. Go Blue!
The answer to "how" is the same as it's always been - work harder!
Don't be denied your spot to shoot, fight harder for rebounding position.
Playing Illinois better in a potential rematch won't involve any magic or calculus. It will involve effort!
It wouldve been hard for this game to go worse. Illinois had energy and was on fire. We had no energy and were awful all night. Forget it and move on, but hard not to see a thrashing like this as an obvious kink in the armor. Hopefully its a wake up call and not a harbinger of things to come
That was bad.
Some of this was just a game getting away. Michigan held Illinois to less than a point per possession in the first half, right where we would want them... but the offense was getting nothing.
Once the lead started to inflate, it was over and the team couldn't keep up the intensity.
Was it a bad game? Could have been. Teams have bad games. Hasn't been an undefeated national champion in a long, long time.
Is it possible that Illinois is a bad matchup for us? Yes. Kofi was sort of neutralized, but more than made up for it by neutralizing Hunter. That, of course, allowed Illinois to defend the rest of the team tightly, and Kofi's presence seemed to make the lane an unattractive place to drive; Michigan took a lot of the midrange shots that Illinois wants to force and it went as we would expect.
And Illinois was definitely able to get stuff with its guards that our guys seem to have trouble with.
So, there's a worry. I wouldn't want to face Illinois in the tournament, kind of like 1989. If this happens again in the B1G tournament (and there's a good chance it will) the concern will ratchet upwards.
But it's not shocking that Michigan loses, even badly.
Oh well. On to tomorrow. High pressure game against State Thursday.
It WAS absolutely shocking. Nobody saw this coming. YOU, are the only one Sensei.
Did you see most of the shots put up by Michigan?
Most of them were tentative and short.
I don't remember any clanging off the backboard etc. No testosterone.
Point being, it seemed just about every player was playing scared.
It was very strange. Rarely seen a team that has been so dominant, all of the sudden go into cower mode. Not sure what the vibe was with the guys before the game but it needs to be expelled to the furthest regions of the Horsehead Nebula.
We will not see this if we play them again and no, Illinois is not a better team. Pretty equal though.
Juwan will have them ready next time. Just gotta beat the piss outta MSU a couple of times first.
+1 for referencing a specific nebula
Illinois played 40 minutes of hell like UNLV used to do and Michigan wasn't prepared. Although Underwood said those things about UM, whatever he said to his team was way more effective.
Michigan didn't match Illinois' intensity from the jump and it showed. Learn from this and be ready the next time.
Oh, and Beat State.
It seems pretty clear in hindsight that Underwood's comments about UM were meant to be digested by his own team. His message was clear: U-M is soft. They're only the #1 team in the B1G because the league is bending over backwards to accommodate them. They rescheduled their game against us because they knew they were going to lose. U-M is afraid of us.
Illinois came out smelling blood in the water, so the message was highly effective. People on this board got too caught up being offended by a bit of trash talk and whether the comments were literally valid and ignored the subtext. Underwood was telling his guys that U-M is afraid of them, and yesterday they played that way. Kudos to Underwood on the motivation job.
I mean, I wish there was some way to sugar-coat it but they just got beat. It happens, and credit to Illinois for playing well on the road. Michigan's gotta recover and beat State to win the conference and then see if they can square up the series if they run into Illinois in the tournament.
I don't think it was them even being particularly tired; everyone's playing a lot of games at the end of the year. I guess the one thing might be that UM was coming off a couple of really dominant performances against OSU, Iowa, and Indiana and sometimes you're due for a downturn; Illinois got one of those against MSU and were scuttling a bit as well.
Get ready for another game in a couple of days and I'd REALLY like it if they don't wind up going to Breslin with a title on the line.
I really wish Juwan had tried to shake things up a bit more by going small. Davis was not good tonight, and with Dickinson in foul trouble, I think this would've been a great opportunity to play Johns or even Livers at the 5 to try to open up the court and create more driving lanes.
This would've been especially great to try while Cockburn was off the court so he couldn't punish the small lineups on the other end, but even with him out there, forcing him to guard in space while in foul trouble might've been created more of an offensive advantage than what you gave up on the other end.
Beyond this game, it would've been nice to see the small lineup get some reps for future games when Dickinson and Davis either don't have it or get in foul trouble.
I know he hasn't played that well, but wouldn't have minded seeing T Will as well. Anything to possibly get some energy on the court. You know it's bad when even Chaundee didn't seem very active. Just a really weird game from Michigan.
duplicate
duplicate
This is the first time I noticed Juwan not wearing a Michigan shirt of some kind - I blame that.
It appears to be a rule among the MGoWriters to go hide in a cave and refuse to do a game column when Michigan loses a big game in embarrassing fashion. I had to miss the game at my son's HS basketball game, so I thought I might find some actual analysis here. Silly me.
There’s only so many ways to say we didn’t show up. I’m surprised the game recap was as long as it was.
"Recap" means tell what happened. Basic journalism. Tell us what happened and a little bit of why.
Here is an actual example of a real game recap:
https://www.maizenbrew.com/basketball/2021/3/2/22310567/uncharacteristic-offense-rebounding-woes-leave-michigan-with-questions-after-second-loss
Did you know from Ace's article that Mike Smith had zero assists? Or that they had 4 as a team? Or that Michigan got destroyed on the boards - similar to the loss last year at Champaign?
I know how to read a boxscore.
"Or that Michigan got destroyed on the boards - similar to the loss last year at Champaign?"
From the recap
Michigan was taken out of their rhythm by an aggressive Illinois defense, got beaten badly on the boards, and never found any consistency on either end.
Maize & Brew wrote a different recap; I'd argue that they glossed over how anyone not named Cockburn did anything while Ace name-checked Curbelo and Frasier. I can read a box score and see that one team nearly doubled up the other in terms of rebounds, only team only shot 7 three pointers, and only had 4 assists. Most of the "color" in the M&B recap (which is good), comes from quotes taken from a press conference. Otherwise it's not demonstrably different from this recap except, apparently, in your personal preference.
Also, feel free to read the recap after the loss to Minnesota, which went into more of the "let's stare at the box score and put it into words" territory.
I mean, Brian will likely do more analysis tomorrow, but I don't know what you expect when one team beats the other by 30 points. Michigan came out of the gate poorly and it went downhill from there.
Very insightful write up as always. Next level analysis.
cry baby
that approach is not limited to writers of mgoblog.
the official u-m postgame podcast didn't include highlights, recap, or analysis, either. they interviewed juwan for three minutes, just long enough for him to say that trent frazier and andre curbelo played well.
we came out flat and were never really in it. that's the analysis.
I wouldn't say a podcast is equivalent. Juwan could have simply cut the interview portion short and that's that. Ace's piece had one paragraph of actual game narrative - and I am being generous at that (the paragraph starting with "Andre Curbelo") Do you have any examples of written game recaps in other outlets (print, web, or otherwise) that give one paragraph of actual game reporting?
You realize this site is free right?
When your most dependable offensive threat is Austin Davis, yeah, you're probably losing by 20-plus.
Destroy Izzo & staee.
Go Blue.
PS - Izzo will be about foul trouble all night.
Izzo playing 11 players tonight, he’s gonna make sure they are rested for Thursday.
He does that every game.
Michigan out-rested Staee tonight. We played 13 players, and our starters reportedly were sleep-walking at times.
We'll never see the good guys win a game again ever.
It’s one thing to shoot so poorly. It’s another thing when the effort just isn’t there. Even coming out after halftime when you may have thought that out of embarrassment they would play with more intensity - it still didn’t happen. It’s hard to figure out. They just didn’t show up. The entire team didn’t show up.
Better tonight than in two weeks.
The team will learn from this. For the next week, Juwan will run tape of the Illinois bench acting like frat boys for the entire second half.
Stay positive folks. We need to take games one at a time and enjoy where the outcomes take us.
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