Ohio State 77, Michigan 63
That got away in a hurry.
After Michigan either narrowly led or closely trailed for most of the game at Ohio State, we appeared to be in for a classic finish when Franz Wagner knotted the score with a three-pointer and Jon Teske rolled in a hook shot to tie it up again after OSU's CJ Walker responded. With 6:51 remaining, the score stood at 54 apiece.
You already read the final but I'll save you the math: the Buckeyes closed the game on a 23-6 run before Wagner hit a buzzer-beating triple that'll only count for KenPom's calculations. A tight game ended up verging on a blowout.
Much like the prior game against Wisconsin, much of Michigan's problems stemmed from falling well short of their foe on points beyond the arc. Unlike that game, the Wolverines had no problem generating looks today, they just couldn't hit them. Wagner, who led the team with 18 points and ten rebounds, went 4/8 on three-pointers; the rest of the team went a combined 3/18.
Franz Wagner was the only Michigan shooter to find his range [Campredon]
In another frustrating similarity to Thursday's loss, Ohio State made it rain on Michigan's defense. The Wolverines had three significant problems: Duane Washington (5/7 3PT) was dialed in and punished the defense whenever they switched, Kaleb Wesson (4/5 3PT) got open looks because M's centers didn't get out on him, and both Kaleb and brother Andre Wesson managed to bank in second-half threes. OSU went 11/21 from beyond the arc, including 6/9 in the second half.
On Michigan's ensuing possession after Teske tied it up, the big man committed his fourth foul. On Thursday, the Wolverines made a late run at the Badgers by playing Brandon Johns at center after Austin Davis had difficultly staying with their stretch bigs. Today, Juwan Howard decided to stick with Davis. While the first triple with Davis in was the fortuitous Andre Wesson bank after Wagner had nearly come up with a steal, the second in as many possessions came when Davis lost Kaleb Wesson on a pick-and-pop, and the Buckeyes suddenly held an eight-point lead.
Walker took the lead to double digits with one of seemingly a hundred midrange pullups out of the high screen to take the deficit to ten, and then Michigan crumbled. A Simpson pass to an unsuspecting Isaiah Livers, who had a brutal 2/11 outing from the field, clanged off his hands for a backcourt violation. Teske bit on a Kaleb Wesson pump fake to give up a layup. With the game all but over, Kaleb then bonked in his three off the glass to seal it.
Bank Brother #2 won his matchup with Isaiah Livers [Campredon]
After Wagner, Simpson was the only Michigan player to score in double digits, going for 12 points on ten shots with seven assists and four turnovers. Teske needed nine shooting possessions to net his eight points and coughed up three turnovers; Davis had eight points on 4/4 shooting but he too committed three turnovers. Eli Brooks, sporting a Batman-like mask in his return from a broken nose, had seven points, seven rebounds, and two assists but went only 3/8 from the field.
All five Ohio State starters hit double-digit points as Chris Holtmann had to go with a short rotation down starting forward Kyle Young and reserve Alonzo Gaffney. Washington, Young's replacement in the starting lineup, led the way with 20, Walker posted 15 and 7 assists, the Wesson brothers each had 14, and Luther Muhammad chipped in ten to go with a pair of steals. Andre Wesson visibly dominated his matchup with Livers on both ends of the floor, which proved impossible for the Wolverines to overcome.
The loss drops Michigan to 9-9 in the Big Ten and a full game behind OSU, which also holds the head-to-head tiebreaker after completing the season sweep. The Wolverines are tied for eighth in the conference with Rutgers. They'll be heavy favorites for Thursday's home finale against Nebraska before closing the regular season on Sunday at Maryland. Hopefully the jumpers start falling by then.
[Hit THE JUMP for THE MASK and the box score.]
Always a joy licking the sweat under those Bucknuts.
Never. I really thought we were in great position to win this one until they got hot at the same time as the wheels fell off. Hopefully we get to knock them out of the B1G tourney
I’m hoping Livers is still injured and not saying anything
He's definitely still injured. It's obvious to everyone and has been since the Purdue game. Even in that one, I was like oh he's a couple steps slow. It's almost bad that Purdue didn't have anyone that could take advantage because it's hard to then sit a guy after he scores 19 (which was padded by FTs at the end).
He's maybe 75% and he's getting torched. Guys just blowing by him, which virtually never happened before the ankle injury. It's happening with a step and half to spare multiple times a game right now.
Livers has been pretty bad last 2 games. He is not good at iso ball. Everyone's first thought is, are injuries limiting him? Concerning that we lost 2 games in a row by not guarding the 3 point line good enough. Also concerning that we are not getting good shots out of timeouts. Davis is good on the block on offense, but he has terrible rebounding awareness and is a huge liability against stretch 5's. Woulda liked to have seen more Johns at the 5 today.
Doesn't help that we continue to shoot 25% from behind the line. We need to figure out a better plan than having Teske and DDJ shooting 3s.
Agree on Teske, DDJ is a good shooter.
DDJ is not a good shooter. He is streaky at best.
They need to get better at defending the three, at least come close to matching the other team at shooting from there, and the margins are too close in games like today's, and Wisconsin the other day, to miss as much as they do from point blank. I can't recall a team that missed more layups or pup shots - and would really like to understand what that's all about. I get being snakebit in a game or two, but this is a consistent thing I can't explain.
On the other hand, the ball movement, screen and roll, and post stuff is really excellent at times, and I think I'm really going to love Franz Wagner as his future unfolds.
No mention of the officiating, I see.
Anyone blaming the refs in this game is ridiculous. The officiating was fine. People already bitch enough when the refs are actually bad.
The officiating was worse in this game than the first one. It was horribly inconsistent and one sided.
UM called for 3 illegal screens none of which were as bad as a typical Wesson screen, including the play where they said Brooks “ran into Wesson” while he was backing up into him the whole way.
Teske was given an early foul that wasn’t on him.
The big one that kicked off the final run where Wesson ran over Brooks then tripped over him and got the 4th foul called on Teske
Brooks has 2 shooting fouls called where his defense was perfect
the charge on Livers called by a ref that couldn’t see that there was no legit contact to call on the play,
the travel on X, while I get why they called it, wasn’t a travel at all (but it looked like it must have been)
From the 18:00 mark to the 13:00 Mark was a key stretch. There were 6-7 bad calls in a row against UM (some of those above)
I thought this was the worst overall whistle UM caught since...??? At Iowa??
I didn’t see the refs setting any picks at the 3 pt line, did you?
Officiating turned the game around after Michigan took a 4 point lead early in the 2nd half. There were 4 or 5 nickle/dime calls in a row against Michigan right then.
Having said that, Livers is better as a spot up shooter. He's ISO takes to the basket didn't go well. Johns was weak again. Need more Castleton (+2).
The Wesson boys are pretty good, while Walker and Washington were just short of sensational.
We should be able to give the Buckeyes a pretty good run at a neutral court in the B1G tournament if we meet them again and they're not banking in 3s.
we got torched. again.
Unfortunately, Nebraska will probably hit 15 3ptrs and their 4th string center will score 35 against us.
Need to regroup and do well against Nebraska at home. See what happens against a struggling Maryland team and then go into the Big Ten Tourney with nothing to lose. Recapture some of the neutral court magic and hopefully get 2+ wins in the BTT. That should be good enough to buoy the confidence and potentially get us off of the 8-9 seed line in the Tourney.
If the jumpers haven’t started falling by now, they won’t.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck, a poor shooting duck.
This is the whole big ten though. When anyone shoots the 3 well, they win, when they don’t it’s a blow out. Teams are living and dying by the 3 like never before it seems.
But the jumpers have fallen. Doesn't mean they will every game. You get so wildly histrionic. Go back and read Brian's column a couple weeks ago about how fans hang on the normal variations of randomness in the this game and feel like they're on top of the world (when they shouldn't) and feel like the sky is falling (when they shouldn't).
This team shot 40% in the five games from the MSG Rutgers game to the IU game.
So were we quacking like a poor shooting duck then?
Michigan is an average 3pt shooting team. 34%. Sometimes they'll hit 25% like today and sometimes 44%. It happens, man.
Exactly. We just aren’t a good three point shooting team. We need to move the ball on offense in order to score. Open threes are not often good shots with this team because the people shooting them aren’t good shooters.
Livers definitely not 100%. Teske looks bad. Davis has severe limitations. John's very inconsistent. This team is a mess right now. Need to regroup....
Teske is always bad now meaning there’s added pressure on the other starters. If one of them play poorly (Livers), this team has no chance.
The bench is not good. Johns is back to pseudo-bust status. DDJ is mediocre. Lack of depth really showed in this game. OSU has depth in spades (and shooters). Michigan does not.
Oh well just make the tourney go 1-1 in March and wait for next year. Anything further than that is gravy.
It helps when your guys underachieve and have no pro potential so they stay forever. How would this Michigan team look with Iggy and Poole? OSU lost their shitty point guard from the last 4 years and improved all of their other players from last year. Can't build depth when guys leave to the NBA in droves. This is the reason Penn State has been relevant this year (and why they won't be next year)
Not much better. Poole didn’t shoot well his last year here and Iggy was an offensive black hole. Same issues would arise with maybe 1-2 more Ws.
I agree that Poole did not shoot that well and was checked out at times, but this team would be worlds better with him and Iggy this year.
Uh, OSU has depth in spades????? Really?? They had 5 guys score!!! They just didn't miss anything.
They only played 7 guys. That's depth? And the two players who shot well performed above their seasonal average. These guys aren't Steph Curry
i think the depth comment is more about OSU's ability to play well w/ starters unavailable. They were without DJ Carton and Kyle Young (and a less impactful Alonzo Gaffney). It's well documented how much our team has struggled without Liver's, and the one game without Brooks wasn't great either. It's not crazy to be envious of OSU's depth in light of that.
I hate the defensive philosophy so much
It made so much sense under Yaklich. Layups/dunks and 3 point shots are the most efficient in basketball, so the goal of the defense is to run them off the line and keep someone in the paint to contest layups. Teams either have to be crazy adept at shooting deep and finishing inside, or they have to midrange you to death. This defense tries to stop everything and, as a result, stops nothing. We single guys in the post because we want to stop shooters, but nobody can defend 1-on-1 (this has gotten better this year, I will say). So to prevent getting abused in the post, guys stay planted down there and aren't able to go out and defend stretch bigs. We've gotten torched from downtown so guys try to play up on shooters and they run right past them for uncontested layups because the bigs can't help in the paint. It's all so ugly and amazing how fast it's fallen off from being one of the best defenses in the country. For the record, teams absolutely are making an unsustainable amount of 3s given the quality of them, but that's why you don't let ANY threes get up, regardless of quality. You can't control whether they go in or not, but you can control whether shoot it or not
It’s not philosophy. It’s talent. Teske and Davis are getting exploited to the nth degree.
Matthews. We miss him. He flat out took the opponents' best player out of games.
We’ll always have Atlantis!
All this elite basketball is really exciting.
This team can beat and also lose to just about any team in the country.
This was a top 10 kenpom team on the road, sooooo it's not like it was just anybody.
Overall, this was the type of year I expected from Michigan. I think Michigan should have won 3 of the home games they lost. But not a bad season. I hope their shooting improves before the B1G, may be we can win the first game. If we are an 8 seed it will be tough winning the first game in the tourney but not impossible. Who knows, if this team gets hot we could make it to the sweet 16. I think next season we will be better with the infusion of great talent.
Yeah, this is true. This years' Michigan is the kind of lower seed team that can really screw up people's brackets. They can get hot and play like a top 5. They could also shoot like me out there and go home early.
Just like they probably weren't the #1 team for the past 7-8 games before this week, they likely aren't as bad as they've looked these past couple. Their big problem is that if the other team can get open 3s and hit them as a somewhat-increased rate, Michigan struggles to keep up. They don't really have that other gear to fight thru a shootout, so their margin of error is pretty small in games like this.
That said, this team is going to make the tournament and really scare a couple of teams; there's no reason not to believe once they are out of conference they can't take some teams by surprise. In particular, the awful ref show you see in conference play tends to not be as prevalent out of it, as you tend to get the better refs calling games. My guess is Michigan's ceiling this year is Sweet 16, which would be great for a first-year coach.
Michigan does have another gear to fight through a shootout. They did it against Iowa the first game when they won like 102-90.
But yeah, if the other team is going to bank in multiple threes on their way to shooting over 50%, it's going to be really hard to overcome against a top 10 team on the road.
There were certainly some coaching points in this game. Michigan needs to figure out a better plan against pick and pop. They had a couple bad turnovers, but mostly this was a well played game by Michigan aside from Livers getting burned and that's gotta be an injury thing.
I feel bad for Z. Ending a brilliant career, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
There is still March.
Unlike Thursday's debacle of a coaching failure, this was truly a very even game that mostly came down to one team shooting poorly from three and the other banking in not one but two in addition to simply being on fire.
There's really only two things about this game that worry me going forward:
1) Livers is clearly not 100% so I hope he'll be good by tournament time and that playing him isn't slowing down a full recovery.
2) Michigan has a problem defending pick and pop bigs. I'm not sure there's much they can do because they don't have switch everything bigs - like Xavier Tilllman or DJ Wilson. I still think the best solution is to switch and have Teske play up a bit more on the ball handler. When he's getting those switches they're still drilling shots over him right now and that can't happen.
That might be an overreaction to two guards simply being on fire the last two games but it seems like forcing a drive is better. Teske's good at trailing guards for the block. Do that. And whatever you do, don't play Davis against bigs that can shoot. Been saying this for weeks but you have to play Johns or Castleton to give Teske breathers against bigs that can shoot.
This is dumb. The long balls have fallen for us in lots of games this year.
I've been cranky after a lot of these losses but this one was just a lost cause. It' disappointing that it wasn't closer down the stretch but Michigan had too much going against it. Ohio State hit everything - everything. Every junk shot they threw up went in. And of course, Michigan couldn't hit anything and didn't get a friendly whistle. Even Livers was bad - he couldn't score and he picked up a few bad fouls and wasn't great on defense. Just forget it - try to win the next two and then get revenge on these goons in the conference tournament.
If this team could just hit a few shots they would be deadly. I'm gonna start praying that they can hit do that in the tournaments.
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