Purdue 70, Michigan 69
[Marc-Gregor Campredon]
Thirty-nine minutes and fifty-four seconds of exquisite basketball ruined by replay.
Michigan and Purdue played an absolute classic tonight. Twice the fifth-ranked Boilermakers stretched their lead to double digits; twice Michigan clawed their way back, finally taking their first lead of the game with under five minutes remaining.
Moe Wagner went toe-to-toe with Isaac Haas in the post. Zavier Simpson hit multiple floaters over seven-footers, including one to beat the first-half buzzer. Charles Matthews hit a couple cold-blooded jab-step threes. Jordan Poole scored eight points in seven minutes. Isaiah Livers was everywhere. Regardless of outcome, it was a game that showed Michigan's present and (especially) future are both bright.
But about that outcome. With under ten seconds on the clock in a 69-69 tie, Matthews came off a Wagner screen, got a step on Dakota Mathias, and drove hard to the basket. Mathias reached through Matthews and poked the ball out from behind, no foul, Michigan ball—as with countless plays before it, the gentleman's agreement to give that play to the offense applied.
Then the refs went to the scorer's table and spent five minutes Zaprudering the play, killing much of the considerable excitement from the wild back-and-forth affair before eventually determining the ball lingered on Matthews's hand for a frame or two after the Mathias poke. Purdue got the ball, Wagner committed a (legitimate) foul on Haas, who made the first of two free throws. A buzzer-beating heave by Matthews took a painful journey around the rim and out.
It's hard not to feel robbed. While it's also hard not to be excited about this team, that rings hollow when a call that's never made in the first 38 minutes of a game costs them a much-needed signature win. The future is bright. The present, for the moment, is stupid.
[Hit THE JUMP for the box score.]
January 10th, 2018 at 10:03 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:27 AM ^
and that's sad because this was an absolute classic for 39:54.
Something that's frustrating that isn't being talked about:
Yes, the overturn was unbelievable as a call that is never, ever made that way live (as it wasn't in this case). And yes, the call on Wagner was a ticky-tack foul that rarely gets called in that situation, but it was a foul.
My beef: I don't understand why Wagner was in the game at that point. Teske is clearly a better defender, was doing a much better job on Haas and there's only four seconds on the clock. It is a pure defensive possession that you don't have to worry about Teske offense at all. Teske should have been in for it. SMH.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:37 AM ^
Agreed on the last point. I've been looking to see if someone else would bring it up and thought it at the time. Teske is clearly the better defender, and we know Moe struggles there. The call was weak at best, but why not have Teske in there, especially since Moe had 3 fouls? Let him D up Haas and he probably doesn't even need to reach in there.
January 10th, 2018 at 10:02 AM ^
I think Wagner was in because he is a more mobile/active defender than Teske is. Haas wasn't going to shoot the ball, he was being used as a distributor. If he was down low under the hoop then yes, Teske should've been in. But there's no way Purdue is having him take the last shot so having Wagner in, with more active hands and a little more agility, I think is what made JB's mind up. It almost worked.....:-(
January 10th, 2018 at 12:08 PM ^
Wagner is more active in the sense that he reaches more and gets dumb fouls, which he did. No reason to reach around and go for the steal with Haas so far from the basket.
Plus, Beilein didn't know where he was going to be. They easily could have put him under the basket. So either way Teske is a better option. He's the far superior defender.
Completely disagree that in a tie game, there's no way Haas takes the last shot. You only need one point. Almost no one in college basketball scores at least a point on a used possession more reliably than Haas (very high FG% and very high foul rate). Everyone in the gym knew he was getting the ball and it would have been his choice to try to score or pass. Teske would have forced a pass, which would have been preferred.
Wagner was either going to foul or give up a basket (or require a double such that another guy was wide open) because that's pretty much how every possession went with Wagner gaurding Haas.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:06 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:10 AM ^
high level for the last 19 minutes of the game. Guess the rumors about conditioning issues are certainly not the case anymore.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:11 AM ^
go blue!
January 10th, 2018 at 12:13 AM ^
The overturned call was awful. We still didn't score in the last 3 minutes though and had some bad possessions and kept a TO in our pockets.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:15 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:16 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:59 AM ^
To go up against a senior Bridges in a couple years.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:25 AM ^
refs decide this
game
and far too many.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:25 AM ^
I guess we will see if those 3 refs start giving that ball to the defense every time a ball gets stripped. They have called that play 100,000 times the same way. And tomorrow they will call it the same way. Tonight they got it wrong.
To preempt the common stupid comment that people make, Purdue didn’t make a single play in the last 2:30 to win the game either.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:37 AM ^
It always sucks to lose, and tonight is certainly no different. But I'm not going to blame the refs for making the righ call. It was clearly off of Matthews.
I am not a fan of the whole (very, very real) "gentleman's agreement" crap though. It's either a foul or not. It's either off of us or them. Unfortunataly, I think it 1) was close, but I wouldn't have called a foul personally and 2) it was clearly off of us. The refs agreed. I personally wouldn't have called a foul on Mo. This time the refs disagreed.
More than anything, I am angry we went with 8+ seconds on the clock. Tie game, at home, in the bonus, with the ball,... you make sure that shot isn't off any earlier than 2 seconds left. Not to mention, Mo was WIDE open. Not only for a three, but with time and space to drive for his own layup attempt. Similarly, though not as egregious, a forced, fadeaway 30 footer from the sideline dosen't need to be taken with 1.5 - 2 seconds on the clock, down 1 either.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:41 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:42 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:53 AM ^
I don't disagree. If you're going to have replay, use it all game. Same rules, same calls, all game, sign me up! I also don't disagree they make the wrong call on those types of plays all the time. But with all the calls refs get wrong, I can't find it in me to get mad when they actually manage to make the right call.
And regardless of how long they took, watching the replay once makes it quite clear it went out off of Matthews. Watching it live, I spent the last 9:50 of that 10 minutes questioning what they hell they were looking at.
January 10th, 2018 at 1:05 AM ^
Matthews hand goes straight up.
Watch it again. Ill wait 15 minutes go ahead.
The call is made on the momentum of the ball. The swiping player hit it causing the monetum to take it out of bounds.
January 10th, 2018 at 1:23 AM ^
Defender's hand goes down. Matthews' hand goes up and right to left. Ball goes up and right to left.
January 10th, 2018 at 3:15 AM ^
Just like the previous 356,823,893,321 times previous.
January 10th, 2018 at 9:36 AM ^
We need to show this magic loogie clip to last nights refs about that out of bounds call.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:56 AM ^
This call is made multiple times a game and if you really want to, you can go back and some of them will hit the offensive players hand for a split second or two because that happens. Absent it being very obvious, they don't call this.
They decided to attempt to dissect something that they simply have no business in doing. It was atrocious.
January 10th, 2018 at 10:42 AM ^
You said it. I feel unless it goes off the offensive players leg or is painfully obvious he batted it out, that should go back to the offense. I'm like 55% sure it grazed Matthews' finger on the way out but it didn't seem to me there was enough strong evidence to overturn it.
What bothers me was that - in this huge conference game - two 50/50 calls essentially went against Michigan in the last 30 seconds of the game. I'm a little ticked that there wasn't a makeup call for us, notably letting Wagner's also-questionable foul go uncalled. Our end of the gentlemen's agreement was not held up (again). The officials called almost the exact same thing against Wagner during a big Michigan rally that killed some momentum earlier in the half and it sent Wagner to the bench with his 3rd foul. Beilien was rightfully pissed. Maybe Wagner should've known that would be called (especially because the earlier version of the foul had little to no contact at all) but its also annoying that the ref went with the same shitty call again. At least he's consistent I guess.
Also - I feel if those calls (or even one of them) goes Michigan's way, that wouldn't be totally controversial and wouldn't send Purdue into an uproar.
January 10th, 2018 at 1:42 AM ^
So every time a defensive player knocks the ball out of an offensive players hand and it goes out of bounds it is a turnover? Yeah, of course if your using micro-seconds to determine who the ball last touch it would be the hand it got knocked out of. But that is not the way that call should go and if it is then they should call every ball a defensive player knocks out of an offensive player hands then the defense should always get the ball. But this not the case, most refs give the ball back to the offense. It was a bullshit call and if this is the case it better start getting called in other games which it will not!!!!
January 10th, 2018 at 7:57 AM ^
In my somewhat limited time on the Blog, this is one of the worst comments I think I've ever seen! At its absolute best, the replay (all views, frame by frame) is inconclusive - you don't see anyones hand on the ball. At its worst, the referees conspired to give Purdue the ball at any cost (and even gave them an additional half a second back). This is one of the rare cases where I'm more inclined to believe the conspiracy theory...
This play happened 50 times during the game, and not even once did they replay it - and this one shouldn't have been checked, either. The ball just doesn't magically fly out of someones hand with that type of momentum, and in that direction. The defender slapped it out - offense ball on the inbounds.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:41 AM ^
on the strip of Matthews. I was at the game and couldn't see it in real time but watched the replay once I got home. Frame by frame, there's no definitive evidence who touched it last. It looks like it might have been touching Matthews' hand last but it's impossible to tell. Therefore, the possession stays with Michigan. Period.
As for the last foul call on Wagner, it's technically correct but I don't think it's usually called on the last play. But it shouldn't have mattered given the screw up on the previous call.
January 10th, 2018 at 2:19 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:43 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:51 AM ^
This legitimately is how it is ALWAYS called.
Nearly every time that play happens you could probably find a frame or two that is similar where the ball "lingers" if you freeze it. But they never do it because its ridiculous to do. The refs went out of their way to find a way to give Purdue the ball.
January 10th, 2018 at 2:24 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:44 AM ^
Didn't care for the endless amount of time it took to overturn the call. I was very much enjoying the game up until that point.
January 10th, 2018 at 12:49 AM ^
I'm really sorry, Ace.
January 10th, 2018 at 1:17 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 1:19 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 2:26 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 1:18 AM ^
Keep writing Ace, you're a good writer.
January 10th, 2018 at 1:24 AM ^
Absolutely brutal. Still, very impressed with Michigan (and Purdue, for what it's worth).
If we can't have it, hope to God the Boilermakers win the Big Ten again instead of that team from East Lansing.
January 10th, 2018 at 8:50 AM ^
Heck yeah! Classic of a game until that end bit. Both teams are good, and they deserved to play it out on the court. Purdue got an extra phantom possesion and won by 1 point.
January 10th, 2018 at 2:01 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 2:48 AM ^
I think it's good that they want to make sure they get the calls right in order to make it as fair as possible, but it's gone too far. A main point of this is them reviewing pretty much every made shot with under one minute to play. They almost always go to the monitor and have to decide if the clock-keeper stopped it at the proper time. This punishes the team that just got scored on because the other team now gets a free timeout and can set up their defense. Not only that, the majority of the time the time is right, maybe off by one tenth of a second. This is drawing out games and making it pointless for coaches to keep their timeouts because they are getting so many free ones at the end of the game. As to replay, if you can't tell within 15 seconds of live action replays, then the call shouldn't be overturned. There's no reason to have a frame-by-frame analysis in order to make a call.
That being said (and I was saying this as the ball got poked away), Matthews started that play way too early. If he makes or misses, he is still leaving too much time on the clock for Purdue to create something. Otherwise, an excellent game. Unfortunately, the last ten seconds pretty much overshadowed it.
January 10th, 2018 at 8:47 AM ^
Why are they even allowed to put as little as 0.4 seconds back onto the clock? The person who starts the clock has to register that the ball hits the hands of the player inbounding the ball. The avergage visual reation time (via google) is 0.25 seconds. Then that clock timer has to press a button which take time, then that signal gets sent though the electronics, etc.
The fact is the clock will never stop the moment it touches something OOB. And it will never start the moment it touches someone when inbounds. In the end the length of time of the play and length of time off the clock would be the same, even if they aren't happening at the same exact time.
Not that this was an issue with yesterdays game, but it is just another point that the over-analysis frame by frame slow mo video should NOT be apart of the replay process. Adding time should be for an egregious error, somewhere around a full second minimum. Overturning an OOB call should be only if an egregious error was made and a deflection was missed. Literally every poke of the ball that ends out of bounds like that has a frame where the guy in possession "touches" the ball last. But that is not the whole point of sports. Purdue knocked that damn ball out of Matthews hands and directly OOB. Should be Michigan ball.
January 10th, 2018 at 6:12 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 8:19 AM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 12:35 PM ^
January 10th, 2018 at 8:21 AM ^
any video of this call?
January 10th, 2018 at 8:23 AM ^
The thing that really just... ugh... chaps me is the fact that the same basic thing applied to the DPJ touchdown against Wisconsin. If you went "pixel by pixel" his trail foot hit in-bounds before his lead foot hit out of bounds, but, in that situation there "wasn't enough to overturn the call on the field." I sort of understood that... they probably didn't want to go down the rabbit hole of frame-by-frame analysis. I'll accept that hi-def slow mo can sometimes raise more questions than it answers and that you should only take it so far. But then, last night happens...
I mean, okay, different sports, different refs, etc., that is all absolutely true and I'm not expecting any sort of informational carryover from a football game in November to a basketball game in January, even if it happens to involve the same leage and one of the same institutions.
But that being said, goddamnit this sucks.
January 10th, 2018 at 8:33 AM ^
Replays across all sports should be required to be viewed in real time only. If it is inconslusive at real time, the play stands as called.
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