Coppin State Recap?

But I did follow a good portion of it on the gamecast. Seemed like it got out of hand pretty quickly. Seemed like it was a game Beilein was using to boost player confidence with their shots, hence Stu's 10 3's and some quality pt for the depth players. I wouldn't look into Manny's 5 at all.

I thought they looked good. Sims was having his way. Manny wasn't needed much but did drive in for a monster dunk. Cronin got in and ran the floor awkwardly. Novack hit a nice three... and missed a few not so nice ones. Vogrich had a couple nice baskets.

Full, official MGoRecap in the morning. Stu had a very good game, Novak kinda struggled, Manny did more work as a distributor than a scorer. 25 assists on 30 made baskets.

We had very good ball movement, but that may be saying more about our opponent than ourselves. We seemed to kick it into Deshawn or dish it back out for the three fairly effectively. Nevertheless, I was satisfied to see Stu have a breakout game with 6 treys and a midrange jumper to finish with 20 points. At the half, we were 6/19 shooting 3's, which is skewed because Stu had already made four of those shots. The rest of the team did not shoot the 3-ball that well (with the exception of two meaningless Vogrich shots); Deshawn was stone cold from outside, but had a couple nice reverse layups. Darius did not get good minutes at all, while Stu ran the point for the vast majority of the night. I hope we can continue this improvement versus our conference foes.

I was probably most impressed with LLP tonight - he was very active defensively and on the boards, including a couple really nice blockouts early when the game was still close. Manny didn't score much at all because his shot was off from distance and there was really no need for him to force anything off the dribble, as we were basically getting any shot we wanted, especially in the first half (see the 25 assists on 30 buckets stat). Novak continued to miss from range, but he really didn't show any hesitancy that I could see, and his shots were all on line - he missed a few that just caught the inside of the front or back iron. (Not sure it caused any of his shots tonight to rim out, but is anyone else constantly weirded out by the tilted rotation on his shot? I'm kinda surprised Beilein hasn't tried to fix that yet.) Novak was again very agressive on the glass, though, especially offensively. And Josh Bartelstein has the shortest vertical of any human I've ever seen on a basketball court.

They shot pretty well, especially Douglass, of course. They passed pretty well. The new zone (a 3-2 or 1-2-2) worked pretty well -- but Coppin State seemed quite hesitant, so I'm not sure that tonight's game says more about Coppin State or the new zone. But it's a slight encouragement. On the downside, they seemed to lack energy and effort on offense. They weren't lazy, but they did not act as though they smelled blood in the water either. Movement off the ball was not fabulous. I thought Coppin State played scared, or at least with a severe lack of confidence. Given that, Michigan should have really put the hammer on them, but they did not quite do that. I saw a couple of occasions where Manny seemed to pull up a little, as though his hamstring or back was bothering him. That might have had something to do with his relative lack of production.