Late February is the ugliest part of the college basketball season, and Michigan and Nebraska played what has to be the ugliest college basketball game of the season on Monday night.
The Wolverines prevailed, 49-46, with a crucial quadrant one road win to stay in the Big Ten title hunt, but it was more of a battle of will than skill.
Michigan’s .71 points per possession were its lowest in a victory in Torvik’s database. The next lowest in a victory was .83 points per trip in a 49-43 win over Illinois in 2008, the ninth win of John Beilein’s Michigan tenure.
The old Michigan head coach used to love to refer to games as gritty-not-pretty, and I’m not sure there’s a game that embodies that idea more than this one. The Wolverines tested the limits of how poorly you can play offensively and still win a Big Ten basketball game, but as closely as they flirted with the limit, they survived with another single-possession Big Ten road win.
This game was ugly—unprecedentedly ugly if we’re being honest. On the other hand, Michigan won this game without doing the one thing you must do to beat Nebraska: making threes.
The problem is that Michigan’s 3-point shooting wasn’t a fluke; it’s a prolonged issue that was only exaggerated in this matchup. Michigan isn’t shooting it well from three, and it isn’t even taking the threes it took early in the year.
That’s a combo of many things — not just one player, as many will try to have you believe — and I’m not sure what’s going to snap the Wolverines out of it. It’s hard to deny that this team’s ability to make a run in March hinges on shots starting to fall, and this was the seventh consecutive game in which shots didn’t fall.
A tight turnaround on the road against an aggressive defensive team isn’t an ideal place to rediscover your stroke, and Michigan certainly didn’t find it tonight. The hope will be that three straight home games will be.
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