Michigan Basketball vs. Northwestern: Takeaways

Michigan basketball got a much needed victory on Wednesday against Northwestern to keep its tournament hopes alive.

After the hard fought loss against Maryland on Sunday, the Michigan Wolverines needed this one. They took down Northwestern 72-63 and kept their tournament hopes alive, though for much of the contest Derrick Walton Jr. and Co. didn’t seem like a team in need of a victory.

The game was closer than it probably should have been until the last two minutes, but despite the Wildcats’ 10-0 run to start the game and their 8-0 run to start the second half, the Wolverines persisted; they ended up with just enough 3-pointers and fast break points to eek out a victory against an inferior opponent. Here are some things to take away from the win.

Tournament Hopes: Strong

This is the big one. Depending on who you look to for bracketology (ugh), Michigan was either on the 10 line or one of the first four teams out of the tournament. Losing this game would have all but guaranteed a high seed in the NIT.

The team now travels to Madison to take on the Badgers and then hosts Iowa to end the season. Losing both may still send the Wolverines to beautiful New York City for the postseason, but there’s still a chance they could sneak in to the tourney. Winning one means they’re in, barring some unforeseen catastrophe. Losing to Northwestern would’ve probably rendered all of that moot.

The game may not have been pretty, but at this point a win is a win.

Coaching . . .

Though they were able to pull away in the last few minutes of the game thanks to Northwestern turnovers and a few big Aubrey Dawkins shots, the Wolverines didn’t look like a team on the edge of missing the tournament for most of the game.

Michigan looked discombobulated out of the gate and out of the locker room at halftime, which just shouldn’t happen in a big game at home against a lesser opponent. To make things even more frustrating, that’s all on the coaching staff.

From small things (not having a viable inbounds play from under an opponents’ basket), to medium things (long scoring droughts without timeouts or set plays) to big, kind of nebulous things (the team just not looking prepared and/or amped for a game consistently, whether it was tonight, against Ohio State, Michigan State, or Indiana), it seems like the coaches aren’t having as big of an impact as they’ve had in recent years.

Beilein isn’t exactly Tom Thibodeau, but this year’s team has been terrible on the defensive side of the court. Despite the fact that Muhammad-Ali Adbur-Rahkman and Walton are both plus-perimeter defenders, the team hasn’t been able to consistently nail rotations and still hasn’t mastered weak side defense, which we saw tonight. That’s not good.

Aubrey Dawkins Needs to Play More

Dawkins has been in and out of the doghouse all year due to bad shot selection and shoddy defense. That’s understandable, but we’ve reached the point in the season where that matters less than finding a spark that can get you 5-10 points in a 5-10-minute span, especially considering the Wolverines’ proclivity for just not scoring for five minutes at a time.

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Duncan Robinson is just as poor a defender as Dawkins, but Dawkins is shooting better right now and has more ability to take the ball to the rack than Robinson. Even if Dawkins doesn’t end up starting, he should eat up some of Robinson’s minutes going forward, because he proved tonight and over the last month that he’s able to generate points. Time to trust in Aubrey.

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