Michigan Basketball: How Wolverines battled back to beat Wisconsin

The long break due to covid is over and Michigan basketball returned with a close win in the always impossible to win Kohl Center.

After a 5-0 start for the Badgers, Michigan basketball came climbing back to knot it up at five apiece. It stayed that way for a while with a back and forth pace until the Wolverines fell flat to end the first half.

Wisconsin went on to stage their largest lead of the opening 20 minutes and was ahead by 12 at the break. The three-week absence played its part by putting the Wolverines in a dubious hole.

For the record, Michigan shot 34 percent in the first half, but it felt like as time raged on, the worse it got. Isaiah Livers single-handedly held his teammates on his back.

Franz Wagner and Hunter Dickinson struggled to show up on a sustainable basis. Michigan suffered on the other end of the floor as well by giving up a noteworthy 71 percent from three.

In the beginning minutes of the second, the maize and blue responded with a much more spirited effort than how they fared at the end of the first half.

The defense forced some turnovers and cut the advantage to single digits. The Wolverines got within one possession thanks to a triple from Wagner and continued to rally from there.

Michigan basketball kept chipping away on every possession thereafter. U-M eventually overcame coming from behind to take the lead with five minutes to play.

Then in crunch time Livers buried one from deep to give the Wolverines for good. The Wolverines controlled the pace the rest of the way, just like they did for the entire second half of the contest.

Dickinson remained true to form with an exceptional performance in the last 20 minutes of play. He battled relentlessly for 15 enormous rebounds that shortened  Wisconsin’s chances on the offensive side of the ball.

The Badgers only made one 3-pointer in the second, which was a monumental testament to how the Wolverines pulled it out in Madison.

Livers added 20, while Wagner and Dickinson reached double digits on the afternoon. The name of the game was Michigan’s defense after halftime though.

They held Wisconsin to just 20 points in the second and 39 percent from the field, a significant turnaround from where things stood following half number one. That’s a very impressive accomplishment in a place that has proved to be a house of horrors in the past for Michigan.

It is Michigan’s sixth win in their last eight over the Badgers, which is hard to believe against such a sound program and the first time since 1998 that they swept them in the regular season.

Depending upon how things work out with the schedule and those missed games, Michigan now sets its sights on a duel with Rutgers back in Ann Arbor on Thursday evening.