Michigan Basketball: 3 things we learned in loss to North Carolina

Michigan basketball was humbled by North Carolina in the Big Ten vs ACC Challenge. This is a long-awaited revenge strike from the Tarheels after U-M routed them in Ann Arbor in their last meeting.

Yesterday was an ugly game, no beating around the bush with that. Michigan basketball came out strong, but weird rotations from Juwan Howard mixed with the inability to adjustments to North Carolina’s adjustments.

In short, Howard was outcoached once again in the 4th “Rebound Game” the Wolverines have been played in this season. Michigan falls to 4-3, which inevitably will remove them from the AP-25 which is well deserved.

Going into the season, we questioned if the Wolverines would even lose three games, now here we are in early December wondering if they will even make the tournament come March. Regardless, the Wolverines gave us some things to talk about, so let’s do that.

1. Turnovers seem like an unfixable problem at this point

Every game this season, we’ve recapped it with “they need to clean up turnovers!” and we kept saying “eventually they’ll clean up turnovers!” But will they actually fix the turnover issue? To me, it’s so dragged on it’s not worth diving into again after this, I truly have no idea if they will fix it but they surely can, it makes you question what Juwan Howard is doing in practice.

Michigan basketball had nearly six turnovers in the first 10 minutes of the game, recording a turnover roughly every other minute in the early stretch. The Wolverines ended the game with more than double the Tar Heels turnovers with 13.

There were three players in the starting five with at least 3 turnovers. The only starter without a turnover was freshman Moussa Diabate who we will touch on later. The main culprit continues to be Devante Jones but Hunter Dickinson and Caleb Houstan join the club with three turnovers too.